The Internship

Last weekend I took my teenage daughters to see The Internship, the Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson vehicle where they play two forty-year old interns at Google. It basically follows the standard underdog story Vince Vaughn so greatly spoofed in Dodgeball.



We went since most of the Google scenes were filmed at Georgia Tech last summer, with the climatic final meeting filmed in the atrium of the Klaus building that houses the School of Computer Science.



The movie was at best mildly amusing and not too often do you see an Emacs vs Vi discussion in a major motion picture. Mostly the movie played as an homage to Google, what a wonderful magical place it is and all the great things they do for the world. To some extent that worked: Both of my daughters came out of the movie wanting to work at Google.



Larry Page, talking about the movie said "The reason we got involved with the movie ‘The Internship’ is that computer science has a marketing problem. We're the nerdy curmudgeons." I do think CS has a marketing problem, though recently of a very different nature.



The US government is using big data as big brother. The US-China discussions on cyber attacks remind me of the US-USSR talks on nuclear weapons in the 70's. Let's not mention how some people believe computers are destroying jobs and widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.



But of course I remain very bullish on computer science and the great things we can achieve with computing. And sometimes it takes silly movies like The Internship to drive that point home.