3 ms·

Years ago I had a rather poor internship with Google. Wrong team, wrong time, wrong me at the time. No one's fault really, but no one would call it a success.

by mabbo 10y ago

Years ago I had a rather poor internship with Google. Wrong team, wrong time, wrong me at the time. No one's fault really, but no one would call it a success. Their recruiter contacted me a couple years ago using the sentence "everyone who worked with you had great things to say about you!". I replied back "really? Who in particular?". Things went downhill from there. I really do wish their recruiters (or all recruiters really) did a better job of remembering what their company's previous interactions with candidates were.

mooreds 10y ago
Or at least not lie. I am guessing that they could have referenced the internship without saying "everyone had great things to say" and that would would have at least started the conversation on the right foot
argonaut 10y ago
I think you have to put things in the right perspective. The bar for a software engineering internship (for a student) is not that high. The expectations are not that high. When I was in college, I knew several fellow students who were bored with their projects, felt like they didn't get along with their team, and didn't really do anything useful, who got return offers (which implies positive feedback). Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer. For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?
- mabbo 10y ago
  Given the lengthy apology afterwards, I suspect it was more like "People love to be told they're great, let's start with that".
  - argonaut 10y ago
    I see. Well this is just a standard feature of human interaction. I am always polite and cheerful in tone when I write emails. Even if I'm actually annoyed or bored or tired. It costs me absolutely nothing to use certain words instead of other words, to add an exclamation mark in certain places, etc.
Someone 10y ago
There may be laws prohibiting them from keeping information about employees/interns for that long. Many countries have information privacy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law) stating that companies can only keep PII insofar as needed to operate their business, and keeping, for instance, your address around years after you left the company isn't needed to operate the business. The USA has weak laws there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law#United...), but those of California are stronger, and the likes of Google run the risk of information 'leaking' to other countries. It typically is easier for a company to ditch an entire employee/intern record than to filter it for to-be-discarded information. Of course, for employees or interns, they also typically are obliged to keep records for some time, for the tax office or because former employees might still file a claim. Still, they probably will ditch everything they have on employees as soon as they are allowed to.
- _asummers 10y ago
  If they do that, they shouldn't say details about the employment in the email. You can get the same point across, that you want a candidate, without saying something potentially false.

by mabbo 10y ago

mooreds 10y ago

Or at least not lie. I am guessing that they could have referenced the internship without saying "everyone had great things to say" and that would would have at least started the conversation on the right foot

argonaut 10y ago

I think you have to put things in the right perspective. The bar for a software engineering internship (for a student) is not that high. The expectations are not that high. When I was in college, I knew several fellow students who were bored with their projects, felt like they didn't get along with their team, and didn't really do anything useful, who got return offers (which implies positive feedback). Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer. For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?

mabbo 10y ago
Given the lengthy apology afterwards, I suspect it was more like "People love to be told they're great, let's start with that".
- argonaut 10y ago
  I see. Well this is just a standard feature of human interaction. I am always polite and cheerful in tone when I write emails. Even if I'm actually annoyed or bored or tired. It costs me absolutely nothing to use certain words instead of other words, to add an exclamation mark in certain places, etc.

Someone 10y ago

There may be laws prohibiting them from keeping information about employees/interns for that long. Many countries have information privacy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law) stating that companies can only keep PII insofar as needed to operate their business, and keeping, for instance, your address around years after you left the company isn't needed to operate the business. The USA has weak laws there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law#United...), but those of California are stronger, and the likes of Google run the risk of information 'leaking' to other countries. It typically is easier for a company to ditch an entire employee/intern record than to filter it for to-be-discarded information. Of course, for employees or interns, they also typically are obliged to keep records for some time, for the tax office or because former employees might still file a claim. Still, they probably will ditch everything they have on employees as soon as they are allowed to.

_asummers 10y ago
If they do that, they shouldn't say details about the employment in the email. You can get the same point across, that you want a candidate, without saying something potentially false.