Comment by nickbarnwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickbarnwell | Hacker News Reader

While the article has a fair point it really would be better phrasing to say "Take the highest yield internship offer."

This summer I had the opportunity to choose between a couple of YC-backed companies at different stages, a Founders Fund/500 Startups-backed company and Google. I chose the latter - not because of the pay, but because it was the only offer that would be a truly novel experience. As one of the rising freshmen the post mentions, experiences include:

- A startup that didn't gain traction and went under

- A startup that had its Series A and a liquidity event within 18 months

- A startup that had turned into a scalable, profitable business

While I love the camaraderie with the team and the impact on the product it's possible to have as an intern at a company where the only difference between you and a fulltime engineer is age, it's possible, albeit unlikely, I may enjoy working at a large company and would still be unaware of it had I passed on the opportunity. More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat.

My rule for finding internships so far has been simple: I target variety. This way, by the time I graduate, I have a very good idea of what I like and what I don't. Being able to try a different sort of company for a short time with no adverse effects is great for exploring! Doing just small startups would be just as bad as only doing bigger enterprise companies.

I started with a larger company and later found that I'm more interested in smaller companies; now I'm looking for different technologies (functional programming!), different industries (no more web stuff) and, in the far future, different locations (I'm bored of the Bay Area now).

Coincidentally, I haven't seen anybody mention the last one, but I think spending the summer abroad or in New York would be really awesome. (That said, I'm not willing to sacrifice technically interesting work just to live elsewhere.) Of course, I say this as somebody who went through middle school, high school and now two years of college all in the Bay Area, so it's no doubt different for students from other universities.

"and the impact on the product it's possible to have as an intern at a company where the only difference between you and a fulltime engineer is age"

I think, and I speak as someone who hires the technical interns for my employer, that an internship where the only difference between you and the fulltime engineer is age isn't a good internship.

A good internship program is something that goes beyond just 'doing the day job'. There are far too many companies that treat internships as 'cheap labor' - this is particularly true in the UK (my office is in London, although my interns come from the US due to alma matter connections) where internships are not as established.

It's more nuanced than 'don't take the highest offer' - really, the advice should be 'take the internship that will offer you the most valuable experience'. Acting as a cheap source of labor can certainly form part of an internship...but I really don't think it should be the overarching goal. Perhaps this is why Google's internship programs are so successful and sought after.

> It's more nuanced than 'don't take the highest offer' - really, the advice should be 'take the internship that will offer you the most valuable experience'

I will start by saying that as I understand it, we agree. Yield, by my definition with regard to choosing an internship is perhaps 20% pay (more significant if in a location with high CoL), 80% what you'll learn.

> an internship where the only difference between you and the fulltime engineer is age isn't a good internship.

Perhaps I should have clarified - an internship in which you are treated as an equal to FTEs is immensely rewarding. Not once have I felt as though I was merely a 'cheap source of labour', and I would certainly qualify every internship I have had as excellent. Every position I've taken has produced a measurable impact on my ability as an engineer and entrepreneur. The exposure to a significant number of different languages, frameworks, system architectures, and development practices has given me a modicum of wisdom beyond my years and made me aware of previously unknown unknowns.

The knowledge garnered of marketing, sales, product development, and analytics has been invaluable, and the talented designers I have had the pleasure to work alongside have certainly inspired me to appreciate and strive for an incredible user experience. Had I been given wholly insignificant projects, excluded from meetings, and treated as half-as-productive (even when I was) I don't feel the effect would have been half as great.

More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat.

The fact that you chose Google in favor of a number of legitimate startups signals that you are more interested in stuffing your resume than doing something actually interesting, challenging, and impactful.

I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of random startup employees (some of whom are probably ex-Googlers) than one full of present day Googlers.

> The fact that you chose Google in favor of a number of legitimate startups signals that you are more interested in stuffing your resume than doing something actually interesting, challenging, and impactful.

