Here are five major reasons why most Googlers say goodbye to Google in one year or less.

The perk trap. Recently, a controversial TikTok video shows the dark side of Google's exclusive perks. Now you might wonder, what could go wrong with receiving benefits at work? Because at first nothing seems shady. Employees work hard contributing to the company, so they get rewarded with benefits. But what if the benefits have a dark side and are nothing but bait to keep you trapped? This is what Ken Wachs, a former employee of Google, said.

Said in a controversial TikTok that went viral this year.

Aspiring young workers flock to the company assuming they have amazing work-life balance, eat delicious food, and play ping pong with colleagues. And it's not their fault because that's how Google portrays itself. But according to Ken, this may be careful marketing just to attract employees. And what you actually see is to get employees to stay for longer. For example,

Google serves three tasty meals a day, but they don't serve dinner until between 6 and 6.30.

And you might say, okay, that's not that late. But if you think about it, by the time you finish eating, it's going to be 7 or 7.30. That means to take advantage of all three meals, you're going to need to be at your desk from morning until evening. And getting every employee to stay until 6 instead of 5, those hours really add up. Another perk is Google's free shuttle. And you even get free Wi-Fi on the shuttle. Great. But you can probably guess what most people are using that

Wi-Fi to do, work more. Considering the shuttle can take about one hour from SF to Google campus when there's traffic. If you just add those two hours of commute time per day and one extra hour that people stay late for dinner, then people already got three hours of extra work from you.

Now, Google also lets you bring dogs to the office, which just seems purely positive. But what Ken said is by doing that, Google just eliminated another reason for you to go home or to think of anything else other than work. It's kind of like you and your dog are living together in one cage.

And there's one thing that's for sure. Google's earning back what they spend on these perks many times over. Now, several million people watch Ken's video and some agree, others disagree.

Some say they would happily spend long hours of work if they got all these free benefits.

Honestly, though, what do you think? Leave a comment below. And of course, beyond what we mentioned here, there's a lot of perks we didn't cover, such as Google's generous work from home policy, unlimited vacation time and more. But can you actually enjoy them with the second reason, endless work pressure? Of course, Google isn't alone with the list of companies that put a lot of pressure on employees with aggressive deadlines. But how much pressure is too much? Well, maybe when work pressure starts to take a toll on health, because anxiety and burnout can definitely be a factor in early departures. Research on workplace stress recently done by Payscale.com said that 53% of Google employees consider their jobs extremely stressful. No wonder ex-Google employees claim Google acts like a demanding girlfriend. Even with the unlimited vacation, work from home and more direct stress relievers like meditation rooms and insurance covering therapy, the question is, are these things actually helping? Well, if we look at Payscale's report and what ex-Googlers say, it largely seems like no. But why? Because many Google employees claimed they felt like there was a culture of them working against the clock and they didn't have any time to relax and de-stress themselves because it's hard to have leisure time when you're only thinking about the task you're behind on due to an aggressive deadline. And ex-Googlers say that due to these deadlines, they always felt behind schedule and only in rare cases, if the team was lucky, would they actually finish a project on time. Now, in this situation, it's very easy to rationalize something like skipping the gym when your whole team is working too. Now, it's not like anyone's going to stop you from going, but you might be seen as a slacker for not working as hard as the rest of the team. And to be perceived as a hard worker, you might be eating those tasty meals at your desk. Now, you might be typing a comment right now that says, hey, you have your perks, you have the high salary, so stop complaining. But when you're actually in the environment, it's a bit different. Not everyone can handle that stress. You might also wonder, is coding itself a stressful thing to do? Well, today's sponsor doesn't think so. If you want to learn and earn with coding while simultaneously living a stress-free life, check out the Fremo Code Bootcamp where you'll learn front-end coding and location-independent job hunting skills.

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Fremote in the description below. Let's get back into the video and move on to the third reason, difficult to survive. I don't want to be dramatic, but working at Google, you might feel like you're living a state over in Death Valley. The constant work pressure can make you sweat and the competition hard to survive. The competition begins as soon as you apply at Google. You have to compete with 3 million applicants every year and overshadow them just to get an interview, which means landing a job at Google is harder than joining Harvard. 20 times harder, actually. But passing the interview and becoming a Googler might be just the beginning. You'll be working with some of the smartest people in the world, which is of course a great stimulating experience, but you're also going to feel pressure to match up to them in terms of performance, productivity, and creativity.

You might try to come up with new ideas and initiatives to stand out and get a promotion, but this can actually create conflict with your colleagues who have their own ideas and incentives, and having someone incredibly smart and experienced or creative on your team can actually leave you feeling like you're stuck in their shadow. And many ex-Googlers surveyed actually felt like they got left out being on such a type of team. Personal motivation aside, being on a competitive team can also make it harder to get big projects and promotions, and over time it can be discouraging to operate in this circumstance, which does lead to a lot of employees company hopping to get more recognition.

That brings us to our fourth point. Politics kills promotions.

The next Googler named Michael Lynch said he tried his best to stick with the company. He gave his best, yet there was still no opportunity to ever get a promotion. And numerous ex-Googlers have felt this way, describing a house of cards style internal politics structure that happens within the company, blocking them from claiming up the ladder of success. Within tech companies, it should be purely results driven, but people pleasing within Google is apparently a massive problem. People getting passed over for promotions, taking it personally, and then going on to find a new job. This is exactly what Crystal Brick experienced, an ex-product marketing manager who ended up leaving for a six-figure job for the same reasons. Now the question is, when people leave, where do they go? Google seems like the top, and what's next? Well, there are many comparable companies such as Facebook or Netflix, but a sizable amount of people take advantage of the fifth major reason to start a startup. Uncle Ben from Spider-Man said it best, with great power comes great responsibility. What he didn't say was, with great responsibility can come extreme stress. If even in big companies, stress is inevitable, why not spend that stress on developing your own company instead? And if competition is inevitable, then why not compete with Google itself? One group of ex-Google employees took this very literally, and they created a new search engine called Neva. And Neva is far and away not the only startup ex-Googlers have created. There's so many like Cardiogram, TextNow, Coda, Amplitude, Zenesis,

Dilda, Snap, Cape, and the list is endless. Now, it's just a fact that people ambitious enough to get into Google in the first place are probably ambitious to a fault. Whether you eventually find it more exciting and worthwhile to work on their own company, chasing that same high that initially motivated them to get into Google in the first place. Now, of course, you're going to lose the perks, company culture, benefits, and things we've been talking about this whole time. But if your startup does fail, the perks and competitive salaries exist at almost all the big tech companies in SF because they're all competing for the limited pool of great software engineers. Tech employees are notorious for company hopping, especially for higher salaries as soon as they get bored. And if you have Google on your resume, you better believe recruiters are going to be flooding your inbox more than if you were a bikini model on Instagram. And they'll be trying to get you to move to their company. Being so in demand is no doubt a good thing. It makes the temptation to move though for a pay bump, especially after having a bad day extremely high. Imagine if you're

Google, you're trying to steer a ship with employees jumping off every single day. So, it's an uphill battle to keep people around and get anything done. So, maybe it's not surprising Google tries to juice people as much as they can when they are still around. Anyway, what do you think? Is working for Google worth it? Are the benefits just a sales tactic or do they genuinely care about their employees? Maybe the sweet spot is landing Google, staying for one year, and then leaving it on your resume to use it for the cloud and future opportunities. Just like all the people who dropped out of Harvard. Let me know what you think and I'll see you next time.