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A Google employee works at the corporate offices.
Working there was even the subject of a 2013 Hollywood comedy, the "Internship."
So someone posed a question on Quora recently that asked if working at Google really was like a recruitment video, where one person described it "like a big playground."
Or was working at Google was "over-rated"?
Answer: Uhm. No. The actual experience of working at Google actually gets better as time goes by, says Edgar Duenez-Guzman, a software engineer who has worked for Google for about a year, according to his LinkedIn profile. He writes on Quora:
Before I joined Google, I researched the culture, the values and the perks. I kind if hoped it would be awesome, but imagined that it realistically was going to be good, but probably not great.
During my first couple of weeks I felt like in the video you posted ... they told us all about the impact we could have, all the great things we would have, and the perks we should use. I figured this was good PR. ...
Over a few months I realized that the honeymoon period was not quite ending as I thought. I got to know more about the real culture and the real values of Google. And they were, if anything, even better than what I had hoped.
Google gives me amazing freedom to do what I think is important. ...
But better yet, one would think that such freedom would cause chaos. ... Yet Google surprised me even more. ... If somebody thinks what I am doing should not be done, they can see it and raise an issue immediately.
Now, clearly not everything is perfect. There are issues with Google. It is a large company and growing. It has issues of any large organization. But by and large it is the best place I have ever experienced, and better than I thought it would be.
Googlers say those issues are things like: the company is so filled with geniuses, it can be hard to distinguish yourself; there's a lot of pressure to work all the time and spend what remains of your free time on campus, too; it has a big company feel and you can end up feeling like a cog.
Still, it's hard to deny how happy many Googlers are overall.
One employee summed it up in a Glassdoor review, "If you're ever bored of your current role, there are plenty of new projects and interesting teams to jump onto" and another who has been there eight years said that Google was "likely the last job in my life... "
Here's the recruitment video that some employees say is not over-the-top: