Let the insider dirt-dishing begin!

Sorry if these posts are long- I'm just going to post them verbatim.  I cannot verify any of the info contained in these emails, but they sound sufficiently pissed off to be real. One thing I would mention, if you're leaking info to me, do it in a way that you cannot be identified and/or get fired over. Say a conversation happened between you and *one* other Google exec, and you post the details, they're gonna know who you are. Be careful with the identifiable tips unless you already found a new job, folks.

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Hi, I work at GOOG and thought the world should know the following:

All the press surrounding the amazing perks at GOOG is bullshit. Seriously, you can't really take advantage

of the free food, massages, etc. because it just looks bad (and no one who is taken seriously at the company

actually has any free time).

90% of the people eat at their desk and it's not an enjoyable experience.

The massages are booked months in advance and even then, you're likely to have something come up

last minute- meeting, etc, that interferes with it.

Management sucks. You have to worry when top flight execs start leaving- Sheryl Sandberg (Harvard MBA, amazing resume, etc) is amazing and talented. If GOOG was the #1 place to be, she wouldn't budge. She knows what she's doing and she got out. FAST. Because the place is going UNDERWATER.

Douglas Merrill also left the coup- Another bright, intelligent (PHd from Princeton) guy.

Things change so fast, there is no value invested in new hires, particularly in Product Management and AdWords....

it's so bad that they've started a DILBERT series...meetings every month of how we can avoid becoming a Dilbert like workplace.

DILBERT and GOOGLE shouldn't even be placed in the same sentence. Yet, they are.

How about that Fortune magazine?

It seems like Fortune magazine is more concerned with overall performance than what it's actually like to work there.

Also, Hilary Jensen, Mike Miller & Tracy Lee-Blumberg (managers in OSO) are evil.

Mike Miller- Plays favorites. Says 'hi' to only a select few people that he likes. He manages a team of 40 but actually only talks to 5 or 6 of them. His direct reports can't say anything because they can't afford to get on his bad side... (which would mean a bad performance review since Mike can't take criticism.)

He's also a little troll at about 5' 2" and a crazy receding hair line.

Hillary Jensen has no ethics or morals. She will ask someone to dish dirt on someone else just to find out information. In what business setting is this an appropriate method? Her direct reports loathe her. They don't trust her.

Hillary happened to learn everything she knows from Tracy Lee-Blumberg, another twisted manager in OSO that no one trusts. How she got to associate manager position is unimaginable. She stomped over many people and made a lot of enemies.

If you don't share her fake attitude of "cheerleaderism" (She's like one of the girls from the Hills- "Hi Hi Hi !!! Like OMG, Oh, i KNOOOW)... then she will cut you down.

GOOG was a cool place to work in 2004, even 2005. Now, management is leaving, perks are not being enjoyed, and people are looking for a way out.

Plus, it doesn't seem fair to lure lots of promising new grads to the west coast to start a new life in SF or Mountain View, commute to MV and work for a "great" organization, when the reality is so far from the truth.

Unless you're on the Exec. Committee, you're doing General Support- answering emails, on the phones, etc.

Because that's what Google is...a search engine that needs general support - clients with questions about their bloggers,adwords accounts, gmail, gcalendar, etc etc.

Comments

[.]

Sounds like a great place to work. Do I need to get my phd before they'll hire me though?

[M]

I work at Google and this is certainly not a representation of reality - whoever wrote that (if it is a Google insider) is disgruntled and it doesn't reflect the employees that I know of, or even see from a distance. Pretty poor that you would even give it such priominence, and it really goes to show that this blog isn't going to be objective (even if critically objective), but just a slanging place for unchecked rants (which I'm sure you can find about any company). If anything, you've just made it clear to all present and future readers that they can't take anything here seriously, so I'm pretty happy about that.

[admin]

Hi "M" google employee

I've got around 70 emails from Googlers with more dirt, and I got 12 more today. I guess they're all lying? Or just random anonymous people sending me emails detailing the behavior of managers and execs by name?

Google has nowhere to go but down. And I'll be here to document its epic failure.

Good luck with cashing out your options before the bottom falls out of this company built on fraud. (making advertisements look like text links on a page so people don't know they are even advertisements)

And since you're a google employee, I'm sure you noticed the name of this website is "fuckedgoogle".. This site certainly is biased against google. Thus the name. Is that too complicated for you to understand?

[Googler]

I've actually had Mike Miller as a manager and he's one of the best managers I've ever had.

[gazzle]

Hi Mike! I think you're one of the best managers too. Why are you spending your 20% time on this site?

[pat smith]

Fantastic. Found this via Adrants. And I just added you to my Google Reader feeds. Wonder how many Gmail users will do that in the next few weeks. Don't want to forget my lame-ass blog, also with Google. AdWords is a lot less frustrating than Yahoo's PPC.

