My Google Internship
I love reading accounts like this. As someone who had an internship in high school, I&#x27;m always happy to hear what other people&#x27;s experiences were going into and out of the process. I think my immediate reaction is that Google creates an environment that simply doesn&#x27;t exist at most other places.<p>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&#x27;t particularly fun to solve so much as they &quot;had&quot; 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 &quot;on the clock.&quot; As soon as we stopped working, we were expected to stop billing or move to some other task.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;hand me down&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Seeing a post like this makes me feel like my internship hosts haven&#x27;t cared in the slightest. That&#x27;s pretty painful, if I&#x27;m brutally honest.