Internship at Google - Part 2

This is a continuation of the story of how I trained in the Swiss Google. The first part is here.

Disclaimer Everything written is based on my experience and may differ from the experience of other people. Also, the numerical estimates given by me are not official or unofficial data and may differ from reality.


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On the part of the future intern before the internship requires minimal effort - Google organizes almost everything himself. I was required to sign a contract (which the courier delivered to my house), call some number, say that the contract was signed and can be picked up (also taken from home). And make a work visa.

Swiss visa issues are also very easy to decide - in fact, I did not collect any documents other than photos. It was just that at some point they wrote to me, “Well, everything, you can carry a passport to the embassy,” and in a week I already had a visa. The US visa was a little more difficult - they sent me some papers and told me to go with them to the embassy for an interview. There I was asked a couple of questions about what specialty I was studying and what I had forgotten in the States, and they promised to send a visa by courier in a couple of days (they sent me the next evening).

A separate question is the search for housing. Google does not solve low-level issues for its interns, such as providing an apartment or booking tickets. Therefore, you have to look for a place to live yourself remotely (buying a plane ticket is a quest for beginners of level zero and is not considered here :). Fortunately, in Switzerland, I have many wonderful former classmates who alternately sheltered me and saved me from solving a non-trivial housing issue (taking this opportunity, once again I thank the most wonderful former classmates! :). I had to tinker a bit with the search for housing remotely in California, but after seeing a bunch of ads, a couple of dozens of letters and complicated logistic and financial transactions, I finally managed to agree on hiring a room in a family just two kilometers from Googleplex. Hooray!

Internship and interns

In general, an internship at Google is not at all such an exclusive thing as many imagine. Because every year there just comes to the interns and, for example, in California, even learning to visually recognize a fellow intern will most likely turn out to be an unrealistic task. Although it is not necessary - the interns are given special badges with a green striped and the intern can be recognized by the badge.

For example, last year we had 40 people in Zurich (for 600 workers), but this, they say, was not enough - because of the crisis. On Googleplex (according to unconfirmed data - I heard this figure somewhere), about 500 interns come to the year.

The internship itself lasts 12-14 weeks. But in some cases (if the intern does not have time or wants to personally see Larry, who will arrive just a week after the internship is over), the internship can be extended. It was quite easy to do this - it was necessary for the manager to write why he believes that his intern should be given a couple more weeks of internship. According to my feelings, quite a few were extended - all without problems. The main limitation in my case was the end of a work visa.

Benefits

In general, everything that is written about Google (about benefits :) - everything is true. They feed there nourishing 3 times a day, all over the office are scattered all sorts of different goodies like ice cream, chocolates and fruit. The interns, however, could eat two times less chocolates and ice cream than ordinary Googlers. Joke :). It was possible to have everything and in any quantities. True, I had to make friends with the gym (right at Google’s office) and the pool - but I learned to swim well and run for a long time.

There are a lot of places where you could have fun or drink coffee with somebody. And on Friday evenings, it was possible to get annoyed with free beer or wine and with a crowd of nicely drunk googles (googles - people are extremely intelligent, so I never saw anyone drunk) to go to play "Rockband" or there billiards. I am not very friendly with alcohol - that’s why it’s not particularly applicable to me, but everything else is true :).

Interns could go on all sorts of different techtalks - lectures on any (about) technical topics. There were usually 3 such lectures per day and they were on different topics - security, design, programming in Python, how to combine life and work in Google and so on. I didn’t go to a lot, but the second intern in our team, in my opinion, absolutely everything departed (and the project did in the evenings and at night :).

There was still such a thing as shadowing. The bottom line is that there are several types of engineers at Google. Ordinary programmers, testers, web programmers and two-in-one designers, and SRE, something like technical support. And the interns could choose some other area for themselves and, by agreement with their manager, spend 3 days in another team that does something completely different. Usually during these 3 days it was necessary to carry out a simple mini-project.

Not everyone uses this opportunity. Those who use it usually go to see how testers or technical support work. I chose designers - firstly, I already managed to make friends with them, and secondly, it was actually what I was doing all this time. And I just wanted to do something different, but not so much different than everything else. As a result, I was able to write another part of some internal project in a state of wild work-up and deadlines. So the name “Benefit” is very controversial for me personally - but I learned how to use regular expressions in JavaScript and, in general, I am pleased to realize that someone may be parsing my code now with my parser.

Also, specially for the interns, special nature trips were organized, dinners with senior Google managers and all sorts of small things to make the interns feel good, have fun and everyone had time to get acquainted as soon as possible.

Oh yeah, I do not know a single intern, who would do 20% of the project. Probably, this thing applies only to full Googlers.

My team and my manager

Since I speak Czech quite well, they took me to a Czech regional team. They were developing products for the Czech market. There was one big minus in this team, it’s also a big plus at the same time (so I decided not to decide for myself whether I was lucky or not lucky with the team).

The bottom line is that the Czech Republic is the only country in Europe (not counting Russia), where Google is not the first place and significantly inferior to the local competitor. Therefore, on the one hand, they were engaged in the localization of the already existing for the Czech Republic (that is, they did not work on all sorts of exciting projects). But on the other hand, they could afford a lot more than other teams as an experiment (because the market was so small and there was really nothing to lose, I think :).

The managers appointed me about my age mate. I was his first intern and he was engaged in a completely different project. Therefore, we did not have regular meetings and he did not coach me. But I was always ready to help and organize for me half an hour-hour of my time at my first request. That, in general, suited me. In another company, I once had a manager who nursed his charges in kindergarten. At the same time, it was imperative to discuss any, even the most minimal, initiative with him - “if something did not work out” The style of my Google manager impressed me more - though we were more likely to be equal and independent of each other. Therefore, I would like to try some other style - when the manager coaches me :). I hope this summer work out.

My project

There is such a thing as iGoogle - this is one page where the user can select the so-called gadgets to his liking. And so my task was to make one very beautiful, big and cool gadget that the Czechs would like very much. Since 1) the task was very flexible (well, you do it, and we will see if you need to redo it) 2) assumed a large amount of designer work and web programming, my team prudently waited until someone came to do it (like me ). I fully understand them - C ++ programmers are not interested in debugging CSS.

Therefore, during my internship, I learned how to program in JavaScript, I became well versed in HTML and CSS, learned how to use Photoshop tolerably. The second part of my project was a backend service written in Python. And, in fact, my gadget sent requests to the server, received XML-responses and all this beautifully painted. In fact, even if we take into account that I learned all this from scratch, it was quite possible to cope with this task. Then about a month later I completed the details (all large companies have all sorts of rules that every project must comply with - such as allowed colors, allowed and prohibited functions, preferable ordering of elements on the page), encrypted the communication of my gadget with the server and wrote user documentation and programmer.

And then it turned out that many more people should approve all such projects (including Google’s vice president of user interfaces, Marissy Meyer). Since my internship came to an end and I managed to get only 4 "approvals" of 6, I left detailed instructions to my manager what else needs to be done to finally launch this miracle. But, apparently, he decided to wait until I come again - so, probably, this summer I will have a continuation of the story with my gadget. After all, the last battle with big boss has not yet won the permission of Marissa, we have not yet received. So wish me luck :).