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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

> When he interned at Google prior to his current role, he said he worked "probably under two hours a day," which freed up time to take a weeklong hush trip to Hawaii while on-the-job.

This is more messed up than the rest of the article. You need to have a serious failure of processes and/or extremely low expectations from your interns if they can work 10hrs/week and get a FTE offer afterwards.

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I have zero expectations from an intern. The scope of the programs vary wildly, but I have seen platforms that are as little as two months. It takes a month just to get someone a new laptop, access to systems, any kind of onboarding to processes, etc. Then you can give them a project, but unless they are exceptionally gifted, the mentor is going to have to spoon feed the requests. My experience dealing with people fresh out of school is that they need discrete assignments, there is less ownership and global thinking. The scope of the work has to be so limited that it requires minimal expertise.

Which is to say nothing of the value proposition of having experienced person taking hours out of their day to mentor someone with a limited shelf-life.

I expect nothing from interns either, but in this case he got a full-time offer after his internship which is the part that I find baffling.

He's either very gifted or got a manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer", which is the part that is a failing in processes in my opinion.

> manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer"

When you've got plenty of money in the budget it's not beyond poor managers to hire more for no other reason than to grow their "kingdom", as a bigger headcount equals bigger importance.

To me it seems like this employee delivered on his intern project, got good reviews and was extended an offer.

Wow this was the complete opposite from my personal experience. I'm almost over with my summer internship at google.

I was given a project complete opposite of "discrete assignments, less ownership and global thinking". I am really happy with the project I was given and the outcome of it. The objective was purposely vague which allowed me to take control: Designing the implementation, consideration of alternatives, setting up experiments, creating feature review documentation. I had to reach out and interact with people from multiple teams. I feel like I really got to experience the FTE life in my short 14 weeks.

Its not that messed up. Every internship I ever saw had low expectations.

I worked at least 50 hours a week during my research internship at Google. Towards the end, I worked seven days a week. It was mostly because I was the only person on my team with the expertise required to complete the project, and I cared about being eligible for future internships. There were a few non-research interns who I vaguely remember not spending a lot of time in the office, but I would say they were there at least 20 hours a week.

It's kind of crazy that Google of all places doesn't have any sort of system to alert when one of their devices signs on from a location not associated with that employee.

Of course they do.. they don't care as long as you do your job.

Get a personal laptop, remote desktop to your work laptop at home… easy

Post Covid I think that horse has bolted.

Google does monitor network usage and activity for at least some of their non-developer contractors. I briefly dated a Ukrainian woman who had a mouse jiggler plugged into her Chromebook to game the activity monitoring.

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