The Internship That Students Drool Over

selan writes "The Baltimore Sun has a feature on Microsoft's internship program and why it is so popular with college students. Not only are interns paid, but they also receive the same perks as other Microsoft employees. At the end of the summer they are treated to a catered barbecue at Bill Gates's house and have a good shot at a full time job after graduation. You do not know the power of the Dark Side."

Comments

Barbecue @ Bill's House?

[JRHelgeson]

What they don't tell you is that after the barbecue, Bill likes to have these little boys sleep in his room, and sometimes in his bed...

Or was that Jacko?

--
Keep it Wrinkled, boys.

Why MS has their internship program

[hotspur_fan]

At Michigan, just about every minority computer engineering student was a Microsoft intern. Yet when I went out to interview for a full-time job there was not a single minority student out there. Microsoft uses their internship program to boost their diversity numbers.

If you're going to MS to interview, I recommed...

[stomv]

I went to Seattle to interview with Mircosoft in 1998. Most of my interview process consisted of games and puzzles -- so get yourself a stack of mind puzzle books, and read them. Then, during the interview, instead of shouting out the answer immediately, pretend to think for about 30 seconds, while contorting your face. Shout out Eureka!, and give the answer. It worked for me; they made me an offer a few weeks later. They didn't give me much time to decide, which helped contribute to me turning them down, but I digress...

at any rate, I flew in, rented myself a Mazda 626 convertible, and immediately went to the Kingdome. The Mariners now play baseball elsewhere, but I digress again.

I bought a $75 ticket for the game, about five $5 beers, and plenty of food. I got reciepts for all of it, and included it in my expense report. Sure, $110 is nothing for Microsoft, but it sure was fun to watch a game in style on their dime.

In short, if you go to Seattle on an interview, treat yourself well, and review mental exercise books. Go do some things, and expense them. They'll fork over the loot. Pretend to figure out the answers to their questions on the fly, even if you already knew the answer.

After all of this, turn them down -- for you know that, in the overall scheme of things, it just isn't worth it.

What has Microsoft invented?

[afantee]

Here is a company that has $billions to burn and spares no effort on hiring raw talents, but where is the results of all those smart people?

Let's face it, the beast is a bully and copycat, or just throw cash at anything that can't be acquired otherwise. As we all know, DOS was bought (from Bill's friend for $50,000), so was Visual Basic. Earlier versions of Windows are nothing more than half-baked copies of Mac OS, much like C# to Java. Tablet PC is really not that much better than Apple Newton introduced 10 years ago except for more powerful hardware, and the hand writing recognition software appears to be less usable than that of Newton. Every Mac has come with voice recognition since about 15 years ago, and where is the MS voice recognition technology that Bill has been talking about for so many years?

Re:Are most internships unpaid then?

[grumpygrodyguy]

There is still a shortage of REAL developers.

Nonsense. You'd never see someone saying "There is still a shortage of REAL ditch diggers". It's sad that programming has become so elitist. So that only the cerebral hitler youth are allowed to do it.

If being a "REAL developer" means having a 200 IQ, then you're excluding about 99.99% of the human population. The world needs capable programmers more than it needs "real" programmers.

Bill Gates. Who?

[Trogre]

I recommend people considering a position such as this watch the movie Antitrust.

Re:you mean they really aren't evil?

[kingkade]

thank you AssFace, that was an insightful posting.