Pros
- pay is good, people are lovely but that is changing - Well equipped offices and food is so convenient! - Amazing network - Global footprint, opportunity to change offices - Perks of large company - 401k - Brand recognition on resume Welcome to Google’s Steve Ballmer era. Your experience will vary vastly from department to department, team to team and manager to manager. I’ve had amazing experiences pre-Covid, and unusutainable situations post. With internal mobility limited having a bad manager becomes much more problematic than in the past with no real solution. A good number of sales is completely burnt out and certain sectors more difficult to work in than others due to sector customer growth trajectory. Also - being front line sales to staunch a bleeding search business is inherently not fun. Corp just launched a dashboard stack ranking all AE’s against their peers, and they are testing mandatory requirements to turn on AI call listening during customer calls (this will be used in future to assess how strong the salespeople are, and downstream eventually replace the salespeople). The department I was in (large customer sales) is over managed and given far too many metrics to hit. Stack ranking will become a clear and present danger in the next few years due to pressure cooker environment and very aggressive goals. My sector in LCS was a rotating firing squad for the manager who didn’t hit their numbers (for reference- this is usually a % of a brands overall revenue that goes to marketing…. And with less revenue in a recession, there are already headwinds before you factor in the decline of search advertising). No meritocracy + highly political due to stack ranking and layoff fears - showing up for customers takes a back seat to bringing in short term revenue and hitting internal metrics. 1 person does work and 9 different teams take credit. So you have to be comfortable being that 1 in 10 that does work, or the other 9 that take credit. Pick your poison. Certain levels (L6) are not long for this world in GBO, and the highest difficulty level for mobility right now is L5 due to L6s taking demotions to stay at the company, and L4 wanting growth. I was on a front line sales specialist team and organizationally it was chaos. In last 4 years had 4 restructures, 3 different roles under 3 different managers. If you happen to be part of a toxic org don’t take it personally if you feel on a constant spin cycle. In my department you would hit a metric in Q4, then 2 months later the calculation updates and you can go from 95% feature attainment to 20% with absolutely no change from your customer. So with a poor manager you could easily be quietly let go due to performance which the numbers would support, because on paper you’re not performing (due to the constant change). This makes your manager now make or break. When I left I needed to schedule and run 3 hours of internal meetings per day in order to do my job and hit my feature adoption numbers as a front line seller. Spent 5% of time speaking with customers because the products were constantly changing and breaking. Absolute nonsense Top leadership talent in Ads left or leaving in the last year to go outside the company. If a friend had an offer I’d tell them to join unless they had another MAG7 offer, but be incredibly vigilant - check in with themselves once a quarter, and be ready to leave externally at a moments notice should conditions change.
Cons
internal mobility very difficult - turning into IBM - bureaucracy & largely uninteresting work - Hours can be bad (50+) depending on team - Burnout inevitable in new paradigm - Dispersed teams leading to an isolated work environment - Lots of overlap and dwindling support - dog eat dog / “what have you done today” culture - limited learning / stalled career trajectory outside comp - High stress hitting unrealistic metrics with limited support and control - Ineffective middle management - No longer stable - real and present layoff and silent layoff fears plus stack ranking make it unappealing for top performers