Has anyone seen the interns yet? Part 2 of a summer diary on remote jobs

Brett Saks has tried a lot of stuff during his 23-year career in human resources. Early on, he worked in fields ranging from banking to consulting and customer service. Since joining Amazon in 2015, he's overseen teams in countries ranging from Costa Rica to Australia; Jordan to the United States.

But Saks' newest project might be his biggest leap into the unknown yet. Seattle-based Amazon -- which runs one of the world's largest summer internship programs -- is moving all 8,000 interns online this summer. Saks, as director of student programs, is in charge of making sure this sudden shift is a success.

Catching up with the boss? That will be done by video-conference now. Hanging out with the other interns? That'll happen online, too. Learning the routines of office life? It's time to spin up digital moments that approximate the tacit bonding of grabbing a coffee, rehearsing a pitch or grabbing the "good seats" in a crowded conference room.

Thousands of other big companies around the world are testing virtual internships this summer, too. I first wrote about this switch in April, when the mere concept seemed astonishing. Now, it's here -- and two surprises are emerging.

First, it's striking how much of interns' actual work, at least at tech companies, can be redefined so that it's doable in a faraway apartment, or even at mom and dad's kitchen table. Software engineering is an obvious example. Online chat, video calls and shared-screen controls help fade the boundaries between solo work and collaboration.

Step away from coding, and remote internships still make sense. Amazon's big consumer division ("the store") is putting interns to work on product visualization, Saks says. Essentially, they're figuring out better ways to make everything from laptops or toys look clearer on customers' screens.

Another natural fit, Saks says, involves interns working on the video experience associated with Amazon Prime. We can't all get paid for watching movies, but at Amazon, figuring out how to make movie-watching more enjoyable and efficient is a legitimate job, too.

Solving "work" seems simple, though, compared with the challenges of making the socio-cultural elements of an internship come to life when people aren't meeting face to face. Amazon has some interesting ideas, including getting interns to do socially useful projects in their home communities, helping address the challenges of the COVID-19 epidemic in real life, and then sharing their findings with one another.

But the company that's impressed me the most so far with its attention to the full internship experience is Snowflake Computing, a cloud-based data-warehousing company in San Mateo, Calif. (You might remember Snowflake as the No. 1 company on LinkedIn's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups.)

Even if interns can't share usual bonding rituals like a boat cruise or an afternoon on the beach, there's a lot of team-building fun that can happen online, says Snowflake's manager for university recruiting, Alex Haverty. She's already coaxed them to share photos of "walking the dog." Some photos involve yo-yos; others involve canines. Coming up -- a 50-city marshmallow roast, with individual roasting stations across the world and lots of webcams creating that campfire feeling.

Professional networking can move online, too, Haverty adds. Interns' first-day lunches with their bosses can work in cyberspace, too, she insists. The informality (or even goofiness) of eating sandwiches miles apart while talking into a webcam can help everyone feel relaxed and chatty, she says.

Experts' talks should work well as a video-conference experience, too. Snowflake this summer will actually be giving its interns more access to its technical leaders and top executives, with online chat making it easy for more interns to ask questions.

Come 2021, if pandemic concerns have faded and office routines return, will virtual internships go the way of 1943's zinc-plated pennies? (Americans briefly endured them because wartime needs made copper too scarce to use for coinage, but that burden passed quickly.)

Don't count on it. "Most likely we'll have a combination of onsite and remote internships," says Amazon's Saks. "We're starting to realize that the virtual internship has a ton of benefits."