Google Software Engineering Manager II reviews

Google has a lot of bad managers. They spend a ton of money trying to figure out how to make it better, but the tl;dr is that at the senior levels, a lot of the promotion committees (it's an anonymous committee, not your manager, who decides) look favorably on managing people. Especially on the manager track, the size of organization you manage seemed to matter more than how good of a manager you were. In many parts of the org, it became impossible to get the promotion to the next level unless you had a manager who was really good about helping you carve out space to manage a large organization within their org. Career development is mostly an exercise for the reader. There's lots of opportunities available, but you have to go out and find them and push. Don't expect someone to guide you along career development. At the senior levels, you're at a huge disadvantage outside of Mountain View. And if you're in MTV, you're either suffering a huge commute from SF, or living in an extremely overpriced boring suburb.

Increasingly bureaucratic as it gets larger.