HackerRank

• Getting to work directly under the CTO, Hari (he's cool and a nice person to work with).
• Diverse range of projects to work on.
• If your project is to be built from scratch, you are given quite a lot of freedom to choose the right technologies to work with.
• You will definitely get to learn a lot if you are a student developer starting your career.
• Besides a good stipend, the additional benefits given to the interns are great.

So the biggest red flag for me was how the salary negotiation was carried out at the end of the internship. I was given an offer, and so were half of the intern batch. The calls were one-on-one with the HR, where you are expected to quote your desired salary figure. After that, the HR tries to talk you down from your salary figure, citing reasons like COVID and the market, which is fine, but it all ends up becoming a bit manipulative. At the end of the call, you are told not to discuss this offer with anyone, otherwise it will be revoked.

For me, it's a red flag. I like companies where salaries at every level are public inside the company for all employees to see. But at HackerRank, if you try to discuss salary, everyone gets skittish. There is no transparency in that regard.

In the follow-up call, they told me that I was one of "the brightest intern" and they wanted me to keep working under the CTO. The salary they offered me was 15 lakhs, which is fine, but I knew that there were other interns getting 16-17 lakhs. Again, it's okay if you want to pay me less, but you have to give me concrete reasons why I am being paid less than my peers for the same job title. It's a bit disrespectful to think that the intern might be stupid enough to be unaware of what's going on with their fellow interns.

Because of this and a few other reasons, I declined their offer.

Be open about salaries. The ideal way to carry out the salary discussion would have been to talk to all the interns one-on-one, get their expected figures, and then offer everyone the same package, albeit lower considering the market conditions.