Google Internship - Part 2

This is a continuation of the story of how I interned at 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 I have given are not official or unofficial data and may differ from reality.


Preparations

From the side of the future intern, minimum efforts are required before the internship - Google organizes almost everything by itself. 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 the house). And also make a work visa.

Swiss visa issues were also solved very simply - in fact, I did not collect any documents other than photographs. It’s just that at some point they wrote to me “Well, that’s it, you can carry your passport to the embassy” and a week later I already had a visa. It was a bit more complicated with an American visa - they sent me some papers and told me to go with them from the embassy for an interview. There they asked me a couple of questions on the topic of what specialty I study and what I forgot in the States, and they promised to send a visa by courier in a couple of days (they sent it in the evening the next day).

A separate issue 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 home remotely yourself (to buy a plane ticket is a quest for beginners of the zero level and is not considered here :). Fortunately, in Switzerland I have many wonderful former classmates who took refuge with me one after another and saved me from solving a non-trivial housing problem (taking this opportunity, once again I thank the most wonderful former classmates! :). I had to tinker a bit with finding a home remotely in California, but after looking at a bunch of ads, a couple of dozens of letters and complicated logistics and financial transactions, I finally managed to arrange a family room rental just two kilometers from Googleplex. Hurrah!

Internships and interns

In general, an internship at Google is not at all as exclusive an item as many imagine. Because every year just dofigisa interns come there, and, for example, in California, even learning to visually recognize a fellow intern is likely to be an unrealistic task. Although this is not necessary - interns are given special badges with a green stripe and the intern can be recognized by the badge.

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

The internship itself lasts 12-14 weeks. But in some cases (if the intern does not have time or wants to see firsthand Larry, who will arrive just a week after the end of the internship), 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 lasted - 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 :) is all true. They are fed plentifully 3 times a day, all sorts of different goodies like ice cream, chocolates and fruits are scattered throughout the office. True, interns could eat half as much chocolate and ice cream as regular googlers. A joke :). It was possible to eat everything in any quantities. True, I had to make friends with a gym (right in the Google office) and a pool - but then I learned to swim well and run for a long time.

There are a lot of places where you could go have fun or drink coffee with someone. And in the evenings on Friday you could have some free beer or wine and with a crowd of pleasantly drunk googlers (googlers are extremely intelligent people, so I never saw anyone drunk) go play Rockband or there is billiards. I’m not very friendly with alcohol - therefore, “kicking” me is not particularly applicable, but everything else is true :).

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

There was 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, are a bit of technical support. And interns could choose for themselves some other area and, by agreement with their manager, spend 3 days in another team that is engaged in something completely different. Usually during these 3 days it was necessary to complete a simple mini-project.

This opportunity is far from being used by everyone. Those who use it usually go to see how the 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 in a state of wild rush and deadlines, managed to write another part of some internal project. So the name "benefit" is very controversial for me personally - but I learned to use regular expressions in JavaScript and in general I am pleased to realize that someone may now parse their code with my parser.

Also, specially for the interns, special outings were organized, dinners with senior Google managers and all sorts of little things - so that the interns felt good, fun and everyone managed to get to know each other as soon as possible.

Oh yes, I don’t know a single intern that would do a 20% project. Probably, this thing applies only to full-fledged googlers.

My team and my manager

Since I speak good Czech, I was accepted into the 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 does not take first place and is significantly inferior to a local competitor. Therefore, they, on the one hand, 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 much more than other teams as an experiment (since the market was already small and there was nothing to lose, I think :).

As managers, they appointed me about my peer. 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 he was always ready to help and organize for me half an hour or an hour of his time at my first request. Which, in general, suited me. In another company, I once had a manager who nursed his wards as in a kindergarten. In this case, any, even the most minimal initiative, had to be discussed with him - "if something did not work out." The style of my Google manager impressed me more - though we were more likely on equal and independent from each other. Therefore, I would like to try some other style - when the manager will coach me :). I hope it works out this summer.

My project

There is such a thing as iGoogle - this is one page where the user can choose for himself the so-called gadgets to his liking. And so my task was to make one very beautiful, large and cool gadget that the Czechs would really like. Since 1) the task was very flexible (well, do it, and we'll see if you need to redo it) 2) involved a lot of work of the designer and web programming, then my team prudently waited for someone to come (like me ) I fully understand them - C ++ programmers somehow did not fit CSS debugging.

Therefore, during my internship, I learned to program in JavaScript, began to understand HTML and CSS quite well, and learned to use Photoshop fairly well. The second part of my project was a maintenance backend written in Python. And, in fact, my gadget sent requests to the server, received XML responses and rendered it all beautifully. In fact, even taking into account that I learned all this from scratch, to cope with the task was quite real. Then for about another month I completed the details (all big companies have all sorts of rules that every project must comply with - like allowed colors, allowed and forbidden functions, preferred ordering of elements on the page), encrypted the communication of your gadget with the server and wrote user documentation and programmer.

And then it turned out that all such projects should be approved by many more people (including Google’s vice president of user interfaces Marissy Meyer). As my internship came to an end and I managed to get only 4 “approvals” from 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 arrive again - so, probably, this summer the continuation of the story with my gadget awaits me. After all, the last battle with the big boss has not yet been won. Marissa’s permission we have not yet received. So wish me good luck :).