14 months at Google

Hack2hire Community · 2026-05-14T12:00:00.025Z

Google - Company Culture - Software Engineer Time at Company: 14 months Joined Google for the obvious reasons. Comp, brand, stability. What I didn't expect is how much of the work is about being seen rather than building things. Projects get picked for career visibility. Nobody owns anything end-to-end. There are 5 engineers for every task that would take 1 at a startup. I watch it silently boil over every quarter when I compare what I actually shipped to what the team celebrated. The delta is r...

ryan.zhang2d ago

Company Culturegoogle

133

Replies (3)

User-l57qa2d ago

the WLB trade is actually valuable depending on where you are in life. not everyone wants to be shipping features at 11pm

ryan.zhang2d ago

100% that's why people stay. just don't join expecting to ship things that matter

User-5q52q2d ago

this matches exactly what multiple google friends have told me. the work/visibility ratio is off

ryan.zhang2d ago

and the thing is everyone knows it. they just accept it for the WLB

jacobmiller2d ago

5 engineers for every 1 task is an exaggeration... right?

ryan.zhang2d ago

not really lol. redundancy is everywhere

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