Google is the most preferred employer in India but not quite so in the U.S

Google is the most preferred employer in India among business school undergraduates. That was the conclusion after The Nielsen Company surveyed 860 students across 30 premier business schools in India.

The ‘Most preferred Employers’ survey was conducted during October-November last year when hundreds of corporations were hunting for talents.

Google was ranked second in the list last year and managed to overtake former number one, McKinsey which is ranked fifth this year.

Google is known to be a creative and forward-looking company. Despite having offices across different parts of the world, Google’s culture remains reasonably consistent and strong.

“We have worked hard to ensure that people enjoy what they do when working for us,” Shailesh Rao, MD of Google India told The Economic Times. “We have a collaborative culture and are purpose-driven.” Google India encourages innovation by allowing people to spend 20% of their time in projects of their interest. It also gives patent bonuses and high flexibility to help employees strike the right work-life balance.

However, Google has mixed review back in the U.S. Current and ex employees have complained on Glassdoor that Google is losing its start-up culture and turning bureaucratic. Of course, there are people who have also praised Google for its diverse culture and massive learning opportunities.

“Base pay is just okay; work is not easy (very sink or swim), lots of internal procedures are always changing and often confusing; difficult to maintain a balance with so many things going on at once (a diversity/chaos of activity),” said an intern who used to work in Google Mountain View.

Another ex-Googler software engineer also shared his pros and cons about Google:

“Google management is pretty bad. Many cool innovative ideas from engineers were “killed” by managers because they were unable to understand their importance. Projects similar to facebook and yelp were made in google long time ago and they did not start and succeed because of management failure. Top management never understood importance of social and local until very recent time.”

And to him, the learning opportunities, the prestige to work in Google and having the chance to be involved with advance technology are some of the advantages working in Google.

“Google is the best place to start for a fresh graduate. You can learn a lot here. I loved working on map reduce infrastructure, the Google implementation is years ahead of any implementation (hadoop etc) and learned a lot. It was incredibly easy to find a job after I left Google, my experience was valued very much by other companies.”

For now, the coolest company to be in seems to be Facebook. But like any giant technology company, it will one day lose its shine while another start-up takes over the helm.