Google revealed this Tuesday (22) news that could be a bucket of water in the pretensions of students around the world who dream of working in the largest technology company on the planet. The Moutain View company has decided to end its traditional internship program for beginning engineers.
According to Reuters, the announcement came after several participants complained that the tech giant had imposed “systemic wage inequalities” in an internal correspondence to which the British news agency had access. Last year, Google made a commitment to increase the number of underrepresented employees by 30% by 2025.
Now, the multinational has released a statement, confirming that the current Engineering Residency program will be replaced by a new initiative, and that the company is “always evaluating the programs to ensure that they evolve and adapt over time to meet the needs of our employees”.
The end of “Eng Res”
Called “Eng Res,” Google’s residency program has been in existence since 2014, and has given thousands of recent graduates opportunities to work on diverse teams, receive training, and qualify for permanent employment after one year. These students not only became the company’s “most diverse group” of software engineers, they also became a cohesive group.
That’s how this team of “under-represented” decided, in June 2020, to write a letter to the administration, signed according to Reuters by more than 500 residents. They complained that, compared to other software engineers, their pay and year-end bonuses were much lower for their level of employment, something “on the order of tens of thousands of dollars.”
Signed by Vice President Maggie Johnson, an email was sent to students stating that Google would replace the residency with a new program beginning in 2022, called Early Career Immersion (ECI), which would also include mentoring and training. The message did not reveal, however, the reasons for the change.
