The OP doesn't focus on this in the post, but they're a recent grad with no work experience.
Maybe it was a bit of a cattle-call experience, but IBM is sorting through thousands of similar grads and needs some way to screen them for technical positions when many will have no professional history.
If being asked to take some tests, then flown out for a stay in a nice hotel and a big mixer (with some great networking opportunities, btw), then offered a six-figure salary at your first job out of school requires a "name and shame," then the OP sounds a bit entitled.
Look at the replies too: a bunch of incredibly rich, spoiled brats who had everything paid for by their parents through graduation. Now that they're done, they expect a high tech, luxury 2br apartment in the most expensive city in the world to be affordable on day 1. Anything less is "basically poverty."
Yeah, look at these people, expecting to be paid their market value!
I mean, they're just engineers, right? They should be thankful for anything thrown their way, even if they'll never be able to afford a house or raise a family on it.
They should be working for the lowest comp possible, just like the founders, chief executives, and the VCs.
P.S. there was a NYT article posted here just a couple of days ago about how it's become incredibly easy to raise VC rounds of $100m+. There's a ton of money pouring into tech right now, and everyone is benefiting, from VCs to chief executives. Except engineers. We're not supposed to enjoy this success, I mean, all we do is build the products.
> everyone is benefiting, from VCs to chief executives. Except engineers.
I don't know what world you're living in, but engineering salaries _have_ absolutely shot up in recent years. 10 years ago no engineer was scoffing at making 6 figures straight out of school. I remember being wowed when a friend reported that Google had started regularly offering 105K to fresh grads.
In my experience at several startups, and discussions with numerous friends and colleagues in similar positions, yes the eng comp at startups is much better than it was 5 years ago.
Though I agree that complaining like this can be a problem for people with zero experience, I don't think it is a valid argument against what OP is pointing out. Most of the process seems to be rooted on automation, which encourages candidates to find a way to bypass the selection system instead of showing actual competence. This means a direct loss on the company's staff quality. If anything, IBM might be losing good people, possibly to other companies.
Part of the problem with software today is bulk of the jobs are library plumbing.
Sure you still have jobs where something of high quality like an OS patch, driver or some big algorithm work needs to be done- But those jobs are rare, and there are often ways to hire such people looking at their prior experience.
Its always hard for freshers to break into the cream software jobs that can offer you some different experience compared to others.
In general you have to take whatever comes along the way and build on that. This is unfortunate, regardless of whatever practice you might have done on leetcode, plumbing like jobs are what are common in the world today.
> Maybe it was a bit of a cattle-call experience, but IBM is sorting through thousands of similar grads and needs some way to screen them for technical positions when many will have no professional history.
Respectfully, that's bullshit.
IBM has the money to hire enough people to conduct an actual recruitment process. Then again, I'm the type of person who refuses to work for any company that "process" can and should solve fundamentally human issues. If people are making it through the process with insufficient technical skills, then IBM might as well be setting their money on fire.
I don’t think it matters at all that OP is a new grad. From start to nearly finish, what was described was a terrible experience. The offer was not good, and the rest of the process was mostly a sham. I don’t think I’d want to work for a company that would do that to anyone.
If even 1/2 if what OP says is true, then fuck IBM.
I love reading these rants. I wish more young people fresh out of college were confident and critical like this, I see too many people simply accept whatever the organization tells them without doing the research.
You really have to stand up for yourself and be willing to fight in every interaction with corporations, because they will exploit you in every way possible if you let them. And there is very little recourse for wronged employees in today's rigged arbitration arena.
Funny enough, the OP's later Reddit posts were things like "Two months into my first job, I'm still fucking up on basic tasks" and a complaint that their co-workers are too good at their jobs, and making the OP look bad by comparison.
What is so wrong with not changing companies? I ask for a friend who has worked on the same product for over 10 years, although the company has been bought sold a few times.
This "friend" found that any job offers he got always resulted in a pay-grade drop (normally for startups), or working with boring technologies that would not advance his personal knowledge.
--
I know for a fact that this has hurt me with big companies like Google when interviewing there, the last interview resulted in them flat out telling me I have not worked at enough companies.
