I would like to share my experience, involving some issues and unfair treatment I experienced while working with the company Nokia. My issue reports were largely ignored by the staff of the local branch I worked with. The branch is in Wroclaw, Poland. I tried to send a letter to Taras Lukaniuk, the head of the Wroclaw branch, but apparently, my letter was simply redirected to the HR department.
I encountered issues during the recruitment process while applying for an open position and during my participation in the Nokia Academy.
Until July, the Nokia branch at Wroclaw had been having trouble with providing access to the ‘Job Offers’ page on the Website of the company at https://en.nokiawroclaw.pl to would-be employees. The link ‘Job Offers’ on the main page was broken and following it led to the 404 error (Page Not Found), thus preventing potential candidates from finding information about currently open positions at Nokia. It makes one wonder why neither employees of Nokia at Wroclaw nor potential candidates had ever noticed and reported this problem before. Nevertheless, the problem was dealt with only after I had reported it when I was applying for an open position.
On 1 July, I applied for a position as a C Developer via the Website https://nokia.taleo.net. I checked the application status regularly, and saw that the Submission Status was changed to PRESCREENING starting from 6 July, with a message ‘Thank you for your application. The Global Recruiting team is currently reviewing your file’.
At the same time, when I made my application, I also reported the issue with the ‘Job Offers’ page in my e-mail letter to the recruitment team (recruitment.wroclaw@nokia.com). However, I received no answer, and, as I could see, the issue persisted.
A week later, I wrote them another letter asking whether they had received my previous letter. I got a reply from Lukasz Wojcicki saying that they did not see any issue and everything was working as it should. Naturally, that answer did not satisfy me, so, in the next letter, I wrote more details about the problem. The next day, the same person replied that it was then clear what was wrong and the issue had been reported. Soon, the problem was indeed solved.
I kept waiting for an answer to my application, and on 20 July, I wrote a letter, and someone from the HR team, replied that the current position is only applicable for those who are currently studying at a university, and that my application is illegitimate since I have already graduated. Apparently, the decision on my application was made on 6 July, if not earlier. However, even a month later, I could see that my application on the Website still has Submission Status: PRESCREENING; ‘Thank you for your application. The Global Recruiting team is currently reviewing your file’. I think it would be more sensible if someone from the HR team updated the submission status on the Website when they made the decision, or somehow notified me about the decision they had made.
Then, I wrote about these issues in a letter to Taras Lukaniuk, the head of the branch, but apparently, my letter was simply redirected to the HR department, which was no use. Piotr Knapik, a member of the HR department, replied that they valued my contribution: ‘We do truly appreciate this and take it into consideration’. He suggested me to join Nokia Academy (C++ programming), which was about to start. The best students who finish the academy are recruited by Nokia. It looked promising, so I decided I should apply. On an introductory lecture, there were nearly two-hundred people.
On 24 August, there was an entrance exam on the platform ChallengeRocket.com. During the exam, participants experience technical problems preventing them from performing well.
One would expect Nokia to organise a new test some other day when the technical issue is solved, but on the next day, a letter from someone from ChallengeRocket.com arrived saying that due to the technical problems during the test, everyone was qualified to participate in the next stage of the academy. So instead of planned one hundred people, up to two hundred participated in the following lecture.
It was surprising to see on the test difficult questions related to C++, considering this was supposed to be an educational program for beginners in C++. I think it would do more sensible if Nokia tested candidates on ability to actually program, to write code, to solve problems. I suppose most of the people who joined the academy were not good enough in that to pass all the upcoming interviews and get employed by Nokia. Most of them just waisted their time.
This stage involved self-education via a set of e-learning modules developed by Nokia employees and accessible through ChallengeRocket.com. It lasted until 9 September.
During the first video lecture, it was obvious that the presenter had rather poor Internet connection, and many people were complaining that they were having trouble understanding what the presenter were saying.
The e-learning lectures and texts were not particularly good, requiring students to search for additional educational materials. The lectures and the tests (both questions and coding exercises) were written in rather poor English. All video lectures were in Polish, and, honestly speaking, some of them were mostly boring. The quality of the ChallengeRocket.com platform (a Polish company) is pretty low, and it surprises me that Nokia people have chosen it to host their e-learning materials and tests.
