The worst things about working at Google
Employees at the tech firm explain what it is really like to work for 'the Big G'
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Your support makes all the difference.Google employees have answered a thread on the question and answer website, Quora, explaining what the worst things about working for the internet giant were.
Issues ranging from the company's massive size to its butterfly mind-like approach to new projects that means they often get left unfinished or are unworkable.
Many were also concerned they had become "weird dependent" on their employer because of the famously generous way it treats its employees.
Here are some of their best responses:
"We were essentially rewarded for either dreaming up totally new wildly innovative things, or improving existing things with hard metrics,” said Katy Levinson, a former software engineer.
"This lead to imaginative unmaintained nightmares, frequently based on discarded shells of other platforms nobody maintained,” she said, describing how the company would often have a number of competing or identical projects going on at once because building them could mean a promotion.
She also said she worried that she was "completely unemployable" outside anywhere but Google.
She said: "People feel justified asking you why you left or if you still work there, 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.
"I think that's the marketing campaign that employees at Google have everything they could ever need to be happy is one of Google's most impressive products, when in reality, their perks are not unusual for a company of its size in Silicon Valley at all, and the majority of the features are replicated in the smaller companies too.."
"You watch many of your coworkers get weird and dependent at Google, and realize the Google lifestyle has made them basically unemployable anywhere else. You secretly start wondering if you could cut it on the outside too."
Another Google employee, Joe Cannella, agrees that it is too easy to get sucked into the Google bubble: "The worst part about working at Google is how, when you weren't looking, it takes over the majority of your time and energy.
I think that's the marketing campaign that employees at Google have everything they could ever need to be happy is one of Google's most impressive products
"If you are not intentional about how you approach your time, it can quickly become your life.
"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."
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