My interview involved 3 stages: 1. Initial telephone call with HR / internal recruiter 2. Online pair programming exercise 3. Simulation day which had 3 rounds: 1. Daily standup 2. Pair programming on the existing code base of their application 3. Cultural card game After the initial phone call with recruiter, it was an online pair programming exercise. I really enjoyed pairing exercise with one of their developer online via video call. Once after you pass the online pairing exercise, I was invited for next face to face interview at their London office for the thoughtworks simulation day. 1st round started with daily standup and picking the in-progress item card from the scrum board, and then continuing to pair programming exercise from one of their existing code base (as oppose to the 1st round, where I was doing it from scratch). Pair programming exercise was scheduled for 90 mins and I had 2 of their developers with me to join for pairing exercise. Initial challenge was, me trying to understand their code base which had proper test coverage (that was good) and secondly to understand the requirement and making decisions quickly. However, I didn't get to progress much with the coding because constantly the other 2 developers were bringing me into discussion on why we have to do it this way. Which was fine, at that moment, my thoughts were, may be this round is about the soft skill as I demonstrated my coding skill on the first round itself. Therefore, I was explaining why I think we have to do this way and so on. Constantly they were cross questioning (when I managed to convince one guy, then there will be another question from the 2nd guy), then I decided it to use the white board and sketch there on what we trying to do. Which gave bit of clear idea and to bring all of us into one picture. It was about 90 mins while we wrapping up with discussion and hence made little progress in terms of doing actual code work. At the end of the pair programming exercise, we were having general chat on what could have been done and how it could be approached. I was also trying to find more about them (interviewers). One of them was doing this interview for the 2nd time after a long gap of over 1 year and for the 2nd person, this is the 1st time he is getting involved into interview process. I am not sure whether I approached the problem wrongly (definitely I could have done it better) or is it because of more than one person on the pairing exercise, who weren't aligned to each other on what they expecting out of this session and that put me in a sort of confused state and didn't allow me to do actual coding. The 2nd round was cultural card game for 60 mins. This is to understand more about me as a person. Questions were like, how do we deal with people coming from minority community and what if some of my team mates not comfortable being around them? My past experience, where I had regret and learned from the mistake (not necessarily at work but in other places as well)? and so on. Really enjoyed the 2nd round and every time when I tried to link my answers related to work or work experience, the guys will stop me and instead wanted me to think of something outside the coding world. Not many company does this round and it really shows that thoughtworkers put lots of emphasis on people culture and who they recruit. Saying that, I didn't get through the interview because of my 1st round experience.

When through HR, asked about mainly day to day on my current work and about agile methodologies. Also asked about my tech stack that I used on my current project