Onset of the college on-campus companies
Although I decided to work on my personal project fulltime during my summer break, I had to sit for college placements, not because I was compelled to but because it was for free! Come on, there was nothing to lose, even if I didn’t want to join any of those at least I would gain interview experience to face the real companies which I intended to apply for later on.
It’s been some months now and given the type of companies which were coming to my college (I am from a tier 3 college) I hardly remember the sequence and names of the companies, so pardon me for that.
The hustle and bustle of the mass recruiters in the beginning days was huge, friends from my college as well as across India were getting ready to face them. They were arming themselves with Aptitude, Logical Reasoning, English & Mathematical problem solving skills, while I was busy ranting how irrelevant those skills are if you want to be a serious coder.
Mass recruiters had devised a unique strategy to hire good coders, they first of all created multiple job titles having different packages, mostly starting from 3.5LPA, 5LPA, 7–8LPA. And the amount of bullshittyness & irrelevance of the test was directly proportional to the package. So, if you had to secure 3.5LPA you’d have to clear the basic test, to secure 5LPA you have to clear some more difficult tests and to get higher you’d have to go through grilling technical interviews or so.
Usually these companies used to come to campus to hire and take the written test offline in the computer labs, but thanks/no thanks to Covid everything happened online and almost everyone aced the online tests(no points for guessing how!). I sat for majority of these 3hr tests and submitted in 30mins-1hr, no, not because I was pro in solving but because by looking at the questions it didn’t make sense to me to waste 3hr of my time wasting solving such questions when I could utilise that time to prepare for another interview or even tailor my resume to apply at a startup or even build another project!
There was one company which paid decent and was offering good internship stipend. I was selected for it based on my resume along with 15–20 others. We all appeared for the first online technical round, I cleared it, and then the 2nd technical round which went really well and it was the longest for me, about 1hr while for others it was just 5–20mins, for some candidates they even got rejected during the interview, when I came to know about all this it was a major red flag because no decent company rejects a candidate on face during an interview. I was rejected in this round along with many other good candidates who had the confidence they would get through, while only 1 student was selected. It was a shocker for many of us, there were unfair practices and bias involved but its their company after all, you can’t really do much about it.
Similar things happened for some other companies too, but I was used to it by then.
So, by now I had skipped major mass recruiters and couldn’t get through a good one, while I skipped all the < 3.5LPA or > 1 year bond ones directly.
There was however 1 good company which I was impressed by, it was a healthcare company. Their interview round was really cool. They gave a link to a portal which had 3 questions to be solved within a stipulated time, it didn’t have compiler or test cases, you had to write pseudo code in any language of your choice, they only cared about your approach + there was no web camera or any proctoring.
I know what you’re thinking! Everyone would copy from Google, right? But here’s the twist, the portal recorded each line of your code, so if you were to copy and paste, the recording would show sudden appearance of the entire code at once! Guess who’s disqualified now?
I couldn’t clear this one either 😆 but this was the only company where some really deserving students got through and only 1 of them was offered an offer.
So summing up, I didn’t like the hiring process of majority companies, especially mass recruiters, and the other smaller companies which treat employees as laborers by chaining them with >1yr bonds and meagre salaries. With the advent of remote work and free coding information on the internet, opportunities have increased by leaps and bounds, so no student is bound by opportunities offered only by their college, they are only chained by their goals.