I personally think that is unfair, as I don't think you know what you have done good or bad at a company if you only stay there for 2 years. I did some checking and found that many software engineer seem to have a chain of companies they worked for 2 or less years. And I could not help to think they have no way of really knowing if the things you did were good or bad in the long run.
Anyways, just wondering what others thoughts are on work patterns, and their experiences.
Conventional wisdom is that job hopping leads to better salaries. Of course, conventional opinion is also that changing jobs once every year or two shouldn't be viewed as a red flag by hiring managers and it certainly is in many cases.
Personally, I've been a reasonably long tenure at most jobs I've had.
I do think there's a reasonable medium though. If you've been at some big company for a couple of decades and try to switch jobs later in your career, that can be difficult too.
This kind of process just reinforces why doing paid internships and freelance work during college is so important. I think after you go through that process your tolerance for crappy hiring practices approaches zero.
Something you learn quickly in freelancing is no money == no work. It doesn't matter if it is to measure technical ability. Any amount of time you spend not doing something else carries a cost, if companies aren't willing to pay for it early on, why would they respect your time later?
And so what? It does not invalidate my point, especially compared to the other salaries in the area. Also you did not include the cost of living there, which is probably very high.
IMO, it does invalidate your point. You said: "It really puts the salary in perspective." It doesn't.
To take the cost of living into consideration:
$100k after tax in SF is ~70k. With 2k in rent, you have ~$46,000 p/a. An "average" grad in London is probably grossing at most $40k (£31k) After tax, that's ~£25k, and in London, you can easily be set back £800/month on rent. So you're left with less than £14,000 which is about $18k. Are you really telling me that to maintain the same standard of living in SF will cost you 2 and a half times more after rent?
Indeed. I get roughly 38K gross and pay nearly 1K for an apartment at the moment. Silicon valley is a horrible place and I wouldn't want to be found dead over there, but the salaries are really fucking amazing, even the ones people scoff at.
Market value for engineers in that area is $160-200k. Should OP apologize for declining $100k?
He went through an long and arduous interview process, to be rewarded with an offer that is less than 50% than his objective market value. Should he be grateful?
IBM wasted his time and their own.
I don't get this strange reluctance to accept that us engineers are finally commanding decent compensation. You don't see CEOs shaming each other for declining low offers.
Everyone gets paid as much as they can. Why are we engineers supposed to be grateful for anything thrown our way? Are we morally obliged to race to the bottom?
> For comparison, the average new grad offer in Silicon Valley at a FAANG company here is $160k. If you play your cards right, you can negotiate this to $190k+.
OP is implying that IBM is going for the same caliber of talent as FAANG, then lowballing at the end of the process, after you spent 3 days on site.
I had that happen to me with a different company in the valley so I know how frustrating it is.
Personally I'd expect IBM to try to compete with FAANG, so I also understand the surprise there.
Finally, OP apparently did get his $160k+ offer eventually, so he was right that IBM lowballed him.
Using FAANG salaries for the market value of engineers is like using Big Law salaries for the market value of lawyers. They represent a pinnacle, not a typical.
Using FAANG comp is definitely relevant if you have FAANG-level credentials and can get an offer from a FAANG. If IBM is interviewing this type of people, they're expected to make competitive offers rather than waste everyone's time.
The whole OP sounds like dictionary definition of HR dropping the ball, doing everything "corporate style", being out of touch with the market and the candidates, and then making unrealistic low offers. They deserve to be called out.
Moreover, there was an article about how many companies are trying to compete with FAANG for the same talent by providing higher compensation, which corresponds with my personal experience and that of my friends.
Because they are a well known company, and OP assumed they could pay competitively?
It happened to me personally with another company: well-known in their field, everything they communicated implied they're aware of my current offers and looking to make a competitive counteroffer. Everything goes well...
Then BAM, their offer is 20% less than my lowest outstanding offer, which they knew about.
Total waste of time. So I understand OP's frustration.
Long and arduous? It's not like he had to find a blue flower on the slopes of a mountain and deliver it to Ra's Al Ghul. He had two phone/video interviews and then an in-person competition.
