Google's summer interns make for noisy neighbors | Hacker News Reader

Google's summer interns make for noisy neighbors

money.msn.com

17 pointssonabinu14 comments

This seems pretty tame, IMO. I think these folks should pick their battles. Better to have intelligent kids making noise (as they'll probably listen to you when you ask to quiet down) than to have belligerent kids who were raised with poor manners.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but waking your neighbors up in the middle of the night definitely sounds like extremely poor manners to me. And intelligence doesn't correlate with good manners, either.

Not even the people who live there have claimed that they're being awoken in the middle of the night. It just says they use the hot tube and once someone heard someone singing.

I read in the yelp reviews that they were singing in the middle of the nights, and throwing out parties during the week.

The apartment complex should write lease violations to offenders (or Google)

Yes, because when you're living in an apartment that costs $3,200/month and can't fall asleep because your neighbor is blasting nerdcore music, at least you can find solace in the fact that the noisemaker is an intelligent, well-mannered computer whiz who is apparently so intelligent and well-mannered that he doesn't recognize making lots of noise in the middle of the night is rude.

As for darting out into traffic, there's an Android app for that, right?

>Yes, because when you're living in an apartment that costs $3,200/month and can't fall asleep because your neighbor is blasting nerdcore music...

This never happened. What you imagine Google interns to be like and what they actually are seem to be disjoint sets. Music isn't even mentioned in either article or the Yelp review.

And I am somewhat suspect of the claim that Google interns are darting into traffic. The problem is if it happens even once by accident, you'll have residents complaining that it's an epidemic.

I was being sarcastic, perhaps poorly. I know people who work at Google, and I can assure you that they don't like listening to music. Or soaking in hot tubs. Ever. I'm not sure about jaywalking though. I'll have to ask.

If building security is honestly unable to do anything about it (as mentioned in the linked article) I suspect the claims of residents are somewhat exaggerated. Especially considering some of the "havoc" they're causing is jaywalking. While it's undoubtedly important to be a considerate neighbor, I suspect there is some overreaction here.

Edit: I read both stories and the Yelp reviews[1] that sparked them. They're nothing more than blogspam designed to make people go "Oh yeah I can totally imagine what they might be like..." and project their own ideas of noisy college kids on to these interns.

The interns aren't blasting music, screaming in the night or breaking anything. It's telling that one of the accusations against them is jaywalking.

[1]http://www.yelp.com/biz/crescent-village-apartment-homes-san...

"like a dorm now"

This person is exactly right. That's what happens when you house 400 university students together. I don't see how this has anything to do with them being Google interns. It's completely reasonable that the residents are upset, most people would be if their quiet apartment became like a dorm, but this is the fault of the building management, not Google.

They put a bunch of college kids in an apartment complex. What else did the neighbors expect to happen?

I think the issue is that fairly immature college students are making enough money to live a mature life, and they are thus being transplanted into communities of middle-class people in the bay area.

Without commenting on the pay of these interns, perhaps Google should consider arranging centralized summer housing for these interns purely because of the difficulty of the local market. It would be yet another perk for recruitment, and ostentatious behavior by interns could be curtailed to Google-controlled areas.

The intern I recruited for the summer in SF seized my offer of an air mattress on my floor for the summer, and I can't help but think that these other interns are just being forced into an awkward, foreign environment rather than intending to cause ruckus.

No wonder I didn't have any luck recruiting interns this summer. $3,000 apartments? Hot tubs? Jaywalking?

I thought shelter in the Ghost Town part of Oakland and an AC Transit bus pass would surely lure a true hacker or two. Guess I'll have to rethink this next year.

What's the vacancy rate in San Jose? I would not have expected offhand that they could find an apartment complex with enough vacant units to house 400 interns. Even if they are putting 4 interns per apartment, that would be 100 units.

How did this make the front page again? I don't get why anyone would care about this. If the company was Exxon, GE or BoA instead of Google, would this have made the front page once, let alone twice?

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