Pros: Supportive and approachable teammates who value collaboration.

Cons: Some meetings or processes are optimized for full-timers, not interns.

Pros: As an intern, I had plenty of time to do whatever I wanted. Also, since the project was pretty open-ended, I didn't have specific deadlines to meet, except for having something to deliver at the end of the internship. My host and I were pretty much the only people who had any idea what was going on there. Other employees, however, seemed pretty tense about meeting expectations. Compensation was very good.

Cons: Office culture was annoying. A number of people, hoping they would be the next Steve Jobs, would deliver motivational speeches while wearing a turtleneck. Training was what I could expect it to be. There's a lot of material that had been developed over time in the form of online tutorials, which are pretty useful at any stage. Generally, the place seemed way too large and spread over way too many areas for people to get an idea of what the general direction was. Also, it was hard to get attached to a particular project, particularly given that a good number of these end up in the dumpster, so it's hard to see your own contribution growing into something nice. I wouldn't recommend to younger people to work in Mountain View. That place is boring, and unless you are willing to drive every day to San Francisco and back, there's nothing interesting going on there. Employees are pretty boring; most of them are overqualified people who ended up coding trivial stuff. Because of this, you always notice how people are trying to engage in some sort of weird competition involving things like solving mathematical puzzles and making a point about how they are the smartest employees any company could ever have.

Pros: Able to work on a really interesting project, and everyone in the company was eager to teach me. Great learning opportunities while having fun.

Cons: Technologies are pretty specific to Google and most likely not transferable across other jobs.