Per the article, he went through multiple steps that all seem quite demanding:
> The screening interview requires:
> A webcam with a clear view of you and your room
> Granting a tool (admin) access to your computer to make sure you don't cheat
> The screening interview consists of a basic coding challenge and pre-recorded video questions to which you must give a response. Your response must be in video format - it cannot be written. After you are delivered a question via video, you are given about a minute to formulate your response and then are required to narrate it back staring into your webcam.
I'd consider this "arduous" for a very first step. Then the final stage is 3 days onsite. I'd consider that "long".
My scale is other interview processes, not Batman origination stories.
We had an Oracle position that needed to be filled. Headhunter supplied a candidate, we did a phone interview, then an in person interview. Not very technical from what I understand, just Oracle/DBA basics. He starts at our secondary location, and seems to struggle. Simple tasks don't get accomplished quickly, and more complex jobs are incomplete.
A few weeks go by, and our DBA manager visits the location, and realizes that the DBA is a completely different person than the one interviewed. Same ethnicity, but different person. He had apparently hired the interviewee to perform during the hiring process.
Took us over a month to get rid of him; it was hard to prove that he had acted fraudulently, and the wheels of justice grind slowly.
Between actual costs incurred and opportunity costs, it was a royal PITA. Weeding out these posers can be a problem.
Again, his first step of the process doesn't seem arduous at all. Inconvenient and possibly annoying? Sure. But arduous is the incorrect word choice.
When I was starting out, I had to interview at a headhunting company 2x. Then 2x interviews with the company I ended up at. I would have loved to be put up at a nice hotel during that process instead of having to drive all over meeting people.
IBM is clearly responding to fraudulent interviews, plus signaling two things; that they have enough applicants to impose silly video interview protocols, and that once past the "technical" interview, it's all about schmoozing and politics. These signals tell you a lot about a company.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing. That the step with him posing in front of a webcam to answer questions is common in the industry? It's not.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of other companies hire thousands of candidates every year. Somehow they manage to avoid this SNAFU of hiring someone other than the person who interviewed, without forcing people through webcam processes. Maybe IBM could do the same.
>>Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of other companies hire thousands of candidates every year.
Interviews in those companies are far more brutal, go upto typically 8 - 9 rounds, with an additional bar raiser round. And its a straight reject even if a single person from the panel gives a bad feedback, regardless how amazingly you have aced all the other rounds.
By any measure that IBM interview is a walk in the park.
Sometimes after a candidate does a technical interview, a completely different person walks in for the in-person. Or it's possible the coding interview was with a different language.
Disclaimer: not an IBM employee here; I have only interacted with current/past employees and these examples are anecdotal:
One fresh-out-of-college software engineer spent the first year or so working on nothing but PowerPoints and watching "agile training" videos to improve his score on some kind of IBM social/point system. He moved to actual programming when he relocated to a different office. Then, one Friday, a manager came to him and said his project was shut down, and that he was starting on a new team that following Monday.
When I interviewed at Google, the woman I talked to at lunch (CS PhD) had nothing nice to say either, and she worked on Watson which seems to be their saving grace. She made a lot of the same critiques of the work environment there, also adding that Watson is mostly just a marketing stunt for non-technical customers.
There are certainly problems in that process, but it also sounds like the author doesn't understand the difference between IBM and a startup. Anyone who expected stock options from a company that is over 100 years old with hundreds of thousands of employees just doesn't understand with whom they were interviewing.
> sounds like the author doesn't understand the difference between IBM and a startup. Anyone who expected stock options from a company that is over 100 years old with hundreds of thousands of employees just doesn't understand with whom they were interviewing.
You don't have to be a startup to offer RSUs. FAANG have just as many engineers as IBM, and offer them.
Often those are not like million dollar RSUs. Most of the big money goes to top management, and technical people who manage other technical people. The other technical people to get them are generally who are well connected up with the bosses and have some political leverage, to help them negotiate well.
The ordinary people get little to get by. And often the vesting schedule is long, and taxes eat into bulk of it.
This is true even in FAANG. In fact your best bet to get any meaningful RSU grant is to be something like employee number 300 as a Manager at Facebook.
You also need to understand one thing. Promotions are hard to come by in FAANG companies, because generally every one is at least as awesome as you are. So you also stagnate quite a lot in those companies.
