The Journey of a Google Tech Intern
Disclaimer: These are my experiences from being a Google tech intern in the summer of 2017. All opinions expressed are my own, and represent no one except my self…
Update (9/23/19): After getting full-time at Google in 2018. I left after being there for a year. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the article or my experience(s)!
Let me start by saying, I remember the first time I used Google Search on my mom’s computer using a free trial of AOL online. And I remember when I got my first android phone, and thinking “Wow, I hope one day I can work at Google”. This is going to be similar to my Amazon Internship post, and follow a similar format.
As a tl;dr, working at Google was magical in the ways I did not think it would be, and awesome in the ways I did. I personally was looking forward to all the free food, cool projects, and vast amount of learning from writing production code. But what I loved the most were my fellow Googlers, the passion for code, the environment for learning, and the amazing memes. I’ve been telling anyone who has asked, “Google is like a Disneyland for developers”. And not in the sense that you can ride around on a conference bike, eating ice cream and edible gold. It is the amount of talented developers, and awesome projects that really help you spread your wings and grow in a wonderland of interesting and fun work. I definitely feel that I’ve grown at least 10x as a developer, and met people that I am grateful to have had the chance to work / chill with.
This article may be a little scattered, as it is how my brain works when it comes to remembering things. And may even seem like a list at times, but I hope you enjoy!
Applying / Interviewing to the Googs
For a bit of background info, at this time I’ve been a professional Frontend developer, specifically with AngularJS, for about 2 years at different startups and agencies, and had just finished an Amazon SDE internship. I had then decided to do any interviews in Javascript instead of the standard Java, as I am a Javascript developer, and it is what I felt I should be using for interviews.
The first week college started back up, about late August, I immediately started creating another internship spreadsheet. What’s an internship spreadsheet? Well, it’s where you write down every single company that you are even slightly interested in working with, and finding out if they offer internships, including a link to the internship application. Also, I would add a column tracking my progress, to allow myself time to apply. I think I applied to google the very first day, mid-September-ish?, the internship application opened…
But let me back things up a bit. Before I actually started applying to internships, I first reached out to some of my friends to help get references. I recently had some friends join Google, and they were nice enough to let me put their LDAP as a reference on my application. Also, I worked on my resume as much as I could, until it was completely perfect. Thankfully, that year Google allowed students to watch them livestream tips on applying to Google. And now, they are available to watch for any other potential candidates. These were tremendously helpful. Google didn’t have anything similar to it posted that was recent.
Continuing on the internship spreadsheet, I applied to everything I could. And the first response I got was from Twitter. However, it didn’t quite work out, as Twitter sent along one of the Hacker Rank challenges, which I very much despise, and never do well on. Next, I heard from Airbnb, which might I say, probably have the most awesome recruitment process. I went from initial contact, to response on an offer in a week! It was a simple phone interview, in which I thought I did well on, but I slipped up on the difference between .splice() and .slice() in Javascript, and I don’t think I got the offer because of that. After feeling a bit of imposter syndrome, I came across this awesome video about hiring from a Xoogler, that really helped me understand technical interviews. You win some you lose some, and it’s not always your fault. Sometimes, you not moving forward is every bit the interviewer’s fault, as it could be yours. I’m jumping ahead here, but even after working at google and talking to my peers about candidates they’ve interviewed, somewhere along the chain of interviews someone can ask one really bad question, and mess up everything. And then the time came, I got contacted by a Google recruiter…
So the Google recruiter asked me for some times to interview, and I ended up scheduling mine back to back, a few hours before I had class. I studied every day as much as I could (about an hour or two a day), and doing a lot of leetcode challenges, until the calls came. Before the phone interviews, I read over my interview cheat sheet, which was mostly psychological at this point, and did some coding problems in the morning to “warm-up” my brain. I got my first call, and the interviewer seemed busy, but also very kind. I can’t speak of the problems, however, the problem was something that could not be done in 45 minutes, and the interviewer wanted to see me answer questions about unit testing, and some algorithms. The interview was supposed to be in Javascript, however, the interview had me referencing Python (which I had never done before, so at this point I was doing some sort of JS Python psuedo-code hybrid). After some coding, I asked the interviewer some questions about Google, and they loved to talk. It was very interesting, although, since my interviews were back-to-back, we started running into my other interview time. I had to rush them off the phone, and honestly, didn’t feel the interview went that well. The second interview was awesome. The interviewer was very sweet, and the problem wasn’t nearly as hard. I got it done in about half the time, using JSON as a hash map (e.g object[‘property’]), and taught the interviewer some Javascript tidbits. The interviewer was also on one of my favorite Google products’ team, so we definitely geeked out about that. So, having one mediocre interview, and one that went well, I waited to hear back from my recruiter.
