Applied through an employee referral.
I was invited to the office to meet a group of employees in an informal setting. This happened in the form of a lunch meeting with 2 principals, 2 senior engineers and 1 managing engineer. There was no agenda for this meeting, just a lunch and discussion on my research work at Stanford. The meeting went extremely well and I learned from my referee that exponent was very interested and there would a more detailed and structured interview session with senior and junior members of the firm. Since the lunch meeting was pleasant enough, I agreed to a job interview.
As a European Non-American citizen PhD student, I asked whether they would apply for an H1-B the following year and the HR representative said that they would "evaluate it". I asked her what that meant, since this was a somewhat important detail that they hadn't mentioned previously and probably would not have mentioned at all if I hadn't asked. She said that the company invests serious resources in it's employees, so they had to make sure that the employee was good enough to merit this. Ok, but the H1B visa is unrelated to company or employee performance, it's required if you want to work in this country. It's not a bonus, raise, negotiation, etc ... it's a prerequisite. So that was puzzling. I told the HR lady that I already had other interviews and I would only consider Exponent if they filed for a work visa. She said that "they would discuss". Very well.
The interview with the current employees was straightforward. The "technical" questions that they asked were so simple, any undergrad at Stanford could have answered it. Questions were based on the following topics, but involved minimal thinking and very just ridiculously simple:
1. Fracture and stress intensity factors in cylindrical thick-walled vessels.
2. Fracture in rods.
3. Trusses and force and displacements at nodes.
4. Buckling of columns.
5. Tensile stresses and strains.
6. Design of fluid valve.
The overriding aspect of the interview was this:
"Can you work long hours, work on weekends, work through holidays, work whenever needed irrespective of personal plans".
I was amused by the fact that every single employee asked a version of this question and warned me that everyone worked extremely long hours at Exponent, almost as a sort of subliminal "RUN AND DON'T LOOK BACK".
When it was my turn to ask questions, I asked: "Why should I work here?" and nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. The answers took the form of "we do interesting work", "you will have lot's of variety", "we provide career growth", but nothing substantial. If you interviewed at the local Whole Foods, they would give you the same exact answer.
I asked "What if I can complete the assigned work in 30 hours instead of 40 hours"?
Answer: We work on a billable hour schedule, so if you complete the work quicker than promised, we lose money. However, you can always complete the work earlier and carry out career development activities but charge the client for 40 hours.
Apart from the ethical implications of this practice and the obvious dishonesty of charging someone for personal work, I was struck that employees HAD to bill more than 80% of their non-overtime work-week to get ahead. This means that you had to bill more than 35 hours a week out of a non-overtime work-week of 40 hours. However, since this is impossible unless you know everything about everything, you end up working 60 hours a week and bill 35, for a net efficiency of just over 50%.
The salary offered for this job was $97,000 base salary with a bonus based on overtime. Umm ... that's not bonus, that's overtime. When I pointed that out, the HR lady said "Well, it's more than your base salary so that's a bonus." Excellent reasoning! Total salary after putting in 50 hour work-week every single week = $121,250.
This is a fairly average number for the bay area, but at what cost? You are working late every night, putting in at least one day every weekend to earn a dishonestly termed "bonus".
Evaluation criteria were remarkably murky for a technology company ... no straight answer on how they evaluated employees. Essentially based on how much you could get the senior employees to like you.
For the wrap-up interview with HR, I made it clear that I would not be able to consider this offer, unless they applied for an H1-B right away and had the possibility to apply for a green-card in the near future.
Overall, I did not think that I was a good fit for this white-collar slavery like, non-performance based, unnecessarily elitist company with a reputation for high turnover and limited growth prospects.
