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My Google Internship

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Re: My Google Internship

#191

Post by edblarney »

Bartweiss wrote: post #187
espadrine wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously there is a strong habit of having signs on toilets. But I am unsure why. Sitting toilets are the exact same thing for both genders, there's no reason not to have a bin next to them anyway… Most homes don't have gendered toilets. Why is that so common at work? Why do you think the separation was made?

Three big causes: First, home bathrooms are reliably single-user. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sharing a bathroom with people of another gender (though exactly which people they would not want to share with is a complicated question). Interestingly, this seems to be a bigger deal in the US, where our stalls are shoddy and easy to see into. Second, cleanliness. Mostly, home bathrooms stay clea…

"gender doesn't seem to be the strongest predictor of bathroom hygiene"

It definitely is when you have very few elements to chose from.

When the 'men's' one-ey is 'in use' in Starbucks, I often go into the 'women's' - and it's very consistently cleaner.

It is what it is.

Re: My Google Internship

#192

Post by vonmoltke »

munificent wrote: post #22
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate reading people believe they aren't skilled enough or won't be good enough to work at Google. When you realize all of the toys are part of an extremely successful strategy to keep you at the office as long as possible, and that Google is a huge company that has to hire thousands of people every year, you realize that this view that Google is "the best place to work" or that everyone who works there is a…

> When you realize all of the toys are part of an extremely successful strategy to keep you at the office as long as possible Ugh, I can't believe how often I see this repeated with zero evidence to support it. I work at Google. The office is a ghost town by 6:30. The work life balance on every team I'm aware of is great . Saying the perks are some underhanded strategy to keep people around hugely insults the intelli…

> The reality is that skilled software engineers are in very high demand and companies compete very hard for them.

Nobody has ever competed hard for me. "Skilled software engineers" is a very broad category, and only a subset are actually competed for. Choose the wrong specialization, live in the wrong area, or work for the wrong companies and you'll be lucky to even get acknowledgement of your applications.

Re: My Google Internship

#193

Post by Bartweiss »

gaius wrote: post #125
dingaling wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and one mother's room. As a primary-carer father raising a toddler I don't like that terminology. I'd prefer that they'd just call it a Lactating Room rather than trying to be coy and seemingly indicating a preference for one parent.

If you are a lactating male then you are in a very small minority. Why not just "baby care room"?

I think you're making the reverse of his point.

It's named a "mother's room" because it's for feeding/pumping, and so it's an attempt to offer privacy to people lactating. He's objecting to the name's failure to properly convey that, suggesting that (like putting changing tables solely in women's rooms) it reinforces the (harmful to both genders) assumption that childcare is a female task.

Which is to say - a "baby care room" is also a good idea, but it would be a room with a different use. The proposed name change was about making the name conform to the current intent of the room.

Re: My Google Internship

#194

Post by Bartweiss »

danspencer wrote: post #100

Cool article. But I always find it funny how people try to convince you that so-and-so in their company is a big shot ("our director, the fourth highest rank at Google, after CEO, SVP and VP"). Trust me, outside of your company, that person is quite irrelevant. For most people, that person is just someone working at a big company.

Hey now, at least the naming hierarchy makes sense. My favorite example is finance, where VP is such a meaningless title that Goldman Sachs argued in court that it doesn't carry any weight.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-04/goldman-s...

Re: My Google Internship

#195

Post by Bartweiss »

Vexs wrote: post #11
tyingq wrote: post #9

Really well written...an interesting read. On this though: "On my last day, my team got me some cake and gave me some very sweet farewell gifts, such as the potato below." What's with the potato? Is that some inside joke at Google?

I think potatoes are just a joke in general. They're just... there.

I think this is why Dwight Schrute owned a beet farm, also. He could have farmed anything, but beets are just inherently funnier than wheat or soybeans.

Re: My Google Internship

#196

Post by Bartweiss »

Insanity wrote: post #165
amelius wrote: post #162

If only institutes like CERN had such good HR/recruitment techniques as Google, this world could be a better place.

Not sure how the experience is like as a CERN intern, but you can surely do internships there as a student: https://jobs.web.cern.ch/join-us/students -- If someone happens to have experience with interning at CERN, I'd love to hear about that :-)

Second hand, but the CERN interns I know were over the moon about it.

Obviously they didn't have the perks of Google because they don't have the sheer cash flow, but they both described it as a fun and interesting place to work, with an entertaining social side among the employees.

Re: My Google Internship

#197

Post by FireBeyond »

galfarragem wrote: post #131
Shank wrote: post #65

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 securit…

> 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 drinki…

I 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.

Re: My Google Internship

#199

Post by hiddencost »

The volume of people hung up on bathrooms should illustrate, to anyone on the fence, how virulent transphobia is. Framing it as a political question rather than a question of basic rights is quite dark.

For context, they'll have a hallway with a dozen single bathrooms. They're not even mixing genders. But folks are so obsessed with their own fears of the unknown that they happily jump on any excuse to deny trans personhood.

For context, trans people are less likely to be predators or violent, and much more likely to be the victims of violent crimes.

https://www.ovc.gov/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html

Re: My Google Internship

#200

Post by rxlim »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #114
wsh91 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I know others on here have already chimed in, but I joined Google not that long ago having been rejected twice before. Please don't sell yourself short. Give us a try.

I live in India, have written a tutorial on Go, https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo... , am decent with Go, am learning Vue.js, writing book on it as well, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ . I am a full geek, applied twice. Didn't get any reply! edit: changed book to tutorial

I read your tutorial some time ago and found it to be very good, probably one of the best introductions to Go I have read so far. Keep up the good work.
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