After a few days, I heard back from my recruiter just checking in, and informing me of the status of my interviews, and how the hiring committee would be looking at it soon. After waiting a few days longer, I got an email saying I passed the interviews. I shed a single tear, and called some family members to share my excitement. I then moved onto host matching.
Host matching is awesome. Host matching is a set of behavioral interviews where you simply talk to a potential host on a team, and just get super excited about what is to come. I was first called by the chrome dev tools team, and it was explained to me that I would be able to work on the tools that developers use to build chrome (not the “inspect element” chrome dev tools). I was super excited about the team and the project, as I would be working in Golang, which I love, and may involve some frontend-y type work in Polymer. Before I heard back from the chrome dev tools team, I got a call from a developer on the AMP team. The catch was that I would be part of the hot new ladder at Google called UXE, instead of a SWE. Which comes with a slight pay drop. So before that, I did my research, and from what I could tell, it was Google’s ladder for frontend developers, which was perfect for me! Also, I was already a huge fan of the AMP project, and I remember going to AMP pages thinking, “Wow, that was insanely fast!”. When I got the call I was super excited to join the project, especially since it was super JS heavy, and all open-source. And my soon-to-be host was just as hyped as I was to join. After the call ended and a few days later, I heard from my recruiter that I had the option to join either team. I decided on the AMP team as I felt that it would match me more as a developer and what I am interested in.
In the meantime between just sitting at home, and having literal dreams of what working at Google was going to be like, I made a few contributions to the AMP project since it was open-source. It helped me ramp up so I could hit the ground running on day one, and let me be a part of the AMP community.
So when the day came, I finally packed my bags, said goodbye to my roommate and my city, and made the 6 hour drive to Silicon Valley. Before I get onto working at Google, and all the awesome stuff on the AMP team, I’m going to talk about living in the bay area.
Living in the Valley of Silicon
Honestly, I wasn’t too excited about moving to the bay. The rent is insane, and it’s almost impossible to buy a home out there these days. On top of that, I realized I love Long Beach, CA. After moving to Seattle, and not enjoying living there (though I love to visit), I thought it might be the same. Especially since I heard most of the bad parts from my buddies who moved from the bay to Long Beach, to escape the rent, and the bustling lifestyle of SF. Though, from the advice from my mentor, I decided I should definitely give it a chance. The advice was:
Don’t do what I did. If you want to want to grow as much as you can as a developer. You got to get out of your comfort zone, and go where the tech is.
Honestly, I very much enjoy living in the bay. Even though it’s not in Southern California, it is still California, and it definitely feels that way. I found a studio apartment for my girlfriend and I to live for the summer, and we had the most awesome neighbors that we were extremely lucky to have. They invited use to their BBQ’s, let us watch the NBA playoffs with them, and gave us any advice that we needed. I even consider them my friends now. We lived in west San Jose, CA for the 3 months, where I would commute to Mountain View, CA. My girlfriend and I really wanted to explore and take in as much as we could, so we would drive all over, and I took the Caltrain to SF more than a handful of times. My impressions of living in the bay area are as follows:
The people in the bay are awesome. Everyone is a bit more mellow than people in Southern California, but they definitely still got the California vibes to them. Also, I was afraid a lot of the people would be very pompous and self-centered, due to the amount of money people had out in the bay. But surprisingly, most people are actually VERY humble. After talking to some of my team, they explained that bragging or showing off really isn’t excepted out in the bay area. Mark Zuckerberg drives a VW Hatchback, and I would often see 90s Toyotas and Hondas in the google parking lot. Don’t get me wrong, there were times I was driving surrounded by 6 different Teslas, but even then, almost no one thinks they’re above you because of it.
