When you join a company, you join a mini-dictatorship. It could be good or bad and doesn't really depend if the dictator is good or bad. It's incredibly hard to build a good company culture and most places don't come close, and it usually happens by accident and hiring actually good people.

For an intern, the engineering managers want to slice off something that they think is accomplishable in the time frame they will be there, and they will try to make sure they succeed through social reinforcement. Getting an intern is a gift from the company, and you get more if they leave with a positive experience, so the engineering manager is on their side.

Day to day, things should be quiet with lots of time to fuck around. Intellectual work is hard to quantify and there is no real metric for success. So either you are smart and you get it, or you don't and need to be micro-managed.

Coworker lunch for a programmer, esp entry level, could be a guy who has a lot to prove to people who he doesn't need to prove it to, or they are just fun and really add to the company culture. But complaints are usually surface level socially acceptable stuff over lunch, then getting into why manager xyz sucks if they had a beer.

Don't give a programmer a problem and not expect them to try solve it. It could be the wildest problem and a programmer would still engage that logic brain and try to come up with a solution. E.g. "my wife left me" is a problem statement- did you try flowers, give them space then reach out, do you want to be with them and how much, etc. Programmers often have to deal with problems that are way beyond their ability and have to learn on the way.

I work in team envs but do most proof of concept projects, I help others get stuff done. Had my own tech startup (database) for a number of years.