Google intern begging season is officially upon us!

I know approximately nothing about the way that Google hires interns, except what I can glean from the emails that I receive from various young people who I know (sometimes tangentially) who are hoping to work at Google over the summer.

  1. Potential-interns apply to Google.
  2. Potential-interns are evaluated by Google, and some of them are accepted.
  3. The accepted interns email everyone they know who might know someone at Google in order to find a placement in a Google office.

This happens every year. These emails from students include phrasing like

I’ve signed on for an internship at Google this summer…. [Are you] friends with Googlers looking for interns?

Matching interns with offices is a bipartite graph problem. Why does Google not have any sort of reasonable process for doing this? Compared to the other things that Google has successfully accomplished, this is not hard.

And it makes me doubt Google’s claims about diversifying its workforce. Under the current system, the interns who end up with the best placements are the ones who already have strong connections to people at Google. The interns who ended up where they are by a less typical path are at a disadvantage.

I mean, even Amazon has managed to figure out how to run its internship program without having a bunch of students email me. And if ever there were a large tech company that I thought would try to crowdsource a key aspect of its business, that would be Amazon.