Google Ranks 3rd in Top Tech Places to Work For
While glassdoor.com may not be the best place to get your opinions on employee satisfaction (and that too for a large company like Google), I am not all surprised that the big G has slipped to third in the best tech company to work for category. Om Malik in his post mentions
I had expected Google to take top honors given its stock performance, not to mention what it spends on food and other amenities for its employees. I guess money really doesn’t buy happiness…
Yes, it surely doesn’t! I was with Google for three and half years and during that time, the company’s employee headcount skyrocketed. Sure, many great people were hired, but among them were absolute disasters too. You could say that the law of averages catches up some or the other but unfortunately for them, most of the disasters were hired into positions of power. Typical fresh out of school MBA middle managers who had no clue about how the real work got done. Driven by pure data around productivity, people got pushed around, broken down and eventually made miserable. I am not sure if this is how the engineering side of things worked, but sales, ops and product support of which I was a part of, was certainly this way.
Something else that started going wrong during the last year and a half. The famed culture or Googliness around the place. Instead of being fostered, things were hoisted upon. Instead of voluntarily taking satisfaction surveys, you were forced to. Instead of letting culture evolve with the comings and goings of people, it was stage managed in a very communist manner. You had pseudo culture vultures running around the place dictating things to do and activities to participate in.
Don’t get me wrong, overall, it still is probably the best place to work for for a lot of people, but that halo is dimming. And dimming fast.
