Google reviews

The side-effect of everyone being good (and everyone else knowing it) is that there is a lot of pressure to not disappoint anyone. The side-effect of less management is that feedback is hard to get and good performance and hard work can go unnoticed and unappreciated. A focus on technical expertise means that there is less focus on soft skills. Many managers are not good enough at managing people even though they are very good with the technical side of things. Culture encourages one to give up the rest of his/her life for their job. Despite the initial utopian feel and propaganda, it's just a really rich company with a lot of smart people. It still IS a company and has the same stupid politics, competitiveness, and issues you find everywhere else.

Its a geeks heaven, and although all employees are treated well, the engineers are clearly the favored class. I think this makes sense from a strategic perspective (I am not an engineer) but employees in sales, legal, finance etc. often feel slighted because of this. Engineers build the products that drive the success of the company, other functions are essentially support functions. This may not be the case at other companies, such as traditional enterprise software companies, where sales is more important, but that is the way it is at Google.