I don't want to embark on the millionth discussion of FAANG compensation, but there are enough known facts about FAANG engineers making millions of dollars on their RSUs over 4-5 years, especially at the more senior levels.
FAANGs are obviously not totally equitable, and you won't make a CEO's comp as an engineer, but you will make more than most other places.
Also, I completely disagree with the notion that promotions are the cure against "stagnation". Stagnation has to do with the nature of your work, not your fancy title, height on the corporate hierarchy tree, or for that matter - your pay.
Actually I like the "automated video interview" idea. Sure, the grading part shouldn't be automated (i.e. there's no reason why they wouldn't accept an answer where the interviewee made a small mistake then corrected it), but if it saves (human) time, it's probably a good idea!
Can't really call it an "interview", though, when there is only one participant.
For what it's worth, I find that approach humiliating to the interviewee. It's a subtle way to tell him that they do not value his time as highly as their own.
Huh? Do you also think that the bank "doesn't value your time as highly as their employees'" if they let you use banking services over a phone app? How about online courses, are teachers to be blamed for "not valuing students' time as much as their own"?
Personally, I find this attitude against automation (where possible, reasonable and useful) to be almost Luddite-like.
In addition, if you can automate the process, you might even be able to extend your candidate pool (i.e. interview a lot more people, and not rely on weakly-correlated-but-almost-arbitrary signals such as premium university name on the candidates' CVs, but instead select the actually good people).
I think it is more that candidates (especially well qualified ones) view the interview process as a two way street. The company is probing you for competence/fit for the position and the candidate is probing the company for things like culture fit.
Fair enough, but in general the candidate has a lot more information about the company (e.g. through the website, news, etc.) than the company about the candidate. But, yeah, it definitely depends on the supply/demand ratio; a company that's getting more applications than they need should take steps to optimize/automate the process. At least the initial steps - later rounds should definitely involve humans, in-person interviews, culture fit etc.
>You had to ask me for help on what for loops and import statements are. I had to give her a crash course on running Python code and using Git. This girl was fast-tracked to an offer on the Watson team. None of the IBM employees understood what she was doing because there were literally zero technical people in the loop - it just sounded/looked cool so her plagiarism went unnoticed.
It's going to be brutal when she has moved out there, spent a ton of time and money to relocate herself, and then gets fired for being unable to do the job she was hired for.
Yeah if she learned Python and for-loops that day, and was able to ship the desired project to the satisfaction of the judges, that's pretty impressive, right? Even if she used some existing code for facial recognition, isn't gluing together libraries the bulk of most software engineers' work?
I teach an intro to Python class for people with no programming experience whatsoever that definitely goes through for-loops within the first few hours.
If someone has basic proficiency in any other programming language at all, then learning how to do a for-loop in Python is a trivial matter of minutes to maybe half an hour, in my experience.
Sure, I just meant that going from that level of knowledge to shipping a working program which integrates with a non-trivial third party library is a decent showing for a new grad hire.
> Sure, I just meant that going from that level of knowledge to shipping a working program which integrates with a non-trivial third party library is a decent showing for a new grad hire.
Do you think this is a commonly-held view? Honest question, because I know I could pull this off and I didn't finish university (or study CS when I was there). If companies are looking for this level of talent during the application process, I could probably work for IBM without a CS degree but it's not likely they'd even look twice at my resumé.
I'm not sure if it's a commonly held view, but I don't have a CS degree, and neither do some of the best people I work with, at a company most folks on this site would "rank" at least as high as IBM. That said, our interviews are the usual "write code on a whiteboard" style.
Part of the difficulty of pullimg this off, in my opinion, is finding that third-party library in the first place, and getting everything working under a time crunch. I dunno, I may have a weird view on these things; I find doing coding competition problems on a whiteboard much easier than actual practical engineering.
I'm sure you could get an interview at IBM if you get an internal reference.
A webcam with a clear view of you and your room
Granting a tool (admin) access to your computer to make sure you don't cheat
which alone constitute a massive breach of privacy, in my opinion."
This is the sort of thing that might be alright when IBM does it, but absolutely should not be normalised because you can't trust what people are going to do with that admin access and how it might feed into the hiring process.