While studying the e-learning modules on ChallengeRocket.com, I spotted many issues in the learning material: typos, logical errors, etc. Since there is a button ‘Report an issue’ on every page of every module, I was reporting the issues in that way. By the end of the e-learning stage, I noticed that none of the issues I reported had been fixed. I wrote Aleksandra Sandurska, the Project Coordinator, a letter asking whether they received my reports. In response, she wrote that those issue reports from the Website are not received by Nokia trainers, and she asked me to send her the issues by e-mail so she could forward them to the responsible people. A bit surprised by the fact that my reports were not received by anyone, I collected all the issues I could recall and sent them to Aleksandra Sandurska. She never replied, and, as I can see even now, nothing from what I reported has been fixed. I find such an attitude of the Nokia employees quite disappointing as I waisted my time once again. I would like to emphasise the fact that that despite these e-learning materials were used in the academy for years, no one from participants tried to report those issues — they might have reported them on the Website, as I did initially, but it does not seem as though they went further and contacted anyone from Nokia staff responsible for e-learning texts and tests.
The third module, teaching about Exceptions in C++, did not provide opportunity to test your knowledge and understanding of the material just learned. It contained merely one exercise, which naturally resulted in poor performance on the exam. In the previous two modules, there were plenty of exercises and questions. After the exam on Exceptions, I review the leaderboard and saw that most people scored not many points showing that the questions and problems given on the test were difficult, and little time was given. In fact, only one participant scored more than 50% of possible points for that test. Although it is great that Nokia provides e-learning for free, the quality of the Exception module was rather low. I had no problem with the first two exams (‘Linux and Tools’ and ‘OOP’ modules), where I did great.
As for my results on the third module, I did not manage to score many points due to the above mentioned poor educational materials in that module. I would not say the questions were terribly difficult — it is just that there was given too little time to answer them. During some video lecture (or somewhere in the text), it was said that the simple questions would be given 40 seconds to answer, while questions involving code would be given 1.5 minutes, if I remember correctly. Nevertheless, the code questions on the actual test were only given 40 seconds. I am pretty sure most participants, when they did not know the answer to a question, simply were clicking on a random answer, hoping to choose the correct one. I, on the other hand, did not do that: I simply left questions the answer on which I was not sure about unanswered, because I think it would be cheating to try to guess the answer.
During the forth and last exam on 9 September, all participants experienced another technical issue, which were causing significant delays in interacting with the platform. In result, most of the questions were not counted or were skipped.
The next day, Anna Lagodzinska sent all the participants a letter saying that the results of the last (failed) test would not be considered when calculating the total amount of points. She also told us to wait for a phone call as those who got most points would gat a short phone interview in the following days. It was also said that the result will be known by the 15 September.
I was sure I could score as well as I did on the first two exams. I am also sure that had the last test not had technical issues and had been considered when calculating the total points, I would have had enough points to participate in the next stage. I think it was unfair to finish the e-learning stage without testing the knowledge acquired in every module because of a technical issue. After all, the technical issue was not my fault. It would be more fair to arrange another test on STL. I do not understand why Nokia staff decided not to do so.
Like everyone, I hopefully waited 5-6 days for a phone call from Nokia, but no one called me and I received no letters from Nokia. On 16 September, I got a message from Aleksandra Sandurska saying that I was not accepted to the next stage. I wrote Aleksandra Sandurska a letter asking about the reason of not being invited to the next stage, but, once again, she never wrote me back.
In the end, some Nokia employees proved to be irresponsible and unreliable people. At times, it felt like Nokia employees treat the Academy participants as second-class citizens.
Only about sixty people were to be invited to participate in the next stage, which means most of the initial two-hundred people, including myself, were excluded. Honestly speaking, I feel like I just waisted my time.
I wrote a letter (on paper) describing my experience, and sent it to the head office of Nokia in Finland, but they never replied.
By the way, while I was visiting the Nokia Website at https://www.nokia.com/, I encountered several usability/accessibility issues. I thought to report them, too, but, after my previous experience with Nokia, I’m not sure if there is a point in doing that.
Modern World Affairs 