Google employees confess: TECH INSIDER Google employees confess all the things they hated most about working at Google Jim Edwards Dec. 12, 2016, 12:02 PM 2,472,475 FACEBOOK LINKEDIN TWITTER EMAIL PRINT Google campus Reuters/Lucy Nicholson A job at Google. It's career heaven, right? How could a gig at the biggest, most ambitious tech company on the planet possibly be bad? Well, take a look at this Quora thread, which is being constantly updated by current and former Google employees to dish the dirt on working for the search giant. Turns out that working at Google isn't all free food and bike rides around campus. Take their complaints with a grain of salt. These are the complainers, after all. But we've heard many of these same things from our own sources. ↓↓↓ View As: One Page Slides "You are given everything you could ever want, but it costs you the only things that actually matter in the end." "You are given everything you could ever want, but it costs you the only things that actually matter in the end." Google Joe Cannella, former senior account manager: "Basically, you end up spending the majority of your life eating Google food, with Google coworkers, wearing Google gear, talking in Google acronyms, sending Google emails on Google phones, and you eventually start to lose sight of what it's like to be independent of the big G, and every corner of your life is set up to reinforce the idea that you would be absolutely insane to want to be anywhere else." "To which the majority of folks will say 'boo-hoo, poor spoiled Googler'. But that's sort of the point. You are given everything you could ever want, but it costs you the only things that actually matter in the end." It's hard to be honest with your colleagues. It's hard to be honest with your colleagues. (Not these guys specifically, obviously!)Google Vlad Patryshev, former software engineer: "It is really hard to discuss any issue unless it is your friend you are talking to ... Objective discussions are pretty rare, since everybody's territorial, and not interested in opinions of other people unless those people are Important Gods." No one believes you if you say it isn't awesome. No one believes you if you say it isn't awesome. Ben Gilbert / Business Insider Katy Levinson, Former software engineer, Infrastructure: "People feel justified asking you why you left or if you still work there, and insist that everything must be perfect. They don't want to hear anything less than total enthusiasm for your luck getting into Google, and how much you want to stay. If you left or have anything other than rainbows and ponies to talk about, nearly everybody from my mother to my cab driver pretty much demands you explain why you'd be anything less than thrilled to work at Google." They can hire the very best people — so *everyone* is overqualified. They can hire the very best people — so *everyone* is overqualified. Glassdoor Anonymous: "There are students from top 10 colleges who are providing tech support for Google's ads products, or manually taking down flagged content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A|B test the color of a button on a site." Middle management is dangerously political. Middle management is dangerously political. Android mascots are lined up in the demonstration area at the Google I/O Developers Conference in the Moscone Center in San FranciscoThomson Reuters Anonymous: "The most obvious areas that this political nature manifests itself is in performance management and recruiting. The amount of horse-trading and manipulation that a manager needs to do to be able to manage their team within the system as it was (I understand that it's recently changed somewhat) is morale-breaking. To promote someone, you need to start making a case about a year in advance, and because of the curve, that means you can't really give as much credit to other people on your team." There are too few "bozos." There are too few "bozos." Rob Kim/Getty Images "There are enough talented people that being talented won't guarantee you an inside track on good projects, because there are thousands of equally smart people ahead in the queue and equally underutilized, but there are just enough bozos that you have to prove that you're not one of them," said a former engineer. You can work there for eight years and never get a promotion.

You can work there for eight years and never get a promotion.

Áine Cain

Anonymous: "You can fall through the cracks, and you can fall hard. I know people who have been SWE's for 8+ years, still L4, have never been promoted."