Google Software Developer reviews

The interviews are really bad for the applicant: you learn nothing from what you will be doing and are interviewed only by people from completely different areas of expertise than yours. If you decide to come here, expect to have 5-6 layers of management above you. Unless your are a big shot or manage to get a strong ally, you often get the promise of leading some significant project, only to be exchanged without notice with more "experienced" people. Only a minority of engineers get to do the interesting stuff: Google+, Knowledge Graph, etc. If you are part of the other 99%, things are less exciting and the lower your rank is, the less freedom you have.

Google is a big company, so it's different from startup company. There will be process built that you need to follow and organization can be hierarchical. But it's nature of a big company. Still, there are some projects and teams in Google that act like startup.