Google is great, but stay away from Google Cloud - Sales Google Employee Review

2.0
25 Mar 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Incredibly smart, talented and diverse colleagues in the sales and sales engineering teams. This is Google, so the perks are amazing, the offices are gorgeous and the company does some incredible things across the portfolio. It is a bit like in the movie about Google, called The Internship.

Cons

Sadly, all the cool things you heard about Google do not apply to the Google Cloud organisation. A mess of mindless micromanagement, by self absorbed, arrogant, old-guard types. Everybody manages up, but does not share back down. This is easily the most old fashioned sales management team I have ever experienced. The Cloud sales and sales engineering organisations spend a ridiculous amount of time focused inward on things that reduce time with the customer, while offering no benefit to the customer. Combine that with regular fire drills, where EMEA management needs some information (without communicating why) and everyone! scrambles to provide it, with local management just passing things along, all the while pressuring you about your quota. Speaking of: If you are not in retail, don't even think about having a chance to make quota. Most enterprise customers see no reason to work with Google Cloud and even the sales engineers (CEs) haven't found a reasonable answer to the "why Google Cloud?" question that gets asked by almost every account. The new leadership under Thomas Kurian is implementing the "strategy" of throwing more sales people at the problem, and trying to play catch up on traditional workloads that make money, but where AWS and Azure are years ahead of Google. Not very creative or visionary. Publicly stating this, is even more damning. All of the DACH sales leadership comes from companies that have lost in the public cloud market (HP, Vmware, etc), but bring their mindset of traditional software sales with them. Finally there is a mix of arrogance (we are Google, we know best) and naïveté (if we build it, customers will come) that permeates the organisation. Instead of adapting industry best practices around sales processes, literally hundreds of people internally spend valuable time in creating over engineered processes for large deals that almost never materialise. It is becoming harder and harder to consult customer on GCP, because I'm starting to believe that the company will get bored of it, if it doesn't turn a profit in the next 24 months and will abandon it.

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Pros

Long term thinking, good word life balance

Cons

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4.0
21 Jun 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

1) Food, food, food. 15+ cafes on main campus (MTV) alone. Mini-kitchens, snacks, drinks, free breakfast/lunch/dinner, all day, errr'day. 2) Benefits/perks. Free 24:7 gym access (on MTV campus). Free (self service) laundry (washer/dryer) available. Bowling alley. Volley ball pit. Custom-built and exclusive employee use only outdoor sport park (MTV). Free health/fitness assessments. Dog-friendly. Etc. etc. etc. 3) Compensation. In ~2010 or 2011, Google updated its compensation packages so that they were more competitive. 4) For the size of the organization (30K+), it has remained relatively innovative, nimble, and fast-paced and open with communication but, that is definitely changing (for the worse). 5) With so many departments, focus areas, and products, *in theory*, you should have plenty of opportunity to grow your career (horizontally or vertically). In practice, not true. 6) You get to work with some of the brightest, most innovative and hard-working/diligent minds in the industry. There's a "con" to that, too (see below).

Cons

1) Work/life balance. What balance? All those perks and benefits are an illusion. They keep you at work and they help you to be more productive. I've never met anybody at Google who actually time off on weekends or on vacations. You may not hear management say, "You have to work on weekends/vacations" but, they set the culture by doing so - and it inevitably trickles down. I don't know if Google inadvertently hires the work-a-holics or if they create work-a-holics in us. Regardless, I have seen way too many of the following: marriages fall apart, colleagues choosing work and projects over family, colleagues getting physically sick and ill because of stress, colleagues crying while at work because of the stress, colleagues shooting out emails at midnight, 1am, 2am, 3am. It is absolutely ridiculous and something needs to change. 2) Poor management. I think the issue is that, a majority of people love Google because they get to work on interesting technical problems - and these are the people that see little value in learning how to develop emotional intelligence. Perhaps they enjoy technical problems because people are too "difficult." People are promoted into management positions - not because they actually know how to lead/manage, but because they happen to be smart or because there is no other path to grow into. So there is a layer of intelligent individuals who are horrible managers and leaders. Yet, there is no value system to actually do anything about that because "emotional intelligence" or "adaptive leadership" are not taken seriously. 3) Jerks. Sure, there are a lot of brilliant people - but, sadly, there are also a lot of jerks (and, many times, they are one and the same). Years ago, that wasn't the case. I don't know if the pool of candidates is getting smaller, or maybe all the folks with great personalities cashed out and left, or maybe people are getting burned out and it's wearing on their personality and patience. I've heard stories of managers straight-up cussing out their employees and intimidating/scaring their employees into compliance. 4) It's a giant company now and, inevitably, it has become slower moving and is now layered with process and bureaucracy. So many political battles, empire building, territory grabbing. Google says, "Don't be evil." But, that practice doesn't seem to be put into place when it comes to internal practices. :(

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