Street view? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an intern ship anything more complex than a new lint rule.

That’s not a criticism of interns btw, a few months in a new job just isn’t enough time to ship anything substantial even for a very senior engineer.

I meant to say that I've met cool people from Google, not interns. But on that basis, being one would be neat. I agree with your intuition about how much gets done in 6 months. Though the first prototype was basically a custom in the trunk of a car

Street view started at Stanford with Marc Levoy. Like a lot of things at Google, the hacking around was done by a person with a PhD and many years professional experience and deep domain knowledge...computational photography knowledge in the case of street view.

I may be misremembering who exactly I spoke to, but I don't see what value your comment adds at all; it just seems dismissive. Anyone who read my comment and thought "Ha, this idiot thinks he can intern at Google and build Street View", should maybe slow their roll. My point is that I've met some people who I thought were neat and worked at Google, and that's inspiring. If you disagree with the premise of that, then idk what to tell you.

If you're not interested in the actual history of street view, I understand because I'm not interested in the portrayal of Alphabet as Hogwarts,

Working there is a nice credential and a great networking opportunity, but it will likely take a PhD to have much chance of choosing your own adventure.

Even though street view was well more than a decade ago, Google was well past the plucky young startup phase and well into its purple Koolaid for nooglers idiom.

The new hire who got to work on street view was Levoy. The founding myth car trunk is said to be Brin's. And the connection was made via the hallways of Stanford not a state college job faire.

I've met interesting plumbers. Interesting people are interesting because of what they do, not where they work. Which is why I am interested in Marc Levoy. YMMV.

Well ya, obviously that's true, but that's not the point of my comment or the thread. I don't really want to intern anywhere, or for that matter have much more than a shred of aspiration left to work at any company, because I just don't find companies or what they do that interesting. But if I wasn't doing anything, I'd choose to work with evidently neat people, and those have most often been working at Google or on other stuff at Universities, or at the MET center, or at a company owned by Google. I'd maybe also intern as a plumber, or with a wilderness guide.