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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/technology/venture-capita...

> 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.

The article was about VC funding for startups. Has comp at startups improved that much recently? Not to my knowledge.

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.

The salaries they are quoting are market for the top tier. IBM is not the top tier.

100k is below average for a software developer in the area: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-software-develop...

And new grads make below average, because they're below average in experience. What's your point?

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.

> 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 agree it was a little much to complain about the offer, but it was not competitive at all.

Considering OP could have spent part of that 3 day retreat looking up what new grad salaries are at IBM.

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