How accurately does The Internship, which arrived in theaters this weekend, portray tech giant Google's environment and culture? We asked a real Google intern and a former intern-turned-full-timer just how well the Shawn Levy-directed movie depicts their employer.
Comedians Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, playing two laid-off salesmen who apply and get internships at Google, step into a world where their characters' digital skills are put to the test in mini challenges against their more tech-savvy and much younger fellow interns.
"When they portray it as a Hunger Games-style competition, it's really the exact opposite feel," 23-year-old Kitt Vanderwater, who interned for two summers before Google hired her in 2012 as a software engineer, told Mashable.
Intern Matt Melone agreed, saying the hyper-competitive aspect of the movie was inaccurate.
"The recruiting team made it clear in the beginning that we weren't competing," said 27-year-old Melone, who started his internship this summer after serving four years in the Army in Germany. "Everybody here is Googly, and Googliness is not just a word used in the movie."
Although the competitive nature of the film doesn't exude "Googliness" — an intraoffice term encompassing the perceived fun and innovative nature of employees or aspect of the company — other parts of it did, particularly the sets and props.
Only parts of The Internship were filmed at Google's global headquarters in Mountain View. The film's set designers and talented crew recreated the environment at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
"They do a really good job making the whole movie look like it was really at Google."
"I loved all of the little things, from what was on the background of the monitors to the stickers on the laptops," Vanderwater proclaimed. "It's all so real."
Melone notes The Internship captures the excitement of being on campus. He also thinks the featured cast, except one person, appropriately represents Google's real staff.
"I haven't met anyone like the antagonistic character in the movie," he said.
The Life (and Perks) of a Google Intern
To an outsider, the perks Google offers its employees appear extravagant and endless: free lunches, haircuts, gym, nap pods, campus bikes, foosball, pool, ping pong, laundry service, a subsidized massage program and ... well, seemingly much more.
"There's volleyball nets, and where I work there's an outdoor pool," Melone added about the 3-million-square-feet Mountain View campus.
"You're never more than 150 feet from food because we have micro kitchens around the office."
Melone also takes advantage of the Google bus, which picks up employees near their homes and shuttles them to the Google offices. Melone's trip from Berkeley to Mountain View takes an hour and a half. He spends his daily commute, back and forth, working on the bus, essentially giving Google an "extra three hours" of work every day.
"The other weekend while I was getting on the Google bus to go home there was someone standing there with iced beer — that was just crazy awesome," he said.
Now three weeks into his gig as an MBA intern in consumer operations, Melone recalls his first day at Google, when he wasn't sure whether he should tell his wife about the "cool" activities he did. His enthusiasm levels haven't waned since.
Before his internship ends, Melone will have a chance to interview for another Google internship or full-time employment, just as Vanderwater did in 2010 to earn her second Google internship in 2011. Both helped her get hired a year later.
"I didn't go to an Ivy League school; I went to a school no one has really heard of [North Central College in the suburbs of Chicago] and I think that's really interesting Google is open to diversifying its staff like that," she said.
The Most Memorable Parts of The Internship
The Google staff, including this summer's new crop of interns, watched The Internship at Kabuki Theater in San Francisco ahead of the flick's June 7 release date.
Spoiler alert: Stop reading now if you haven't seen the movie.
"I found my favorite parts were in the details," Vanderwater said. "They portray a woman engineer so well in the movie that I wanted to be friends with her at the end of the day."
One scene, in which the two washed-up salesmen are interviewing to earn their way into the Google internship program, incited much laughter among the viewers, Melone remembered.
"The main characters are great," he said. "In that scene, one lied about being a physics graduate, and the other one lied about knowing C++ [programming language] and he said the extra plus was because he was so enthusiastic about it."
Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox
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