In the recent film The Internship, Google Internship is portrayed as an endless party full of young, smart people living in swanky apartments and having everything they need provided for by Google as they live the high life. Turns out that it’s not really that far from the truth. Until recently the interns were essentially told by Google to find their own place and make their own way to work. This year however, the company rented a swathe of apartments in Crescent Valley, San Jose and offered interns a rent paid for summer in these apartments together. Just to point out, these apartments have pools, gyms and Google even pays for the intern’s laundry.
And of course, they’re making the other resident’s lives… difficult. Regular complaints are apparently filed of noise, loud music, hot tub parties and whatever else you could probably expect of a bunch of highly paid, high flying 20 something’s who’ve all been put together under one roof. You have to bear in mind that this neighbourhood was a quiet, family orientated place before Google moved in.
Of course, Google doesn’t have the monopoly on interns misbehaving, although they all misbehave in different ways.
Apple fired Apple hacking whizz kid “Comex” after he failed to reply to an e-mail asking whether he wanted to stay in employment with them. Seems a little harsh, but then, Apple have always had something of a no nonsense approach to employees.
From the outside, Silicon Valley has a slightly mystical air about it. It’s New Mecca for techheads around the world, where the magic happens and some of the greatest minds of our generation sit puzzling out how to push things past where they sit now. If most of us were offered a place at one of the big companies (Google, Apple, Quora etc) we’d leap so hard at the chance we’d probably hurt ourselves in the process. All we ever hear are stories of that strange land where not having wi-fi is a nightmare only joked about, where the campuses of the biggest companies in the world have no fences or gates and you can apparently blag your way through (if you look the part that it).
It does, however, make it easy to understand why those who aren’t part of the Tech bubble see it as, well, exactly what the Google interns do. An endless party full of young, smart, people earning way more than you and looking better as they do it. Only, it’s not really that is it? These are people who are working exceptionally hard to get where they are.
Bill Gate reportedly only slept for 4 hours a day and an employee who tried to match his way of living could only manage a week before bowing out. Steve Jobs was so driven by his desire to make the world around him the way he wanted it he made an Apple technician make new prototypes of the oxygen mask he had in the hospital because he hated the design.
Having said that though, even if you’re not a technophile, if someone offered you a job with $6000 a month salary, rent free living, pools, hot tubs, gym membership, free bus transport to work, free food and all of that as you’re surrounded by those in a similar situation to yourself? As one Billy Connolly said, there isn’t a “herd of wild horses” that could stop you going.
Interships aren’t for everyone though, some of us like to work for ourselves and many app developers out there do just that. And even if you’re part of a bigger team, you’re still going to need a Mobile Backend for your latest and greatest app. And we at Kumulos have a solution for you with our Mobile Backend as a Service designed from the ground up to support your every app development need.
So why not get in touch with us today?
