What. A. Joke.
I spent more than two months going through the most arduous interview process with IBM. Not because they ask hard questions. No, simply because they are the most incompetent organization for hiring that it has been my misfortune to interact with.
It started in September with a 3-hour virtual interview. That's fine by me. I moved on through. Then over the course of the next 2 months I was scheduled with two phone interviews (none of which were with Data Scientists or taught me anything new about the company or position).
I found out at that point that I had made it through to the last round, something called the Finish Line event. Now bear in mind that the vast majority of companies will screen candidates by phone/video or with on-campus interviews, then bring you in for a day of interviews. IBM eschewed this process in favor of a mandatory 3-day bonanza in the middle of the week. Three days!! That's an insane amount of time to expect people to take off work and school to come interview. I was particularly stressed with due dates for a number of projects going on at the same time. But no matter, it's alright because they're telling us that the Finish Line is for us to come to love IBM; almost everyone will be getting an offer.
So I shrug off the crazy amount of time and go down. What I step into is a complete circus where incompetence, overpromising, and disappointment take center stage. There are technical difficulties the first night as they try and wow us with Watson. Then the next day they usher all the Data Scientists into a room for a conversation with a real IBM data scientist. Only the person in question was not a data scientist nor had he ever been. I discovered later that they had failed to bring one. single. data scientist to the entire event. In other words, I learned nothing from the entire event about the role which they wanted to hire me for (let that sink in). Then there was the TED talk-inspired presentation (the guy averaged maybe 15 words a minute), the self-aggrandizing series of presentations about how awesome IBM is (all delivered by HR and complete with the “Good morning”…”louder!”…”Good morning!” process from elementary school speakers), and a lackluster tour of the Austin campus (it’s remarkable how much they wanted to seem like a Facebook or Google). All the proceeding are centered on the Finish Line Challenge, an event which
But all of this would be forgivable of course (HR is going to be HR), if it wasn’t for the fact that they didn’t actually want to hire folks. I’m not kidding. These people dropped about a cool million dollars to wow us with a three day all-expense paid trip to Austin only to not hire the majority of people. They promised in an e-mail (and at the event), speedy resolution on hiring decisions within 48 hours (while also telling us that we’d only get 5 days to respond). So far they have not hired a single data scientist from the event and have only gotten in contact with a few people to tell them that they have more applicants than positions available and that they’d be placed on a waitlist (not a joke that is the language they’ve been using). Unfortunately, they seem to be forgetting that this is not the college admissions process and that they’re insulting some of the most in-demand college graduates that exist.
I have say that this has been a personally infuriating experience, where my time has been wasted and no apology is forthcoming. It wasn’t all terrible: the highlights of the whole experience were the hotel (the staff were awesome), the people I was placed on a team with, and the IBM engineers who mentored us through our short projects.
