Nikunj Soni

An Interview at ThoughtWorks an AGILE Company

No No, I do not work at Thoughtworks where Martin Fowler is chief Scientist.

Besides this what I know about Thoughtworks is, Amazing company to work for.

• Very good in object design and OOP concepts.
• Makes lots of interesting products like cruisecontrol, white, scrum etc etc.
• They mostly work in cutting edge technologies C#, Java, Ruby.

So when I was working at Directi last December(2007), I applied at Thoughtworks.

Procedure for Interview very interesting one, I really loved it.
Here it goes....
When you apply for the job the first thing they do is send u one problem, or may be 2 problems and they ask you to solve one of them or both.

Phase One

I received a mail from them and it had 2 problems.

• The Famous Mars Rover Problem.
• The Famous Sales Tax Problem.

(Search it on Net for problem statements)

• What they look in to solution is how good you are at OOP concepts.
• How good we are at clean code i.e (No or hardly used "if else" or "switch statments") and use of OOP design.
• They encourage small methods and Intuitive method names.
• They also encourage Test Driven Development(J,N,R - units).

So after carefully reading problems, I gave a thought which one to solve and selected "Mars Rover".
I was recollecting how to solve it and just flipped some of the pages of HeadFirst Design Patterns Book from ORelli. and suddenly "State Pattern" Bingo ... I

I solved Mars Rover using State Pattern, and sent them mail.

Phase Two

I got a call from them. I went picking up six O clock bus and reach Pune at 12 O clock and Thoughtworks office at 12:30 Pm.
so when I reached office, I found very cool place to work,

• What I saw was it was big Hall and just Huge Tables and some chairs and some cords on tables.
• There were few PCs on Tables and remaining people were working on Laptops.
• There were Nice Boards with index cards and some of the stickys.
• Some People were Pair Programming.
• There was a Table Tennis table there.
• A Beautiful Lunch Room with LCD Tv and some games. I got free snacks and lunch - amazing concept, snacks were refreshing juices, fruits, cakes, and sandwiches, and nice lunch with sweets.

It starts with an Aptitude Test(Not a regular English and Maths one)
It consists of 11 questions or 11 flow charts questions. You need absolute concentration to solve them. as you have to calculate some values depending on flowcharts.
I got 10 out of 11 dam Interesting one.

Then there's a Pair Programming session, In which they give you one extension in solution you submitted before.
In this exercise One Thoughtworker discusses problem and solution and sits together with us for solving it.
Idea behind this exercise is they get acquainted with us and make us acquainted with company, refactoring concepts, and together solve the problem.
Beautiful concept of knowing the candidate well and hows there approach to solve the problems and how good is candidate at logic and concepts.

Any Guesses I cleared this also with feedback as I have some inhibitions in listening.(there was one stage where I told that guy to solve problem my way and not his and I solved it also. )

Round three with 2 guys from there.
They gave me one problem to solve of card game
Two players picking up cards and one who gets higher card wins
Simple isn't it.
So Classes Goes here as is
Card Class
Player Class
Game Class
Game class initializes Player which constructs Card,
In Game class, it compares Cards and gets winner.
In problem one more condition added, one with lower one wins.
So I took comparing logic out side Game Class and used strategy Pattern with 2 strategies to solve problem.
They were focusing on names of strategy classes and its methods.

So the problem arrived was which card is winner, when I construct strategy object with 2 parameters, should I pass either cards or players and which of 2 is winner first object or second.
So I decided to pass Player objects and decided Strategy Class to return Winner Player Object.
But they said I should not expose Card through Player as it not good OOP concept or it breaks Object Delimiter Property(as if big deal).
Then I said We can use some sort of Icomparer interface and let Card class implement it and So Card compares it self with other one and return whether its higher or lower.
They finally agreed to it.
But But they said I did not gave them solution in first attempt and so Big Reject.

So Guys I really tell you all prepare good OOP concepts and go for Interview, they are very strict in that case.

I got little disappointment as just because of this round I got rejected.

• They did not see my Aptitude 10 out of 11.(It shows grasping power even if I do not know things)
• They did not consider my solution and pair programming.
• They did not ask me any thing about my previous experience and stuff.
• Interview Panel was only focusing on what they knew best without exploring my best..

These are my thoughts,

Any ways It was awesome experience spending day with them and seeing their enthusiasm for doing things and crystal clear Concepts

Great Company to work for and All the best to all Thoughtworkers for all their endeavors