> "If you need literally any [disability] accommodation, You won't be getting it"
Again, if this isn't actually discriminatory it's certainly something that shouldn't be normalised.
I wonder if setting up a fresh, secure virtual machine and working out the incantations to forward your webcam and microphone devices to it are part of the test?
It should be noted that while IBM is a global company that shares a lot of processes across globe, this might not be something that is identical everywhere. It kind of shows valley-centrism of OP, or I guess of everyone working there.
8 years ago at IBM, my post doc at IBM Research was around $120K (2010). 10 Years prior to that (while still an undergrad) I was offered a job at the LTC in Austin at around 70K a year (i.e. 2000), turned it down to go to grad school. (yes, I took my time)
I can understand that companies have so many degree qualified people to sift through nowadays that this is necessary but from the candidates point of view, I have no idea why anybody, desperate grad or not, would subject themselves to such a process. Walk away and find reasonable alternative employment!
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadMaybe it was a bit of a cattle-call experience, but IBM is sorting through thousands of similar grads and needs some way to screen them for technical positions when many will have no professional history.
If being asked to take some tests, then flown out for a stay in a nice hotel and a big mixer (with some great networking opportunities, btw), then offered a six-figure salary at your first job out of school requires a "name and shame," then the OP sounds a bit entitled.
I mean, they're just engineers, right? They should be thankful for anything thrown their way, even if they'll never be able to afford a house or raise a family on it.
They should be working for the lowest comp possible, just like the founders, chief executives, and the VCs.
P.S. there was a NYT article posted here just a couple of days ago about how it's become incredibly easy to raise VC rounds of $100m+. There's a ton of money pouring into tech right now, and everyone is benefiting, from VCs to chief executives. Except engineers. We're not supposed to enjoy this success, I mean, all we do is build the products.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/technology/venture-capita...
I don't know what world you're living in, but engineering salaries _have_ absolutely shot up in recent years. 10 years ago no engineer was scoffing at making 6 figures straight out of school. I remember being wowed when a friend reported that Google had started regularly offering 105K to fresh grads.
Sure you still have jobs where something of high quality like an OS patch, driver or some big algorithm work needs to be done- But those jobs are rare, and there are often ways to hire such people looking at their prior experience.
Its always hard for freshers to break into the cream software jobs that can offer you some different experience compared to others.
In general you have to take whatever comes along the way and build on that. This is unfortunate, regardless of whatever practice you might have done on leetcode, plumbing like jobs are what are common in the world today.
Respectfully, that's bullshit.
IBM has the money to hire enough people to conduct an actual recruitment process. Then again, I'm the type of person who refuses to work for any company that "process" can and should solve fundamentally human issues. If people are making it through the process with insufficient technical skills, then IBM might as well be setting their money on fire.
If even 1/2 if what OP says is true, then fuck IBM.
You really have to stand up for yourself and be willing to fight in every interaction with corporations, because they will exploit you in every way possible if you let them. And there is very little recourse for wronged employees in today's rigged arbitration arena.
Shocking, a new hire made mistakes
7 years after college, I'm not a noob engineer, I'm a leader on my team.
The way I talk to recruiters has changed as well, and they know what my paygrade is as a result.
A grad doesnt have that industry experience and HR penalizes them greatly for it.
The biggest threat is being a new grad and never changing companies. I know a kid 2 years younger than me making 50k less per year than me.
This "friend" found that any job offers he got always resulted in a pay-grade drop (normally for startups), or working with boring technologies that would not advance his personal knowledge.
--
I know for a fact that this has hurt me with big companies like Google when interviewing there, the last interview resulted in them flat out telling me I have not worked at enough companies.
I personally think that is unfair, as I don't think you know what you have done good or bad at a company if you only stay there for 2 years. I did some checking and found that many software engineer seem to have a chain of companies they worked for 2 or less years. And I could not help to think they have no way of really knowing if the things you did were good or bad in the long run.
Anyways, just wondering what others thoughts are on work patterns, and their experiences.
Personally, I've been a reasonably long tenure at most jobs I've had.
I do think there's a reasonable medium though. If you've been at some big company for a couple of decades and try to switch jobs later in your career, that can be difficult too.
