Summary -
Interview(Good) -> Negotiation(Bad) -> Outcome(Ugly)
Details -
Had two rounds of interviews with the hiring team. Both rounds were pretty good. I really liked the way the interviews were conducted and the types of discussions we had.
The interviewers were reasonable and fare in the overall process.
After two rounds, I had an HR interview, received an informal offer, I tried to negotiate a bit and then the company rescinded the offer. I was shocked by this behaviour and still unable to understand the outcome.
I was not directly communicating to the hiring team, the recruiter involved didn't try to understand the requests I was making and was getting increasingly impatient.
The inflexible attitude and the unprofessional behaviour from them will not help the company.
Higher management needs to take a notice of this and/or similar incidents and educate the recruiters.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Discuss the approach to an infrastructure problem.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at BlackBerry (Vancouver, BC) in Jan 2024
Interview
First off, BB will force you to apply via their online system, which forces you to upload your resume (nothing unusual there), but then asks you to enter a reason for leaving every job you have had in the last 10 years. After that horrible task and all that work, you get to the end of the online application system and it asks you to agree to allow BB to contact any previous employer and ask them any question they want. For me, I had put so much work into the online system already, that I just went along with it. But if I knew about this dubious agreement at the start, I would have not applied.
Next the recruiter calls to talk about the location and salary range. There's no hybrid or remote work at BB. The salary range in January 2024 in CAD for the Senior Developer role is 100k to 120k. I mentioned that I was earning that range in Vancouver back in 2007, and the recruiter said, yeah, it's a junior position and none of the individual contributor roles pay very well. Apparently it's all about having some kind of management role at BB if you want "normal" pay levels.
After establishing that our expectations are too far apart the recruiter actually asked out loud if I know any junior developers suitable for the senior developer position!
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at BlackBerry (Waterloo, ON) in Sept 2022
Interview
The whole process took exactly 30 days. I spoke with the recruiter about this opportunity and also discussed my compensation expectation.
Next was a 1-hour video technical interview with 3 folks. After this, was another 1-hour video technical interview with the hiring manager and a principal engineer. Followed by an HR video interview. They told me that the compensation numbers will only be revealed after the background verification. But my recruiter called a few days after and told me that the numbers she got are way less than what we had agreed upon initially and I did not proceed with the background screening.
It's just bad practice to put a candidate through the interview process and later say we can't pay what you asked when it was made clear right at the beginning and agreed upon.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions about my current role and few coding questions.