This was the most insane interview process I have ever encountered, and I would highly caution anyone interested in pursuing it, as many people I know have had very similar experiences.

They started off with a 3-hour-long virtual interview. Part of it was behavioral, and part was coding. The coding questions were of moderate difficulty, involving topics such as hash tables and trees. Overall, this was very intense but fair.

I heard back in a few weeks saying I got to the next round, which would involve a technical and a non-technical interview. The technical interviewer asked me questions related to OS (since I was primarily focused on hardware), and the other interviewer asked about things such as location and job preference. Both went well.

I was then invited to the "Finish Line" event. They made it seem that if you went to this event, you would receive an offer and there would be no more interviews. So I went to this 3-day event in the middle of the week. This involved listening to speakers and developing a project throughout. This occupied an extraordinary amount of time; basically, it was 3 days straight of these activities. By the end of it, I was exhausted and just wanted to go home. Nobody I knew enjoyed their time at this event.

However, I was very confident in my performance at the various stages of the interview process. I later received a call confirming this, that I performed well in every aspect. However, they also informed me that there was not a position open at the time and there might be in the coming months. From what it sounded like, I spent all this time interviewing for a position that didn't exist.

Of course, after spending all of this time interviewing with IBM, I was furious. They completely wasted a huge amount of time in the middle of the semester. People I know who received offers were also frustrated by IBM. They refused to tell them the job and location before the acceptance deadline and were basically bullying them in an extremely unprofessional way to accept their offers.

Another one of my friends was promised to be in a certain location when he accepted, and a few months later, they said that he had to be moved to another location, totally upending his plans. I have heard plenty of other stories of candidates being treated very disrespectfully by IBM.

This was a truly disappointing experience for me. I really wanted to like IBM, and I was excited by the prospect of working there. However, I quickly realized how little they care about the candidates and how poorly they treat them. There is no reason a company of this caliber should behave this way, and all of these experiences really show what kind of company this is.

I would not waste my time looking at IBM. There are plenty of other companies of this caliber which have fair and empowering recruitment processes. I wish I had been rejected after the first interview.

What is the difference between processes and threads?