Strange world we live in where $100k is something to scoff at. I get it's silicon valley but sheesh.
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.
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.
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.
100k is not unreasonable for a new grad.
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?
Sure its a decent pay vs Walmart cashier, but once you are paid 115, you cannot go back.