Something you learn quickly in freelancing is no money == no work. It doesn't matter if it is to measure technical ability. Any amount of time you spend not doing something else carries a cost, if companies aren't willing to pay for it early on, why would they respect your time later?
To take the cost of living into consideration:
$100k after tax in SF is ~70k. With 2k in rent, you have ~$46,000 p/a. An "average" grad in London is probably grossing at most $40k (£31k) After tax, that's ~£25k, and in London, you can easily be set back £800/month on rent. So you're left with less than £14,000 which is about $18k. Are you really telling me that to maintain the same standard of living in SF will cost you 2 and a half times more after rent?
100k is not unreasonable for a new grad.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm
Sure its a decent pay vs Walmart cashier, but once you are paid 115, you cannot go back.
He went through an long and arduous interview process, to be rewarded with an offer that is less than 50% than his objective market value. Should he be grateful?
IBM wasted his time and their own.
I don't get this strange reluctance to accept that us engineers are finally commanding decent compensation. You don't see CEOs shaming each other for declining low offers.
Everyone gets paid as much as they can. Why are we engineers supposed to be grateful for anything thrown our way? Are we morally obliged to race to the bottom?
OP is implying that IBM is going for the same caliber of talent as FAANG, then lowballing at the end of the process, after you spent 3 days on site.
I had that happen to me with a different company in the valley so I know how frustrating it is.
Personally I'd expect IBM to try to compete with FAANG, so I also understand the surprise there.
Finally, OP apparently did get his $160k+ offer eventually, so he was right that IBM lowballed him.
The whole OP sounds like dictionary definition of HR dropping the ball, doing everything "corporate style", being out of touch with the market and the candidates, and then making unrealistic low offers. They deserve to be called out.
Moreover, there was an article about how many companies are trying to compete with FAANG for the same talent by providing higher compensation, which corresponds with my personal experience and that of my friends.
Apparently IBM decided to buck the trend.
Then why bother interviewing at IBM at all?
It happened to me personally with another company: well-known in their field, everything they communicated implied they're aware of my current offers and looking to make a competitive counteroffer. Everything goes well...
Then BAM, their offer is 20% less than my lowest outstanding offer, which they knew about.
Total waste of time. So I understand OP's frustration.
There is no way IBM would pay $200K to a fresher graduating out of college. I can't imagine any company doing that. Including Amazon.
In fact if you remove Ad revenue driven companies, I guess apart from Apple, nobody would pay that much.
> The screening interview requires:
> A webcam with a clear view of you and your room
> Granting a tool (admin) access to your computer to make sure you don't cheat
> The screening interview consists of a basic coding challenge and pre-recorded video questions to which you must give a response. Your response must be in video format - it cannot be written. After you are delivered a question via video, you are given about a minute to formulate your response and then are required to narrate it back staring into your webcam.
I'd consider this "arduous" for a very first step. Then the final stage is 3 days onsite. I'd consider that "long".
My scale is other interview processes, not Batman origination stories.
A few weeks go by, and our DBA manager visits the location, and realizes that the DBA is a completely different person than the one interviewed. Same ethnicity, but different person. He had apparently hired the interviewee to perform during the hiring process.
Took us over a month to get rid of him; it was hard to prove that he had acted fraudulently, and the wheels of justice grind slowly.
Between actual costs incurred and opportunity costs, it was a royal PITA. Weeding out these posers can be a problem.
Again, his first step of the process doesn't seem arduous at all. Inconvenient and possibly annoying? Sure. But arduous is the incorrect word choice.
When I was starting out, I had to interview at a headhunting company 2x. Then 2x interviews with the company I ended up at. I would have loved to be put up at a nice hotel during that process instead of having to drive all over meeting people.
IBM is clearly responding to fraudulent interviews, plus signaling two things; that they have enough applicants to impose silly video interview protocols, and that once past the "technical" interview, it's all about schmoozing and politics. These signals tell you a lot about a company.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of other companies hire thousands of candidates every year. Somehow they manage to avoid this SNAFU of hiring someone other than the person who interviewed, without forcing people through webcam processes. Maybe IBM could do the same.
