Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently announced that they would step down from their leadership positions with the company. When a CEO and/or founder decides to give up their role, it usually has a seismic effect on their company. But based on employee responses sourced by Blind, it seems that many Googlers are taking the Page/Brin departure in stride.
Blind conducts anonymous surveys on a regular basis. Although these surveys aren’t the most scientific—there’s no way to verify that an anonymous respondent actually works for a particular company—they do give some idea of employee sentiment over particular issues. In this case, Blind asked about the impact of the Page/Brin departure, and the majority (59.7 percent) thought that it would have no impact on the future of the company.
Moreover, 56.1 percent of Google employees are optimistic about Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google who was elevated to Page’s old spot as CEO of Alphabet, the holding company for Google and various startups (such as Waymo).
“Still don’t know what the fuss is about. This doesn’t change anything internally. Larry and Serge are still board members. Google is the biggest bet of Alphabet. CEO of Google is taking over Alphabet responsibilities. It’s cool or not. Does not matter much internally or externally,” one employee reported to Blind.
“Larry and Sergei were already MIA. For last 2 years both were focusing on side projects and X,” said another.
“Literally doesn’t matter, they’re still on the board. All this is is a title change, power move, and probably pay bump for Sundar,” offered a third.
If you’re interested in working for Google, it pays to know which skills and programming languages are most desired by the company’s various teams. Thankfully, the programming languages most in-use at various Googleplexes include Python, JavaScript, C++, and Java.
Using the Burning Glass database (which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country), we also recently isolated Google’s tech roles and associated skill-sets beyond just programming languages. Out of 879 IT jobs, 250 job postings at Google were for people skilled in “software engineering.” Another 104 wanted someone with “software development” skills. It seems that Google is always actively building out its engineering and development teams:
For those who decide to make a career at Google has a software engineer, the potential rewards are enormous. Over the summer, we crunched data from levels.fyi, which crowdsources salary data from the biggest tech companies, and found that, at Google’s L7 level (i.e., senior staff software engineer), annual salary can top $256,059 per year, coupled with $286,176 in stock options and a bonus of $83,294. For Google Distinguished Engineers, salaries can top a million dollars per year. For those engineers focused on compensation, that’s plenty of reason to stick around and see if you can climb the ladder.