That seems...a tad judgmental? I don't know claim to what GP's reason was, but I'm interning with Google this summer because I have an opportunity to work with a team that's doing work which is relevant to the research I'm doing in grad school, and I don't think such opportunities are as easy to find in startups.

Sorry- I probably should have phrased it more carefully. I did not mean to disparage Google, but the OP's reason for choosing Google.

It sounds like Google is a great place for you this summer, based on your research interests. However, if one's basis for being there is because it "is a strong signaling mechanism" then I stand by my original statement.

Well, the point of putting "strong signaling mechanisms" on your resume is to open up other interesting opportunities in the future. Yes, it's stupid that you have to do this, and it would be awesome if everybody just had perfect information about who all the good employees are and which would be the perfect fit for your organization. But people don't, not even at good companies. And in the absence of that, it behooves you to do things that will shift people's perception of you in your favor, so that you have options and aren't prevented from doing what you really want to do.

This is not accurate. The engineers working at Google are talented, hard-working, and intelligent.

Not everyone is interested in starting their own company; some people like working in larger groups on bigger projects and not having to worry about all the non-engineering that goes into a startup.

Moreover, just because you're convinced you don't want to work at a big company doesn't mean nobody should work at one. OP is perfectly reasonable for choosing a new experience to see whether they'd like it or not, even if it's one that's unpopular among some crowds.

And having Google on your resume is a nice bonus. Even if OP decides to stick with startups after, this will help with getting hired and/or funded.

I am sure the engineers at Google are all very intelligent. I never meant to imply otherwise.

Back in 2004 or so, Google had a virtual monopoly on all the top engineering and CS talent coming out of school. At that time, Apple wasn't as sexy as it is now, Facebook didn't exist, and everything else (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) just seemed sort of lame and corporate. Every top computer scientist wanted to work at Google.

My point was that those days are long gone. Google lost a lot of good talent to Facebook and startups. It no longer has the luxury of cherry picking the best of the best. Getting a job offer from Google is no longer nearly as prestigious as it once was.

Microsoft Research is something of an outlier, but I think it deserves mention here.

When the internship days are done, people learn that a good experience and good pay is more, personally rewarding than prestige. Prestige doesn't feed the chickens.

>I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of random startup employees

Tons of random startup employees (not to mention founders) are of very lame technical and scientific skills, and the problems they work on are ho-hum, me-too at best (front-end trivialities for social media, or variations of scaling a web-stack, basically all been there done that problems...).

A large number of those present-day Googlers are ex-startup-founders.

I've always found it somewhat silly to identify people by their employer. I was a random startup employee at two companies. I was a founder at one. I am currently a Googler. I wrote some open-source software in the interim (which reminds me, I need to go stick a license file in one of those projects because another present-day Googler wants to use it for an internal project). Which category would I fall under in your false dichotomy?

Anyone remotely interesting will have a variety of experiences in their career; some will be at startups, and some will be at large established companies.

What percentage of your fellow Googlers are ex-startup-founders?

Yes, there are interesting (and uninteresting) people everywhere. The people I personally find more interesting are found in higher density in startups than BigCo's. ymmv.

I don't know what it is company-wide. Among the immediate teams I work with - I am, my boss is, and four of the tech leads for teams I work closely with are. (I'm defining "work closely with" as "would not feel terribly awkward inviting over for a barbecue or board games.")

If you add people who've founded successful open-source projects or done interesting projects as part of a larger organization, that number grows significantly. The founder of Gallery is the manager of a large team I work closely with, and on that team are the authors of Rhino, Parrot, Pychecker, "Linux Kernel Development" and "Linux in a Nutshell", and probably a few that I don't know of because I don't know everyone's pre-Google background.

If you are talking about Gallery the abysmal Android photo viewing app-attempt, I wouldn't lump that in with your list of impressive technical achievements. I hope you are referring to the web album builder or something else.

No, Gallery the web photo album organizer:

http://gallery.menalto.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project

To my knowledge, the Android photo viewing app isn't open-source (and I'm kinda surprised that alternatives to some of the default Android apps haven't popped up - the Gallery and Music Player apps really kinda suck.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com