Test Engineering Internships

Posted by Zuri Kemp, Lead Software Quality Assurance Engineer

Thinking about becoming a Google test engineering intern? Want to help us organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful -- but you're not sure what it's really like here? Over the next several months we'll be featuring articles by former Test Engineering interns. Until then, here's a top-10 list of adjectives to describe software engineers at Google:

• Global - Google has engineering offices (and, of course, customers) all over the world. So not only do we have engineers from everywhere, every engineer gets the chance to make software that will be as great in Singapore as it is in Finland.
• Comfortable - Engineers need to be comfortable to be effective...and Google gives us the equipment to be comfortable. And if our muscles get tight from sitting, we can get an on-site professional massage.
• Flexible - Getting work done is more important than what time we work.
• Unhampered - We're a company designed by engineers for engineers, so functional merit tends to outweigh other considerations at decision-making time.
• Entertained - We have lots of fun activities. Every winter, there's a company-wide ski trip. Every summer, there's an all-engineer picnic on the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk. Google has bought out theaters for opening days of films like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.
• Listened to - Google has a very open environment and truly values each employee's opinions. Every Friday, there's a company-wide meeting where Larry and Sergey (our founders) report on significant events and have an open-to-all Q&A session.
• Stuffed - In most offices, Google provides free gourmet-quality breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you come in too late to get breakfast (or you get hungry between meals), you can always head to the nearby mini-kitchen and grab some fruit, cereal, and tea (or crisps, chocolate, and espresso for the less healthily inclined).
• Cutting-edge - We have the audacious goal of organizing the world's information -- and to meet it, we've built the largest distributed computer system in the world and written some of the world's most widely-used software.
• High-impact - People in every country and every language use our products.
• Dependable - We try to keep a high bar for hiring, so you can depend on the ability of your teammates to handle most any engineering problem.

If all of that (and this) wasn't enough to convince you that Google is a fantastic environment for a software engineer in test, consider being able to "make and break" cool Google products. That is exactly what test engineers at Google do. We not only manually find flaws in software engineers' code, we also build smart, home-grown tools that effectively break and test the limits of web software.

While the deadline for Test Engineering internships for this summer is past, we want to help you make a decision for your internship next year. Stay tuned to our blog, we'll be posting a regular series on Test Engineering internships at Google.

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