Name and Shame: IBM
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
$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)
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?
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.