Moving to the US (more specifically New York) was in my agenda for a few years and early 2012 due to some family circumstances me and my wife finally decided to make the move. At the time I was working for Readify, which is one of the best software companies in Australia, and I didn’t want to leave an awesome company and join a mediocre one: that was one of our biggest considerations.

Wanted to work in New York and looking for an awesome company, the first and the last that came to my mind was ThoughtWorks. I have been following ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorkers for a very long time and I always thought it is an awesome company. Just to make sure, I did some research including a fair bit of googling plus checking LinkedIn and GlassDoor. On LinkedIn I found quite a lot of people who have been working for ThoughtWorks for many years - a few for 17 years! That was a very good indication. I don’t want to work for a company with big staff turnover. I found a lot of positive feedback on ThoughtWorks done both by those who have worked at and with ThoughtWorks which was very reassuring. So I applied and the interview process started!

I did five phone interviews with seven people. I was interviewed by a great range of people including technical staff, ThoughtWorks’ directors and market principles! Some of the interview questions were rather simple and expected and there were quite a few questions and discussions I did not expect. I also did a coding puzzle that took me a complete day to finish and even at the end I wasn’t happy with my solution but I had to submit as I started a bit late and was out of time! I did a pair programming session with two awesome programmers which I found very challenging and there were also two rather complex but very interesting logic tests to be done.

ThoughtWorks considers their interview to be their signature process and according to Forbes ThoughtWorks is considered the hardest tech company to get into. I must admit that this has by far been the most challenging (and at the same time the most interesting) interview I have been through.

Anyhow, after almost two months of interviewing, one morning as I was going to work I got a call from my recruitment manager at ThoughtWorks and was given a job offer! … but did I accept the offer? Oh, yeah :) In fact I am writing this post at the ThoughtWorks office in New York!

I feel very lucky to have made it through the process and very honored to have joined ThoughtWorks. I also feel way below average compared to people I am working with. For example Aaron Swartz, who co-authored RSS 1.0 specification at the age of 14, is sitting next to me right now! Well ok, maybe I am sitting next to him ;-)