Not everyone is in(to) tech. I’ve heard this plenty of times, that everyone is in tech. I was expecting every person I walked up to, I could start talking about Hash maps and JSON and they would know what I was talking about. I had the perception that almost EVERYONE was a developer in the bay, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Yes, most people in the bay probably work at a large tech company, but a small fraction of that actually write code. The only time I actually got to talk code, were with a new buddy I made who was studying Computer Science, and between my other engineer coworkers. Other than that, the person was usually a product / project manager, sales, chef, etc…
The weather is awesome. I had a great time in the weather of the bay. I heard it was a lot colder in the bay than in Socal, but I feel that people consider SF the entire bay at times. It is definitely colder in SF, but the rest of the bay is probably only slightly colder than Southern California. Also, there is plenty of sun. In Seattle, it is persistently gloomy and rainy, with freezing cold winters (way too cold for someone used to 90+ degree weather). Where as the bay still has the nice California breezes, and can still top out at the 100s.
Caltrain and Bart are great for getting around. Super quick way to get from almost anywhere in the bay, to SF, and back. However, be ready to pay $13 for a round trip. Anyone from LA will know that’s insane, because for $5 you can get a day pass, and go all over LA county if you wanted. However, if you were to plan a Caltrain trip for a Saturday, it would definitely be worth it, and it’s not a bad experience at all. The bart is more comparable to a standard metro, where the Caltrain is more of an actual train (like Amtrack), they both cost the same. However, some prefer the bart since it comes more frequently, but Caltrain has some nice options of skipping most of the stops, but you do have to time your arrival to the station a bit better. For day to day business, you will definitely need a car (unless you are in SF). The bay area is quite spread out, and can get very suburb-y. Having a car to drive down to Santa Cruz, or for a hiking trip is essential. If you are in SF, just sell your car, traffic and parking is insane; even going in & out of the city has a toll bridge. Since SF is the hub of the bay, everything is extremely compact, so you would be fine with the city trolley and walking around.
On the topic of getting around, the traffic in the bay (besides inside SF itself), is nowhere near as bad as LA. The best analogy I can give is, the red on google maps will usually have you driving anywhere between 5–25 mph on the road. In LA, if you hit the red, you might as well put your car in park and take a nap. With that being said, there’s probably even more red sections in LA than San Jose. A drive from my place to Google was about 19 minutes without traffic at night, and my drive to work during rush hour(s) was about 30 minutes. Not a bad commute at all!
The food in the bay was good! People in the bay love their taquerias, and the Mexican food is pretty good! The Sushi, Ramen, and Indian food are all great as well! I personally didn’t develop any “usual spots” when I was out there, other than just a taqueria or two. To me, LA / Long Beach food is really good, and always has you coming back for more, where food in the bay was really good, and I was never really disappointed.
The coffee in the bay was also good. Seattle coffee is really worth all the hype. And to me, Long Beach / LA coffee actually comes close. But bay area coffee was good at best. I went to about 7 different spots across the south bay, and I fell in love with Chromatic Coffee. However, the rest were not great, and most not even good. Coffee is something you will definitely have to look for, but it is there!
Lastly, in terms of things to do in the bay, there is plenty. If you like the outdoors, the bay is a dream. There are plenty of hikes, backpacking, and nature-y things to do! Skateboarding isn’t as widespread as I am used to (though I found myself a very tight skate community at Google). Also, there is plenty of music, since there is the shoreline amphitheater, and venues scattered across the bay. And if you live in SF, the things to do is almost an endless list, with something almost every night in walking distance.
Getting AMPed, and being a Googler
Transitioning back to working at google, my first day of my google internship is filled with free food, meeting other interns, and sitting through a bunch of powerpoints on what it means to be Googley, the Google mission, and the Googler lifestyle. The rest of the week is filled with a bunch of classes on Google information security (infosec), accessibility (a11y), internationalization (i18n), next billion users (NBU), and how a google search works! After these, you get to meet and ramp up with your host and team.
