Most likely you will be surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world.
Managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote.
Promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
You apply for promotion by assembling a “promo packet”: a collection of written recommendations from your teammates, design documents you’ve created, and mini-essays you write to explain why your work merits a promotion.
If you spent each day choosing the right problems to solve, making the codebase better, and helping your team execute efficiently, the promotion committee would magically know this and reward you for it.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work like that.
Your job should be quantifiable. You should prove that anything you did had a positive impact on Google.
"For example, my team was receiving tons of distracting email alerts due to false alarms. Old me would have just fixed these alerts. But now I knew that for this work to appear in my promo packet, I should first set up metrics so that we’d have historical records of alert frequency. At promotion time, I’d have an impressive-looking graph of the alerts trending downward."
Some projects could be "destined" for promotion. For example, projects depended heavily on machine learning, which was and still is the hot thing at Google (2018).
Project that is supposed to automate a task that hundreds of human operators are doing manually, has a clear, objective impact on Google => more points at performance review.
Leading a junior developer throughout the project, generally wins points with promotion committees as well.
You’re in a business relationship with Google. Even though, Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. To make you feel that you're not just employees, but that you are Google.
You're not Google. You provide a service to Google in exchange for money.
"So if Google and I have a business relationship that exists to serve each side’s interests, why was I spending time on all these tasks that served Google’s interests instead of my own? If the promotion committee doesn’t reward bugfixing or team support work, why was I doing that?"Figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively.
"Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it."
Each promotion is exponentially harder than the last.
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/