Thought Machine Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in August 2018.

Interview

Chat on the phone -> chat with the team -> 48hr coding challenge -> face to face interview. Everyone was nice and it felt very fair. The part where you chat with the team was valuable.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in August 2015.

Interview

The process consisted out of 3 steps. The first was a group social event, where me and other potential candidates met in the Thought Machine office. We got to chat with the employees. The CEO then gave a brief presentation of the company. Afterwards we moved to a nearby pub, where we continued our conversations with our potential colleagues.

I was then invited to complete a coding challenge at home (I had 48 hours to complete it at a time of my choosing).
For the last part I was invited to an on-site interview. This included: a code review of my challenge, an algorithm question and finally a system design question. All in all it took less than 3 hours.

The process gave me a chance to assess the company and if I want to work for them.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in April 2019.

Interview

CV Screen -> Social (meet with engineers, listen to talk by CEO, AMA with CEO) -> Coding Challenge -> 3h On-Site (Code Review, Algorithm interview, System Design; 45min each)

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in March 2019.

Interview

The interview process at Thought Machine is quite unique and it’s good in my opinion, because it allows you to get to learn quite a lot about the company, your future colleagues and the product, before joining. It starts with a phone chat with a recruiter, then a social event with a presentation about the company where you get to meet some of the current employees (everyone is very friendly and helpful in answering questions about Thought Machine), then a take home coding task, then a 3 part on-site interview and possibly an on-site chat after that.

Make sure you brush up some of the basic algorithms and data structures before the on-site interview.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in March 2019.

Interview

(Software Engineering Internship)

Applied via email and was given 48 hrs to complete a coding task in either Python, Java or Go. The challenge was fun and didn't take too long. Focus on readability and test it properly. Also make sure you've fully understood the task. They're going to run their own tests so make sure you can run custom inputs etc.

Booked an on-site interview for the following week. There were three parts; 45 minutes of code review, and two hour-long technical questions (interviews for more senior roles have one technical q and one system design q).

Technical questions were as you'd expect and involved a lot of whiteboard scribbling. It was my first time using a whiteboard and my writing was completely illegible. Give CCI a skim and sharpen up on hackerrank. Interviewers were all very young and very friendly, most of them had only been employees for less than a year and were recent grads. They were very chill so have a laugh.

No behavioural questions or HR chats. There was a brief CV quizzing before the code review. They were interviewing lots of people at the time so the process was very streamlined. After the third interview I was escorted straight to the exit! This was fine as I'm all for efficiency, but it would have been nice to have been told when I could expect a response at the least.

Application

I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in March 2019.

Interview

Applied online, stating my minimum salary requirements on the application.

They then scheduled a call the next day.

In the call they just asked for my salary requirements again. I gave the same answer obviously, they said they could not afford me. Call over.

Waste of time, just send an email next time?

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in September 2018.

Interview

They call you for a social event, that is a trick to collect a banch of people to advertise the company. If you think that you dont have the skills for the job avoid, Its a fake proccess.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in July 2017.

Interview

Interview process consisted of the following:

- Pre-screening telephone interview with a recruiter.
- Social event at the Thought Machine offices after work. Candidates get the opportunity to listen to a talk from the CEO (Paul Taylor) as well as speaking to existing employees at the company.
- Take home coding challenge.
- 3 round final interview including a whiteboard algorithm exercise and a System Design question.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in March 2019.

Interview

They process starts with an evening event that you have to go to meet team members and listen to founder or CTO, I found the format interesting but time consuming.

After that they send you a “three hours” code challenge (which I am sure any senior dev would need around three days to fully complete it), for me it was a fully working and production ready calendar app, I took it as an opportunity to practice and spent 16 hours coding it (it’s a three hours challenge but they give you 48 hours to complete ha ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), I wrote some tests but did not aim for 100% coverage because that would prove nothing about my skillset and the whole challenge was already unrealistic, also, the hard part was in sorting and positioning the events.

If you code is good they call you for a three hours interview, first hour to review your code, second algorithms and third systems design, each hour with two different team members.

The interviewers were mostly good besides two, first hour was ok but they complained I didn’t test the app much (bummer), second part was a couple of intelligent algorithms to test my JS/FP skills (very nice guys), third hour was hard, one of the interviewers was inexperienced and quite self-centered and focused most of his energy on asking the same systems designs question over and over, he didn’t know how to nudge a candidate right, nor to realise the candidate may not know the answer he is looking for and that instead he should move on and empower the person to solve other challenges. (By the way, even though it was the first time I was exposed to the specific problem I did provide a workable solution which wasn't excellent - hard to excell without research opportunity or good interviewer).

I receive a feedback and they decided not to move forward because my app wasn’t fully tested and I failed in advanced systems design.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied in-person. I interviewed at Thought Machine (London, England (UK)) in October 2018.

Interview

Call with an external recruiter, last minute invite the same day that the company has a social event without learning something from that. They just want to advertise the company without learning something specific for them, neither for their clients nor for the role itself that you are a candidate. They send a code challenge to complete in 48 hours, for me was to create a calendar day, and apart from the fact that they ask you to not publish your code anywhere, either in your personal github account, because someone could find the solution(I am laughing), their feedback through the recruiter was that the code wasn't strong enough and thats it. Something to mention is that on the instructions they say we want just an html,css and a js file.
Bad experience and waste of time the whole process.

Interview Questions