My host was awesome, and we grabbed lunch and snacks a few times to talk about my project on AMP and exchange a few jokes. What was awesome (and rare) is that my host had a Peer reviewed Google doc containing everything I needed to accomplish, and by what timeline to be considered “on-track”. This was awesome, and really helped me do as well as I could at Google.
Code quality is insanely good at Google. I remember I once submitted a 25-line pull request to a project, and got 25 comments back. Almost all code at Google is written right the first time, and in a way that is readable, and semantically correct. I am glad I got to experience this, as working for Amazon and startups, a lot of code was either old, or rushed out the door to meet a deadline. I never even stopped to consider things like div soup, or writing code to include a11y the first time, or even how to review code with all of these things in mind!
Code is often thrown away. Some roles at google are even designed to just have their code thrown away (some Designers / prototypers)! I generated an entire Es6 project using yeoman, and built out a demo to become a full project down the line. The whole thing ended up being thrown away, because it was decided it would be better to just do every config file in a single pull request. I agree with this, as it helped myself and my team better understand what was going on, but yeoman is a proven tool with contributors from Googlers themselves! It was definitely a culture shock you can say, and I’d be lying if I wasn’t secretly grumbling when it all got thrown away. It’s something you come to terms with because often times, it is better to throw away code and start over, then to hack together something that kinda works already.
Tooling at Google is amazing. I never got to touch any of the more internal Google tools since my team is open-source, but we had some amazing tooling on the AMP project. To be honest, tests are probably my least favorite part about writing code. But I learned that I just never found a testing suite that was put together well. Testing was a breeze on my project, and I actually started to like writing tests. Also, for the size of the project, the build times were very good. I started on the AMP project around when they started using travis, and it was amazing to see them get travis running almost completely green over a course of a month.
I guess to put things into perspective when it comes to being a developer at Google, I can use the whole fish pond analogy thing. If you read above, I’m from Long Beach, CA, where the tech scene isn’t large, but we have a very tight community of extremely talented developers. Though, in Long Beach I definitely feel like a big fish in a small pond; especially among my peers still in college. However, at Amazon, I felt like just another fish in the sea. It was very humbling, but at the same time, it was nice to know that I can hang with the big dogs (fish?)! When I got to Google, I was a fish in a shark tank. Most of the people I met at Google, I wish to be that great of a developer some day. I had a project involving Shadow DOM, and the person teaching me was referring the direct spec. Yeah, like the one that is just a plain HTML page that people in the ECMAScript board have a meeting about. Not only that, I would see crazy pieces of code all over the place, that honestly I had no clue what was going on. I was EXTREMELY humbled by this, and am so grateful it happened. It’s kind of like beating The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and then that Master Mode DLC came out, and then the enemies were 2x as strong and regenerated health. Yeah, it changes the way you play the entire game.
So let’s talk about those Google perks and lifestyle, shall we? Free food at Google is great. I love those chefs. All the food is way better than you would expect from a dining-hall-esque place, and some of my favorite food in the bay area were at the Google cafes. Even the micro kitchens have the best snacks. They have Honest green tea, that stuff is like $2.50 per bottle. And they had these dried mangoes that I would eat almost every morning. Fire. The craziest thing I ate there was some Jello during lunch. But not ordinary Jello, it was Jello with flowers and edible gold. I took a bite, and it happened to be a Jello shot. My mind was blown, they were doing the most, and it was awesome.
So this is going to sound weird, but Google has their own internal service for generating and sharing memes. It’s highlarious, and honestly you probably want to go on it every day. There were these G.I Joe memes, and the crying pam memes, and all the intern memes. Oh my, I literally busted out laughing at my desk at least once a week.
Google has a semi-weekly meeting to address the company as a whole. And it is super cool, everyone at Google gets a chance to ask questions to the company and it just lets everyone get hyped and be proud of where they are working. It is super awesome, and honestly, really says a lot about Google culture as a whole.
Google kind of operates on “Scouts honor”. In the sense that, employees are really trusted to do the right thing. It’s kind of weird to say, but you get treated like an adult. No one is really overseeing what and when you are working on something. Everyone just kinda does what they should do, and once they are done, or are on track, Googlers get to chill, or go home. It’s honestly very liberating, and awesome to have such a casual and laidback vibe.