Eh, according to one interviewee, they did this as recently as last year [0]. They certainly did it 2 years ago [1].
[0]: https://www.teamblind.com/article/Amazon-online-test-qtKOvsu...
[1]: https://qz.com/859486/the-ridiculously-invasive-virtual-inte...
Not something I would agree with.
Interviews in those companies are far more brutal, go upto typically 8 - 9 rounds, with an additional bar raiser round. And its a straight reject even if a single person from the panel gives a bad feedback, regardless how amazingly you have aced all the other rounds.
By any measure that IBM interview is a walk in the park.
> You had to ask me for help on what for loops and import statements are.
We're talking about the "best" people here who already completed the coding interviews. I find it hard to believe she didn't know what a for loop is.
- she knew what one was, but had forgotten details of the syntax
- she was panicking (pressure makes people say ridiculous things)
- she knew perfectly well what it was but didn't interrupt his unsolicited explanation
One fresh-out-of-college software engineer spent the first year or so working on nothing but PowerPoints and watching "agile training" videos to improve his score on some kind of IBM social/point system. He moved to actual programming when he relocated to a different office. Then, one Friday, a manager came to him and said his project was shut down, and that he was starting on a new team that following Monday.
When I interviewed at Google, the woman I talked to at lunch (CS PhD) had nothing nice to say either, and she worked on Watson which seems to be their saving grace. She made a lot of the same critiques of the work environment there, also adding that Watson is mostly just a marketing stunt for non-technical customers.
You don't have to be a startup to offer RSUs. FAANG have just as many engineers as IBM, and offer them.
The ordinary people get little to get by. And often the vesting schedule is long, and taxes eat into bulk of it.
This is true even in FAANG. In fact your best bet to get any meaningful RSU grant is to be something like employee number 300 as a Manager at Facebook.
You also need to understand one thing. Promotions are hard to come by in FAANG companies, because generally every one is at least as awesome as you are. So you also stagnate quite a lot in those companies.
FAANGs are obviously not totally equitable, and you won't make a CEO's comp as an engineer, but you will make more than most other places.
Also, I completely disagree with the notion that promotions are the cure against "stagnation". Stagnation has to do with the nature of your work, not your fancy title, height on the corporate hierarchy tree, or for that matter - your pay.
For what it's worth, I find that approach humiliating to the interviewee. It's a subtle way to tell him that they do not value his time as highly as their own.
Personally, I find this attitude against automation (where possible, reasonable and useful) to be almost Luddite-like.
In addition, if you can automate the process, you might even be able to extend your candidate pool (i.e. interview a lot more people, and not rely on weakly-correlated-but-almost-arbitrary signals such as premium university name on the candidates' CVs, but instead select the actually good people).
It's going to be brutal when she has moved out there, spent a ton of time and money to relocate herself, and then gets fired for being unable to do the job she was hired for.
And it'll be all her own fault.
If someone has basic proficiency in any other programming language at all, then learning how to do a for-loop in Python is a trivial matter of minutes to maybe half an hour, in my experience.
Do you think this is a commonly-held view? Honest question, because I know I could pull this off and I didn't finish university (or study CS when I was there). If companies are looking for this level of talent during the application process, I could probably work for IBM without a CS degree but it's not likely they'd even look twice at my resumé.
Part of the difficulty of pullimg this off, in my opinion, is finding that third-party library in the first place, and getting everything working under a time crunch. I dunno, I may have a weird view on these things; I find doing coding competition problems on a whiteboard much easier than actual practical engineering.
I'm sure you could get an interview at IBM if you get an internal reference.
This is the sort of thing that might be alright when IBM does it, but absolutely should not be normalised because you can't trust what people are going to do with that admin access and how it might feed into the hiring process.
> "If you need literally any [disability] accommodation, You won't be getting it"
Again, if this isn't actually discriminatory it's certainly something that shouldn't be normalised.
$100k is fine for a new grad.
8 years ago at IBM, my post doc at IBM Research was around $120K (2010). 10 Years prior to that (while still an undergrad) I was offered a job at the LTC in Austin at around 70K a year (i.e. 2000), turned it down to go to grad school. (yes, I took my time)