Google reviews

Leaders who don’t lead. Directors who don’t give directives. VPs who don’t even understand the nature of their job function. Mid level managers who understand the work better than anyone, but get trounced on by internal, political BS. Frequent layoffs. Frequent re-orgs. General instability and a lack of job security and psychological safety. You do a lot of tap facing to “safeguard” yourself, but you’re never quite sure how to meet the mark because there’s an ever-moving goal post. If you are a serious government relations or public policy professional… do NOT work here. There are too many silos and too much internal gatekeeping and clout-chasing. Not enough execution for the sake of necessity and job function. You will spend months circling in endless internal meetings and may ultimately accomplish nothing. Your literal political influence matters less than your in-house, company influence in this ridiculous policy shop. It’s also over organized with tons of redundancy and overlap, so get ready to butt heads with folks all the time in pursuit of your job.

Cons for Google as a company: - as most people have seen in the last few years, even at Google you're just a number. In 3 rounds of layoffs, folks weren't given any notice, they just woke up one morning to find that their access had been shut off. I don't blame google for doing this when they needed to layoff thousands of people, but just keep in mind that even at Google (in my opinion one of the best places to work) you're still just a number. Cons about being an Administrative Business Partner: - "Girls Club" energy: this is a female dominated role, thus there are a few cons specifically related to this. unfortunately the Admin teams i've worked with have always been chatty, gossipy, and not very tech savvy. These are what they call "career admins." Ex: women who started being an EA in the 80s or 90s before technology, and stayed in the role until their 40s and 50s. Not very good at their jobs, but unaware. - Ageist: being under 30 in this role means you'll never hear the end of the "career admins" unwarranted advice, or talking down towards you, despite the under 30 admins almost always being far better at their jobs than the admins over 40 - Promotions: getting promoted is specifically about who you know. the promotion committee is made up of senior admins, thus if you're not best friends with the admins on the committee, it will be much harder for you to get promoted. - despite this being an independent job that doesn't rely on the other Admins in your org, you're forced to attend unnecessary meetings with your fellow admins, which often times are full of gossip and "back in the day" chat.