I have never applied for this role, in fact, I have been invited by the internal recruiter to this sort of social event where you can meet with the team, have a general chat and attend the company presentation given by the CEO. At first I thought it was a quite interesting format, albeit a bit unusual, but I decided to accept the invite, also because I was mildly interested in their technology.
The day before the social event I made a little research on the company and the second result on a very popular search engine using the company name as a keyword, was an article that stated that the company went into administration not too long ago and, on the day the article was written, they had signed no clients yet. Needless to say I got a bit suspicious but I decided to attend the event all the same.
I got to the event where I was greeted by one of the employees, who gave me a badge with my name printed on it and also took a picture of me. I asked but the purpose of the picture was but I didn't get a clear answer.
I then started chatting with the current engineers. I have to say they were all very nice guys, happy to answer all my questions about their tech stack. Although, not sure if it was only a coincidence, but pretty much all of them had been at the company for at most one year. Most of them two or three months.
Then the CEO gave us the company presentation. He talked about his past experiences with other companies, why he decided to start Thought Machine etc. He seems to have a lot experience in this field and I'm sure he possesses many qualities but charisma is definitely not one of them. I would go as far as saying that it was one of least engaging public speeches I have ever attended.
He has been challenged about the administration subject by one of the guys that attended the meeting and replied saying that it was fabricated news. I am not sure what the current situation is at present but this information is publicly available on The London Gazzette and is dated January 2018.
He then went on saying how they're growing bigger and bigger every day, even though they haven't gone live yet and it's not clear how many clients they have signed. All of this with a not so confident voice tone. I have never been to a multi-level marketing meeting, but I somehow immagine it would be a similar experience.
After the speech I hanged out a bit more with the engineers and finally met some more senior people (two years at the company). Again, all of them were very nice and it was interesting exchanging views on programming language paradigms with them. Although I didn't get the feeling that they had strong Python knowledge, which is supposed to be the core language they use. I started talking about concurrent programming in Python with one of the senior engineers, specifically asyncio and he thought I was talking about a web framework.
The day after the interview/social event I received an email quite early in the morning saying that they did not intend to take my application further as they thought my past experience were not very relevant.
No big deal at all as I am not brave enough to leave a permanent position for a company that is (or at least has been not too long ago) in administration and a CEO that doesn't come across as a very convincing person, although I found it quite bizarre because:
a. I haven't been asked any specific question during the interview/meeting.
I made it very clear what my background was beforehand but I have still been invited to the event.
b. I haven't even been tested on programming skills or asked specific question related to the position (back-end engineer)
I can only assume they evaluate people just going by their gut feelings.
TL;DR
Sounds like an interesting company at first. People seem quite nice. Not reassuring news on the web about the company (went into administration on January 2018) and it's not clear whether they have gone live yet or not or if they have any clients at all. Questionable ways of evaluating people