You may hear from a Google that the number one perk is “the people”. I though that was the most cliche thing I’ve ever heard, until I actually got there, and yeah it’s definitely the people. Google really does feel like a family, and I have the most respect for everyone that I’ve been able to work / hang out with at Google. Everyone is extremely intelligent, kind, humble, and just filled with integrity. Also, everyone is passionate about what they do. One thing I thought was weird about me, is that I love to code. I’ll work 8 hours coding, and then come home, and code on personal project for another 6. Other people at Google really have the passion for code, and either do it because they still have the time, or understand it. And not just code, people at Google are always trying to learn and perfect their craft, and it is awesome!
Googler values diversity, and so does every university, company, institution, etc… But, Google is the first place where I really saw diversity shine. Literally everyone from my team was from somewhere completely different, and most of my team spoke a second language, that no one else on my team knew. And even walking around Google, it is easily noticed that Google is VERY diverse. This is extremely pleasing to see, myself being an African American programmer. Literally I’ve met like 4 of me in my career / life. It was awesome to see that there are so many diverse people, even in the roles where there is not much diversity. And I know I mentioned my ethnicity above, but to me, diversity spans race, gender, religion, etc… To me, Google is truly diverse, and it’s amazing.
Learning is cherished at Google. I enjoy always trying to learn and get better at what I do. Google does offer some internal classes taught by other Googlers, and I went to a few of them. They are very informational, and a ton of fun. It’s definitely another one of my favorite perks there. Also, there are a lot of opportunity to give feedback at Google. Google and Googlers cherish constructive feedback. I myself agree with this, being a music artist and skateboarder, as it is the only way to truly get better. Google has programs in place for Googlers to give brutally honest feedback for beta software, and I think it’s probably the reason why Google products usually come out to be great pieces of software.
I definitely feel like I couldn’t have gotten on a better team than the AMP project. Everyone on my team was very kind, quick to help, and extremely talented. And what is nice, is that the AMP project is very “intern-friendly”. There is work that ranges from deep Javascript performance, to building simple components. This allowed me to just have a blast writing code where I felt comfortable, and have the support of anyone on the team. AMP being open-source is a blessing. It’s great to see companies like Google embracing open-source and being able to build such a good community. It is integral to how technology is going to advance in the future, and how code becomes a win-win situation for everyone. If you read Hacker-news, I’m sure you’ll see a lot of anit-AMP talk. With most people agreeing, being an AMP user is amazing, it almost guarantees an amazing User experience, but the AMP cache is (unintentionally) against an open-web, since Google is serving and consuming the content. I am probably walking a tight rope here, and I don’t want to say too much, but I’d like to say the team listens. It is not the intent to consume the internet, but really just to solve a problem across mobile web. They appreciate all feedback good and bad, and use it to help the project become better.
So I sure did talk about AMP, so what did I do with it? My main contribution was a new <amp-sidebar> attribute called toolbar. This allows pages to more easily create responsive AMP pages, for sites that don’t mind having their entire site be AMP. This is kind of ironic, since AMP is an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, but hey, it’s awesome to see AMP moving into the desktop space as well. As it will be a huge help to NBU users in my opinion. Also, I did a lot of a11y work for AMP Start, and did a lot of Es6 for a new upcoming feature of AMP Start. I fixed a lot of bugs between the two projects, which was also super fun. And lastly, I worked on a node module called replace-important, with my host. It will be very helpful for allowing existing CSS libraries to get around AMP’s limitations, and is doing well so far. Best of all, all of my work is open-sourced!
An internal memo heard across an industry
So on the meme service at Google, I noticed some outrage about a certain link to a Google Doc. I read the doc, and thought, wow, well I definitely don’t agree with this opinion. I thought it was terrible. Personally, as an African-American, I’ve faced a good amount of discrimination in my time, and you see stuff like this in the news all the time, and even in your neighborhoods. I thought it was unfortunate, but nowhere is perfect. It’s kind of sad to say, but you get used to it. I support feminism, in that I totally feel we should have equality across all types of people. To me, one person can not represent a community as a whole, especially when the community has never embraced that one person. So I just continued on with my day, and kept coding on what I was coding on.