I'll enjoy reading this, but ultimately I'm happy with the services Google provides.

[pat smith]

Just noticed that your old posts going back to 1/9/06 are on Google Reader. Thanks for all the work you've done and, once again, I'm happy that you're back at it.

[.]

what's the link for google reader so I can see older posts?

[AnotherGoogler]

Yeah, working at Google sucks. Today I got to work and had a made-to-order omelet & fresh fruit smoothie for breakfast (free, not eaten at my desk.) After a couple hours of work I got a 15 min. chair massage ($5 gratuity, not quite free, but not bad) which BTW I signed up for yesterday while the entire day's schedule was WIDE OPEN. Then after a great lunch with a couple of my colleagues (also free), I put in a few more hours of work. I had intended to use the company gym today (did I mention it's free and really well equipped?) but instead ended up downing a few (free) beers at TGIF (Anderson Valley Amber & Red Rocket Ale, on tap, in case you're wondering.) After that I was no longer motivated to do much of anything but hang out and chat with some friends. At 6:30 I jumped on a (free) google shuttle which drove me to the far south bay while I surfed Valleywag and stumbled upon this sorry ass site. What a rough day! To make it even worse, I actually get paid really well for all of this! Whaaaaa!

[.]

Congrats "AnotherGoogler"

You just confirm the rumor that most people at Google don't do jack squat every day. Do you know that the team of programmers who built Adsense were 99% temp workers and were laid off immediately after they finished? With no stock/options grants or anything?

You do know that your company gets 100% of its revenue from the work of those "temp" programmers who are long gone. All the current employees are there now just for show. Google is a one trick pony riding on the coattails of those temp workers. Not a single other project in your company has ever produced even 1% of the money that adsense does.

You sound like a moron riding around on his scooter in a dot.com office right out of 1999. You think it might be ironic that Google's HQ is the ex-headquarters of SGI, which went bankrupt? No, irony isnt a concept that phds tend to be able to grasp.

I bet your Aeron chair is quite comfy, isn't it?

[Anthony]

To all the Google Employees that complain you don't get all the amazing perks reported in the press; welcome to the working world. The other 99.999% of us that work elsewhere in Non-Google companies don't get any perks, nor do we have the opportunity for free food (even if it 'looks bad if we take advantage')

Seriously, if you think your work-life is so bad because you've eaten at your desk, go spend a few hours in one of the thousands of Call-Centres around the US and Canada, you'll find people that are underpaid, overworked, stressed, etc., and those people can't book a free massage, not even months in advance.

Management is lazy and makes your life miserable in most jobs, its the way business runs; I'm sure there are some Apple Employees who have some wonderful stories about working closely with Steve Jobs.

The fact that so many Google employees post about how they did, literally, nothing all day and got paid for it is astounding. I work for a company far larger than Google can ever hope to be, and we'd all be fired if we spent our days that way.

I'm not saying I really want Google to stay around, or not stay around, I really don't care either way. Something else will replace Google if it goes under.

Quit whining and start searching the classifieds if your jobs are so miserable.

[Berkely Berkely]

What a load of bullshit: what you write bears no resemblance to the company I know. 90% eat at their desks? Maybe a mid-morning / afternoon snack. The canteens look pretty packed at lunchtime to me, and deserve to be.

Odd how you say that Google is shrinking it's workforce and outlay's...that would explain the recent new offices in Washington and Zurich opening up (amongst many others)...makes complete sense.

I've not met a single asshole at Google in a year of working for them, but I read juvenile nonsense like this and think...oh my...I'm guessing you didn't get the gig, right?

[Teeni raha internetis]

The hippo got too big too fast. Now it doesn't have enough food to sustain, nor the speed and agility to catch it.
Soon it's massive body will collapse from food shortage. But before internal bleeding, several organ failures and maybe a heart attack will occur. Hippopotamus Googlicus, once a proud beast that crawled through the jungles of The Internet will soon have to face it's extinction.

Just a theory.

[Ferro]

At least some of the assertions reported in this blog are easily proven to be objectively false without needing deep "insider" info. Consider, for example:
"""
Seriously, you can't really take advantage of the free food, massages, etc. because it just looks bad (and no one who is taken seriously at the company actually has any free time).
"""
If you're invited to have lunch at the Googleplex (as happens reasonaby often to me), you can often see such people as Senior VP of Engineering Bill Coughran, Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Chief Economist Hal Varian, Directors such as Peter Norvig, extremely senior engineers such as Luiz Barroso, Rob Pike, Ken Thomson, Mike Burroughs, etc, etc, having their free lunches there: so these obviously DO have enough free time to "take advantage of the free food" at least on a somewhat-frequent basis (maybe they do have [free] lunches at their desk on some especially busy days, of course, and take full advantage of the free lunches on other more normal days; I am only stating what I personally observe).

