Despite the incredibly gruelling process you have to go through to work at Google, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side — with many Googlers taking to Quora to moan about the downsides of working at the company. We’ve managed to cut through the countless complaints to come up with our favourite five.
Everyone at Google is just great, after all Google only hire the best of the best. The downside of having too many people who are the best is that you’ll often find that you’re overqualified for the job you’re given. We’d go as far as to assume that even the janitors at Google are probably qualified developers, who just want to get a leg in the door.
“Too many great people, doing work that just doesn’t matter, and they’re being paid off not to care in an explicit effort to starve the rest of the valley of extraordinary talent.”
Working at Google is simply just too fun, or as one ex-Googler put it, like “never-never land”. Of course whilst we’d kill to play games and drink all day whilst we work, some Google employees would rather be getting on with some hard work, and not live life like you’re in a Peter Pan story.
“It’s like never-never land – people never grow up. They drink at all hours, socialize constantly, play games, and do little to no work.”
Sometimes you may feel like you’re in need of a good massage, especially after a long day of work. Googlers also like a nice massage, but not in the quiet room where the company has spent way too long debating whether or not it should remove the massage chairs for being too noisy.
“In Zurich there is a quiet room where people go to relax, or take a nap. There are very nice looking fish tanks there and you can waste as much of your work time there, watching the fish do fishy things. There was a 100+ emails thread about removing the massage chairs from that room because some people allegedly were being kept from sleeping because the massage chairs were too noisy.”
Google supplies way too much food for its employees, I mean how much can one company consume? Well according to some Googlers, too much — with food literally being everywhere you look. It’s not all bad though, when you get in that food coma, you can always work it off in the gym.
“It sounds like a first-world problem. But their food. I put on 18 kilos while working at Google. But they also provided access to great gym within the office. One of my colleagues lost 20-30 kilos while I was there. But with so much food around, it was hard to resist and soon I realized that I was eating whenever I was bored or thinking.”
By far the worst of the atrocities committed at Google has to be the overcooked Beef Wellington, which doesn’t happen all the time, but apparently it happens often enough for Googlers to complain on Quora about it.
Occasionally they would overcook the Beef Wellington in Cafe Royle.
