As a former Mozilla intern, I can confirm that the company has an unusually great intern program!<p>Sure, there's some perks like free food, laundry, free yoga and other things that are taken for granted at startups missing but some of my favorite things about it were:<p>1. Mozilla has the most geographically diverse set of interns of any Silicon Valley company I know. In addition to regular recruiting at North American Universities, Mozilla also recruits from the open source Mozilla community, and that means people come from everywhere. I was recruited on-campus but two of my roommates whom I lived with were recruited directly from the community and were from Argentina and India.<p>2. At least on my project (I worked in the Labs group), I got total freedom to scope out a project I wanted to work on, convince my managers about why it could be great, then go ahead and build it. This is a remarkable amount of flexibility for an internship.<p>3. You got to keep the laptop. Because Mozilla's open source, we just used the default OS X with no custom stuff. Since the value would go down after the summer, they let us keep it as a perk!<p>4. Once every two years, they fly out everyone in the company and a lot of people in the community to a single place to meet up (Summit). This might sound crazy in theory, but face time is invaluable in growing teams that are spread across the planet.
I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analyze seemed frustrating then, yet, it is only after a couple of years in industry that I realize the true value of respecting those who trust their data with you and using it to do greater good.
Congratulations. You've officially been spoiled. :) You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome. :P<p>The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.
Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks.<p>I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative.<p>That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not blowing every dollar -- living, effectively, paycheck to paycheck.<p>I wonder if the employees/interns there have a sense that it's all eventually going to come crumbling down. Because I get that sense every time I hear about how they operate, and I really hope it never happens because I think they're a good thing in the world.
Cool blog post! From your resume it looks like you worked at Blackberry earlier this year. Do you have any thoughts about the differences (cultural, technological, etc) between working for a large company and working for a non-profit organization?
It's always interesting to hear what other Software Engineering students have been doing on their internships.<p>Now, if only writing a blog post could replace your work term report. :)
Seems like there is a growing trend by tech companies to spoil interns with the hope of improving HR. This is great and by all means take advantage of it.
Cool guy, is an "open-source advocate" but removes PureCSS's copyright notice: <a href="https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md</a>