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I love reading accounts like this. As someone who had an internship in high school, I'm always happy to hear what other people's experiences were going into and
by Shank 10y ago
I love reading accounts like this. As someone who had an internship in high school, I'm always happy to hear what other people's experiences were going into and out of the process. I think my immediate reaction is that Google creates an environment that simply doesn't exist at most other places.
I interned at two companies in the defense industry. You could argue that our experiences were different because of security, but I disagree. The environment you described sounds like an absolute heaven: you have challenging, fun work, and have extremely well placed and delivered benefits. At both of my internships, the problems were hard. They weren't particularly fun to solve so much as they "had" to be solved and I was the only one to solve them. I got similar rewarding experiences completing tasks, though everything I did had to be "on the clock." As soon as we stopped working, we were expected to stop billing or move to some other task.
The offices were dull, boring, and expensive to spend time in. Your internship had availability of food and technology that kept you happy. Neither of mine did this. At one internship, we had a free snack room. That's it. If we wanted to eat lunch at the cafeteria at my second internship, we could at great personal cost. We were stuck with "hand me down" hardware that was a menagerie of hardware pulled from random places throughout the building. If you were given a bad keyboard on day one, too bad -- it was yours forever.
I complain like this because you had the exact opposite of the experience I had. Your experience is an irregularity, at least compared to what I've seen. This all comes down to culture, I think. The Google corporate culture is modern, focused on employee happiness, and focused on diversity. Things like getting your own hardware choices and free food go a long way to adding goodwill, and failing to take basic measures like that shows what I consider to be a lack of caring.
I wish more companies would copy Google on how they treat their employees and interns. Even if it might seem a bit cheesy to go after the low hanging fruit, employee happiness goes a long way to building a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship between an employee and a company.
Seeing a post like this makes me feel like my internship hosts haven't cared in the slightest. That's pretty painful, if I'm brutally honest.
- galfarragem 10y ago> Even if it might seem a bit cheesy to go after the low hanging fruit, employee happiness goes a long way to building a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship between an employee and a company. This. While general funding (IT is a very well funded sector) also matters, most of this is cultural. As an anecdote, I interned in a place (not IT related) where we had to use our personal laptops and even pay for drinking water and toilet paper..
- Raed667 10y agoLaptops are expensive I undressed... But water and toilet paper are just common decency. I bet you that they have red flags all over glassdoor?
- FireBeyond 10y agoI worked as a consultant briefly for someone who was all proud to say he'd become a millionaire by his 30th birthday by running a photocopying business that he'd built from nothing. I discovered some of the secrets of his success - my favorite being that when me and the IT manager had to fly to their other office to do some network stuff, I was a consultant, so I got a hotel nearby. Poor IT manager had to sleep in the company owner's spare bedroom, with a 9pm curfew (because the owner had young children), and no alcohol.
- jacques_chester 10y ago> I wish more companies would copy Google on how they treat their employees and interns. More companies would love to copy Google's position athwart a massive river of gold (advertising), soon to be two rivers (cloud).
- edblarney 10y agoOne one side: yes. And BTW - this has nothing to do with defense industry, it's just 99% of business is like this. Business could do a lot more to make a more fun environment. On the other hand ... Google is a 'de-facto' monopoly, and they print money. They are super, super rich, and literally have billions more than they know what to do with. So it's easy to justify a lot of extra expenses. And these things can be expensive. Lastly - let's not be so naive. Much of the reason many of these things are offered is so that you 'never have to leave the office'. 'Free lunch' was a cold, hard, Google style calculation: the time it took to 'drive to resto and back' was wasted time, it was cheaper to give people food than have them waste this time. Years ago, my friend interviewed at Google, and they lauded all the 'free clothes' that you could take, which were often used 'the next day' as employees 'stayed the night'. Sleeping over at the office was a relatively common practice, and as such, there's going to arguably be some pressure to work insane hours. Which is completely against the law. We lambast conditions in factories in China, and just because Google workers earn a bit more does not mean that the practice is any less problematic, when the vast majority of the surpluses are going to 'the factory owners'.
- refulgentis 10y agoIt's absolutely untrue that the lunches are about saving time. Please note the work/life balance commentary in the article. You're jumping to high-minded ideological explanations that confirm your bias based on facts you've unilaterally created.
- edblarney 10y agoNo, I'm 'jumping' to my memory, because I worked 5km from Google roughly 16 years ago when the practice started, and I remember specifically reading about how Google decided to introduce lunch, specifically, and it was a calculation. I wish I had the reference.
- hota_mazi 10y ago> 'Free lunch' was a cold, hard, Google style calculation: the time it took to 'drive to resto and back' was wasted time, it was cheaper to give people food than have them waste this time. No, it's not. If it was, all companies would do it. And they would probably just give away sandwiches and call it a day instead of setting up dozens of gourmet cafeterias with different themes and chefs at the helm throughout their campuses. Google loses millions of dollars every day in free food. Why do they do it? Because that's how the company started and even after the IPO and the accountability that came with it, the founders stuck with their decision to put the employees first and the shareholders second