Name and Shame: IBM

The OP doesn&#x27;t focus on this in the post, but they&#x27;re a recent grad with no work experience.<p>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.<p>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 &quot;name and shame,&quot; then the OP sounds a bit entitled.

Disclaimer: not an IBM employee here; I have only interacted with current&#x2F;past employees and these examples are anecdotal:<p>One fresh-out-of-college software engineer spent the first year or so working on nothing but PowerPoints and watching &quot;agile training&quot; videos to improve his score on some kind of IBM social&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t understand with whom they were interviewing.

&quot;The screening interview requires:<p><pre><code> A webcam with a clear view of you and your room Granting a tool (admin) access to your computer to make sure you don&#x27;t cheat </code></pre> which alone constitute a massive breach of privacy, in my opinion.&quot;<p>This is the sort of thing that <i>might</i> be alright when IBM does it, but absolutely should not be normalised because you can&#x27;t trust what people are going to do with that admin access and how it might feed into the hiring process.<p>&gt; &quot;If you need literally any [disability] accommodation, You won&#x27;t be getting it&quot;<p>Again, if this isn&#x27;t actually discriminatory it&#x27;s certainly something that shouldn&#x27;t be normalised.

Strange world we live in where $100k is something to scoff at. I get it&#x27;s silicon valley but sheesh.

This sounds weird:<p>&gt; You had to ask me for help on what for loops and import statements are.<p>We&#x27;re talking about the &quot;best&quot; people here who already completed the coding interviews. I find it hard to believe she didn&#x27;t know what a <i>for</i> loop is.

&gt;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&#x2F;looked cool so her plagiarism went unnoticed.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>And it&#x27;ll be all her own fault.

Actually I like the &quot;automated video interview&quot; idea. Sure, the <i>grading</i> part shouldn&#x27;t be automated (i.e. there&#x27;s no reason why they wouldn&#x27;t accept an answer where the interviewee made a small mistake then corrected it), but if it saves (human) time, it&#x27;s probably a good idea!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;san-francisco-software-developer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,13_IM759_KO14,32.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;san-francisco-software-de...</a><p>$100k is fine for a new grad.

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.

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!

In context of offer as described in the article.<p>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)

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.<p>Something you learn quickly in freelancing is no money == no work. It doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t willing to pay for it early on, why would they respect your time later?

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.<p>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&#x27;s rigged arbitration arena.