I am at Google (and have been for quite somewhat over a decade now), and am over 40 too.
Despite a lot of internal criticism about "the old Google" and how things have changed, they are still a very good company to work for in my opinion. Lots of well-known benefits, decent comp, and critically a very good work-life balance (no mandatory work-from-office so far, I probably average about 0.5 to 1 days a week in the office) and laid-back pace. I have been basically doing 8:15am to 3pm for my hours (no discussion with management about it - it's just what I do), essentially logging off at 3pm to go collect my kids and not logging back on after that (although I keep a rough eye on chat and email and jump back on if something urgent/critical comes up) and no one has batted an eye lid at all - so long as the work gets done, people are happy and are not closely monitoring where you are or how you are working. Some of the work is interesting and engaging, other part are more "meh" but I think that is true of many jobs really.
Yes I might be able to get slightly more money elsewhere (especially fintech) and might get to work on more sphincter-clenchingly-exciting work elsewhere (especially startups) but the quality of life from what is quite an easy ride of things is very valuable to me. Google is quite grown up in many ways and the culture is calm and predictable (on the whole - the recent (year or two ago) redundancies were not predicted!)
I'd love to work at Google and I'm a really well rounded full stack dev/great problem solver but I don't see how I can get anyone's attention at Google without a CS degree and being 15 years younger. Do you think you'd get the job if you applied now?
Officially it is mandatory 3 days in office per week at Google, but if your manager / director / VP ignore auto-generated emails about your misbehavior, you can coast on less.
Not saying that it is an easy place to get in to - the bar is high, but if you are good enough to get in it is fairly chilled.
FWIW I interview a lot of candidates and there is quite a broad range of ages from college grads up to and including folks older than me. The hiring process is flawed in many ways, but they do seem to go out of their way to be fair and equitable regarding age race gender etc. It is no longer "culture fit" examined during interview for example, but now "culture add"
Well that’s nice - weirdly I got an interview there in 2012 (the stock sure would’ve been nice…) but did badly, perhaps because I was all of 1 year in to my career and had been a self taught physics major. Since then I’ve applied many times and gotten nothing but crickets. Oh well.
The 2012 experience was really good though, for what it’s worth.
Despite a lot of internal criticism about "the old Google" and how things have changed, they are still a very good company to work for in my opinion. Lots of well-known benefits, decent comp, and critically a very good work-life balance (no mandatory work-from-office so far, I probably average about 0.5 to 1 days a week in the office) and laid-back pace. I have been basically doing 8:15am to 3pm for my hours (no discussion with management about it - it's just what I do), essentially logging off at 3pm to go collect my kids and not logging back on after that (although I keep a rough eye on chat and email and jump back on if something urgent/critical comes up) and no one has batted an eye lid at all - so long as the work gets done, people are happy and are not closely monitoring where you are or how you are working. Some of the work is interesting and engaging, other part are more "meh" but I think that is true of many jobs really.
Yes I might be able to get slightly more money elsewhere (especially fintech) and might get to work on more sphincter-clenchingly-exciting work elsewhere (especially startups) but the quality of life from what is quite an easy ride of things is very valuable to me. Google is quite grown up in many ways and the culture is calm and predictable (on the whole - the recent (year or two ago) redundancies were not predicted!)
I'd recommend it.
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