Later that night, I saw on Gizmodo, and exclusive report of the memo. And I thought, wow, that’s crazy that someone leaked this Gizmodo. I personally understand why someone would leak it, as it shows a problem in the industry, and informs people of what is going on. I don’t think it was the right thing to do, especially because of the whole Google “Scout’s Honor” thing I mentioned above.
So, the weekend passes, and you can feel an ominous un-ease across the building. I walk into my weekly sprint meeting, and the first half of it is just addressing that same memo. As I said above, Google is very casual, and appreciates feedback, even willing to talk about its own issues. It was great to see my team offer support and open-ness to anyone wanting to talk, and ensuring us, this is not Google. Some of you may have read my diversity blurb, and just instantly thought of the memo. But from what I’ve experienced this does not uproot any of that. The courage it takes for team managers and members to step up to the issue and direct the team head on is astounding, and I haven’t seen something like it before. I feel like most places would just sweep it under the rug, and let their employees deal with it. But my team didn’t, even friends outside of my team didn’t, and it was great to see.
Continuing on this story, you may have heard there was a town hall meeting planned at Google. But it was cancelled (which was a whole lot of drama and “oohh snaps” across my friends and I), because more of the mess was being leaked online. The initial leaks I kind of understood, but this, to me, was not cool. As I said, I feel like this will hurt the trust Google has amongst their employees and coworkers, which is sad to see. I felt at this point, the leaker was trying to gain something out of this, rather than try to point out something moral in an industry.
I was part of some intern chat groups at Google, and it was also sad to see how it affected potential Google interns, male, female, and across different races. None of them thought it was okay, and really gave them a sour taste of corporate tech in general. And I hope they are reassured that the opinion of one random person, does not represent an entire industry, even though the media can make it seem that way. And this is kind of just me complaining, but it kinda sucks for an intern to have to go home to questions about a memo, rather than questions of all the awesome experience you had at a super cool company.
All in all, it was interesting to see it all unfold. I try not to express my politics, or get into politics at all really, but I felt that it was a big part of the tech industry’s history. As I said, the opinions of the memo are definitely something I do not agree with, and I hope the leaks don’t ruin the open-ness I was able to experience at Google culture.
Waiting for an offer, and What’s to come
After 7,000+ lines of code, a 6 hour drive home, and an awesome summer with my girlfriend, and other Googlers, I’m really excited to see what the future has in store for me. I’m extremely grateful for the experience I had, and for everyone I got to meet. Google doesn’t let interns know if they got full-time until a few weeks after they return home, so until then, I have my fingers crossed.
I definitely think if I get the offer, I’ll be returning to Google. It was a blast. And like I said, there is so much opportunity to grow and learn, I feel like I barely scratched the surface. There’s still so much for me to do there, and I’d love to have the chance to do it all. If I do get the offer, I go back into team matching, since teams don’t really know head count until later on once my start date is approaching. My plan is to return to the bay only if I get on the AMP team, or some other super awesome team like Youtube. Otherwise, I think I’ll stay here in Long Beach. I love it out here. And if I wanted to buy a house or something, it would definitely be down here, as there is no way I would be able to afford / consider a house in the bay area any time soon.
If I don’t get the offer I will be very sad. But it will be alright! I have a lot of friends in Long Beach / LA area, and a lot of good connections with some startups / agencies down here. Also, I wouldn’t mind joining some big name Irvine or LA tech companies as well. So I’m not worried a bit.
In conclusion, I am grateful for all of my blessings, and Google / AMP was definitely one of them. I wish the best for all of the people I was able to meet and work with. And if you read this whole thing, you are awesome. Thank you!
Bonus Round: Google Vs. Amazon internship
I figured this needed to be done. As I thought it might help someone who has an offer to both, or an offer to one but they are bummed because they didn’t get the other. So here’s how I think the two compare:
Amazon pays more to their interns. When it comes to cold hard cash, Amazon is definitely better for that. As a Google UXE intern this year, I was making $5.3k (SWE interns made $6k) a month, with a $9k relocation bonus (taxed down to ~$4.5k). I almost can’t trust that I’m saying this, but I found a good deal on a furnished studio for about $2.3k in San Jose. So for the 3 months, the last month of my rent was paid out of my own pocket. As well as the security deposit and things. I have a very close friend who got the Amazon internship this same year, and paid him about ~$7.7k a month, but paid for housing in full. Google does have more perks however. But if you generously account for your morning coffee / breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a month (~$880), doesn’t quite make up for what Amazon is paying.
