I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England) in Jun 2016
Interview
The process consisted of three stages.
The first was an informal event where the CEO gave an overview of the company and took questions. At the event, prospective candidates as well as current employees attended and mingled. I thought this was a brilliant idea since personally I find the environment and the people one of the most important aspects of any job. This allows the candidates to have a first-hand insight into this and talk to the employees and find out what working at Thought Machine is really like, as opposed to just reading company snippets online and chatting to recruiters. Everyone seemed sociable and smart which encouraged me to pursue the application further.
The second stage was a take-home coding task which took several hours to complete, but I was given 48 hours to complete it at the time I found convenient. I found the problem quite fun to solve. The task was then reviewed by Thought Machine engineers and I was invited for the final stage.
The last stage consisted of three on-site interviews. All were technical interviews with Thought Machine engineers. The questions were challenging, but everyone seemed friendly and welcoming and I enjoyed the process. I received my offer a couple days after the final interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The coding challenge was interesting - not very difficult to complete correctly, but required some thought about handling different cases and applying proper software engineering principles to produce production quality code.
There were three final in-person interviews. The first one was a review of the coding task with some feedback and a discussion and further exploration of the problem. The second one was an algorithmic problem to solve and produce pseudocode for. The last interview was dedicated to designing a system and its components and talking about its details.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England)
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter. Went through two calls, one with recruiter and one group presentation with a C-level executive. Then, I had an offline coding challenge which took 4 hours to complete. Afterwards, I had a virtual on-site with three calls: one code review, and two algorithmic challenges. After a few days, I was called back and received an offer. After signing an offer, the company also does a background check on your profile.
Overall, I'm very happy with the process. COVID-19 had impacted my employment status, so it was great to receive an offer from Thought Machine. The process was also really smooth, and the company seems to have no trouble transitioning to a 100% remote hiring process.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Coding challenge in building an object-oriented solution.
I applied online. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England) in Jul 2020
Interview
My interview process was as follows:
- Phone screen with a recruiter
- Take-home coding test (48 hours)
- 1 hour coding review
- 2 1-hour algorithms interviews
The coding test was pretty standard for a take-home test, it's up to you how many of the 48 hours you want to put in to get it up to your standards. The interviews that followed were all back-to-back with small breaks. For the coding review make sure to prepare on how you would deploy or scale your solution and brush up on the technologies involved. Leetcode makes good practice for the algorithms interviews, but the interviewers were very helpful throughout.
Overall my experience was very positive and the recruiter who was handling my application process was very nice and checked in with me throughout! And you can tell Thought Machine gives a lot of value to good engineers.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England) in Apr 2018
Interview
The process at Thought Machine begins, uniquely, with a cultural test - essentially a drinks & mingling session with some current developers and other applicants, with a talk with the CEO halfway through.
They then decide if you would fit in culturally there before sending you a 48 hour coding challenge. If they like your solution, you are then brought in for 3 final back-to-back interviews with their engineers - a reivew of your code; an algorithm task; and depending on your experience, either another algorithm task or a system design task.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They wanted to know why I structured my solution to the at-home coding task the way I did.