These, most obviously, are all people who ARE "taken seriously at the company", of course -- in a very direct sense, these people the heart and soul of its Engineering (and research/operations/economics) core. How things may be _elsewhere_ at the company (sales, etc), I don't really know well, as my somewhat-close acquaintances there are just about all on the engineering&c side of things; similarly, I can't speak from personal direct observation about how things may be in "remote offices" away from Mountain View. But I notice that many assertions are made without such qualifications (e.g. "things suck for googlers in Sales in Chicago" vs "things suck for googlers") and, as such, they're pretty clearly false assertions.

Among the many other assertions made here that are obviously false to anybody with any substantial knowledge of the details, I've noticed the assertion that Adsense makes 99% of Google revenues (Adwords actually makes more than half, Adsense less than half) and that employees' underwater options are worthless (they would be in any other company, but not at Google: see e.g. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/about-transferable-stock-options.html -- googlers' options are transferable, i.e. googlers can sell vested options by auction to participating financial institutions, and the auction-determined price happens to track the theoretical Black-Scholes model pretty well indeed -- one friend with options priced above $500, back when the stock was trading in the low 400's before its current recovery to $470, told me each of his options was still worth pretty close to $100 thanks to this elegant mechanism). There are many more examples, but this comment's already too long.

I'd LOVE to hear *well-substantiated* negatives on Google to balance out the many (perhaps TOO many...) positives one hears from the general press hearing both sides and weighing them against each other might help me decide whether to pursue opportunities there, as I've been tempted to do ever since professor Varian (one of my personal and professional heroes) joined google last summer (if and when I also leave academia, as a specialist in quantitative analysis of pricing and auctions, Google sure looks tempting, particularly compared with the dire current employment prospects in the financial industry). But unless this blog can start applying some commonsense filtering to block out totally unsubstantiated, and easily-proven-false, assertions, I fear its worth to me (or anybody considering similar decisions) will stay zero. If I sent in a mail claiming to be an ex-googler and to know that google's money actually all comes from evil alien overlords (who, as a side diversion on their way to world domination, are fattening googlers up with the famous free food just in order to provide themselves with handy and tasty snacks), would THAT be taken up by this blog too...?-)

[.]

It's not surprising that high-level execs have free time to enjoy the Gourmet food in the cafeteria, they also have free time (and money) to buy a fleet of private jets including two Gulfstreams and two Boeing Passenger jumbo jets.

As to Google's adsense making up 99% of the revenue, that's actually true since adwords is the mirror image of adsense- they are essentially one program and revenue stream.

The ability for Google insiders to get *some* value for their underwater options by essentially selling them as calls with a 10 year expiration date is not news. It still isn't going to help the average schlub hired last year with the stock at 759 who sees the stock at 450 right now- how much do you think those options are worth on the private market set up by Morgan Stanley and others? Jack squat, that's how much.

The "heart and core" of Google is the adsense/adwords program which was written by temp employees who were almost universally fired after their work was completed. That "core" is what generates substantially all of Google's revenue, and the people who are still around are essentially just filling chairs and answering emails from advertisers. The number of engineers who actually doing any work on a daily basis is practically zero- there simply is no need. Witness stuff like blogger.com - where the first comment to any post is scrambled over the title of the post and unreadable- it's a bug that has been there for over a year, and that would take a single programmer 15 minutes to fix, yet it hasn't.

It hasn't been fixed because nobody at Google gives a shit anymore.

Even our celebrity chef charlie ayers cut and run after cashing out 20 million dollars of options. Insiders at this place have sold more than 1.5x in stock than the total value that Google has earned in total since the company was founded. The company exists now for one purpose- to let insiders sell stock certificates to the stupid investing public: but the public is waking up slowly and surely- we're down 40% in value in less than 4 months.

[interesting]

I think I know who wrote this and if it is the same person, this person was fired last year...you can tell for good reason. haha

[ANON]

I know the person who posted this....He works in a different dept. now and has a great manager now....So he definitely didn't get fired, but he's remaining anonymous so that he really doesn't get fired.
However, when he had Tracy 2 years ago, she was horrible and from what he hears, she's still the same....just check out all of the people who agree on valleywag. I think that if there are that many people who had a problem, there's gotta be some truth to it.
As far as Mike & Hilary. I don't know Hilary personally but I've dealt with Mike and he seems pretty fake to me...tries too hard..and definitely plays favorites. But so do a lot of managers so I don't know if that's saying anything.
As far as perks- yea he exaggerated a bit (I think he was just trying to make a point that GOOG isn't this fantasyland that the press makes it out to be)....of course you can eat lunch and get massages scheduled reasonably...