And my experience was that the people who spent all their time at Google were the ones that ended up on the sexier projects or in charge of things
But along with the food came the Google lifestyle: if you were staying for dinner, it better be because you were working afterwards. I think a lot of people spent quite a bit of time either just before or just after dinner hanging out and not really being all that productive, which is nice for the mostly 20-something crowd, but I can sympathize with the people who have families that didn’t fit in. I had my own reasons for not wanting to hang out at work, so I never really got that far into the Google social scene. (Admittedly, some of these people were also workaholics, and I wasn’t willing to give up some of my non-work social activities, but there seemed to be a bit of favoritism going on as well.)
Engineers and everyone else: Unlike most other engineers, I had a job that required me to talk to people all over the company. I talked to the lawyers, marketing, PR, product managers, executives, engineers… And because I started early enough, I also knew quite a few people in sales. As far as salary went, my offer was 35% higher than my next highest job offer, so I think I lucked out there. That was certainly not the normal situation, though. Over the years I talked to plenty of people about what they thought about Google’s compensation… There’s a huge discrepancy between engineers and non-engineers. Most of the adwords support people I talked to complained a lot about their situation. Not only were they generally overqualified for the jobs (given what the work actually was, but Google has always prided itself on having people with extra education) but they could fairly easily have gotten higher-paying jobs elsewhere.