The intern events at Amazon are better. Amazon intern events welcome all interns, so every event you can see all your friends, and you definitely get a sense of the intern community. At Google, only two of the events were welcome to all Googler interns. Though Google had a lot more events than Amazon, almost all of the events were intended for small groups. Meaning that interns would express interest in an event, and a random lottery of ~45 would usually be chosen out of the VERY large amount of them. So often times you would make a friend at an intern event, and maybe see them a few times around campus, but that was it. With that being said though, tech intern teams at both places are doing a great job. They work day in and day out to ensure the interns have a great time, and are the TRUE MVPs of any internship. So this is definitely not a problem with that. Again, this is just my opinion.
Continuing on the topic of the intern community, I feel that Amazon fostered their intern community a lot better. As I am writing this, I am currently on a plane back home after visiting some of the intern friends I made while interning at Amazon. At Google, I made about half as many friends, and we never really had the opportunity to go on adventures and things like we did at Amazon. At Amazon, teams often times wont get lunch together, so I would usually see my friends almost every day. At Google, teams usually do get lunch together (by their own choice of course), but since everyone might be pulled into a meeting usually the whole team being there is kind of rare. I personally prefer getting lunch with my team, as it builds that feeling of camaraderie, and getting close to the people you see everyday. But at the same time, it’s awesome to make friends over fries and a burger, with someone from a completely different team.
Transitioning towards Google, the intern conversion interviews are not bad at all. Honestly, I was dreading those conversion interviews since before I even joined Google as an intern. Like, why even have them, isn’t an internship a 3-month long internship? Google is really big on removing any and all bias from decision making, and of course your team will be biased to you joining after you worked with them. I personally do not agree with this, but it is what it is. Anyways, my conversion interviews went well, and they were very laidback, and not as stressful as I thought they would be. What I enjoyed the most about it all is the interview prep. I was able to (and encouraged to) get 5 different mock interviews, and resume tips from Googlers who actually do interviews and hiring stuff. This ensured that I was getting the best help you could possibly get for applying to any large tech company. After this, I feel like my resume is much better, and I am probably 5x better at interviewing because of it. So even though I dreaded the day that the conversion interviews would come, I am happy that they did.
You will learn a lot more at Google. As I said in my Amazon internship post, Amazon has a wealth of awesome information on their wiki, and internal video service. But nothing beats writing code, and learning from your team. And since Google puts a lot of work into code quality, you will learn so much, and it will be awesome. Both are great learning experiences when it comes to writing code, but I personally feel I gained more out of Google.
I prefer the company culture at Google. You may have heard horror stories about company culture at Amazon, and I’ve heard some my self from a friend of a friend of a friend, but I had a great time there. I was in the Alexa org, and everyone was extremely kind and great at what they did. However, I stumbled across this funny tech company org chart that describes it well. I felt Amazon is a bit more top-down political than Google. Also, Amazon definitely works hard for deadlines. The rush of trying to get something done can be exciting, and exhausting, I felt more of the excitement in my projects. And with that being said, I probably only worked over 8 hours a few times during my internship. And one anecdote I have about this, is someone on my team at Amazon worked over the weekend to launch a new feature, but were rewarded by going home after 3 hours of work for the next week. So you definitely get out what you put in. Google was definitely more relaxed and casual, and we all took our time to ensure a feature or product was completely solid before it went to prod. This is awesome to see, and definitely helps you sleep at night. Especially since usually the thing you built comes out solid, and people love it! Both cultures are great, and I wouldn’t suggest one over the other, just depends on your personality.
In (for reals this time) conclusion, both are great. You are going to have a great time at either company. If you got into both, I hoped this helps, and if you didn’t get into the one you really wanted, they’re both equally as great for different reasons. Pat yourself on the back because you deserve it! And if you just read this just because, I hope you enjoyed it. Peace!
