Ever wanted to know what employees at places like Google and Microsoft are making and what they think of their jobs? Well, Glassdoor provides you with Ratings, Reviews and Salaries of the employees themselves. They are anonymous of course. In other words, employees are more likely to give out the complete truth without worrying about being exposed.

Find out about the company you want to work for

The site is in beta so apparently it’s still launching. Either way, the amount of reviews, ratings, and salaries submitted is good enough to give you a great idea of what working for the company feels like, the perks given, the pros, cons, salaries, management, and more!

In other words, find out if your dream job is really…your dream job!

The site layout is clean, user friendly, and has a lot of useful information. In the pictures provided, I show you the layout of the site, a preview of a reviews page for a company, and the average salaries page for that company.

A couple of quotes from former employees

Here are some pros from Google

I have never met so many brilliant people at one company ever. I have worked for 8 years in industry now. Seriously, there is not a single dumb employee.

You interact with great developers, original thinkers and interesting people all the time. Unlimited munchies are great, three free meals a day (or two in satellite offices) is great, medical benefits, partial subsidy of fitness membership, subsidy for ongoing education (though in reality you are unlikely to have time to use it) are all pluses. Being on the winning team feels good, especially when winning an uphill battle against an entrenched monopolist.

And now the cons…

Extreme preference is given for manager feedback during performance review cycles. Some managers have no clue about the products they are managing, In such cases, employees who are more vocal and are manager suck-ups get preferential treatment during the review cycles. But engineers who make more contributions, are recognized by peers but who are not in “good books” of their direct management or a level above, get penalized.

The days when Google was the coolest place in the world to work are gone. Google is deteriorating at the edges. Many managers at Google got their jobs just by having low employee numbers and are otherwise unqualified. Once entrenched they tend to show little concern for their reports, concerning themselves with “managing up” to their own manager.

In other words there are as many positives than there are negatives in lots of these reviews. Finding if they outweigh the positives is your job!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in these previous quotes do not represent what Talk Binary thinks of the previous company. This is simply a review showing the reviews found on Glassdoor made by anonymous users and not Talk Binary.