Waymo Reviews

Waymo is struggling with growth pain around issues of culture and transparency. I did not meet many strong software engineers here, compared to other, less famous, companies I worked for. That's not surprising given how poorly Waymo treats its employees. At Waymo, like other startups, employees have stock-based compensation. However, here you are not allowed to know what share of the company your stock represents - and the company can take your vested stock away if you leave. I find workplace conditions here humiliating, and those continue to get worse. If you join Waymo, expect to get a tiny desk in a hallway on a giant floor packed with hundreds of other desks side-to-side. You'll be surrounded by piles of boxes and yelling people all the time. People around me are often working sick, so I get constantly exposed to new deceases.

* This is *NOT* Google. If you come to Waymo thinking it will be just like Google, it's not. The culture is very different, and the managers are generally very narcissistic, self-interested and unsupportive of their people (except for the sycophants, who are rapidly taking over the company). Must play politics to succeed, and go along with group-think. * Each team is different and has their own culture and pros and cons. One team may be easy to submit code but suffers from tremendous technical debt, while another team is near impossible to submit code and progress moves at a snail's pace. It's possible that you may be well suited for one team's culture and find yourself like a fish out of water on another. There's no way to know before you get there. Transferring internally is a thing, but some managers may try to block you if they don't like you (see: politics). * The people managers are almost universally terrible. Waymo does not hire good people managers, they hire star individual contributors who turn into awful managers that repel talent. * Senior leadership seems dysfunctional and delusional. Some goals they set are obviously unrealistic and going in the wrong direction, but they do it anyways and make excuses when it fails. It's really hard to trust that they're making the right decisions, but you just have to put up and shut up. * Dingy, noisy office building, does not feel "nice" like other Google offices. Sufficiently far from Google main campus that many amenities are inconvenient (e.g. decent massages, any other cafes or food trucks). * Waymo equity is mostly illiquid, so a big part of compensation feels like Monopoly money. Living in the Bay Area is expensive, so it may be hard to have a good life with just salary+bonus (good luck buying a house while you wait for liquidity).