Questions d'entretien chez Information Risk Management

Had a convivial telephone interview with the Recruitment Manager. He seemed a nice guy and described the company in glowing terms. However, having read some of the realistic and negative reviews about this company, it paints the picture of politics and overwork and under-appreciation. [Aside: I've been in IT for 30 years, and in web development for half of those. I've worked as a contractor and permie, and wherever I've contracted 9 times out of 10 the client have asked me to stay on as a permie.] I was advised by the Recruitment Manager not to overdo or gold-plate the tech-test submission. It was meant to be a demonstration of my ability in the development language alone. The tech-test was deliberately vague on the expected approach/methodology outside of demonstrating some ability and an understanding of object oriented development and automated testing. I had niggling doubts. Even so, I put a question to the Recruitment Manager regarding an approach and didn't receive any advice until after when the test was submitted, and that advice was unhelpful. The dismissive feedback I received from one of the Bulgarian developers (more about that below) via the recruitment agent was a series of criticisms, which judged me poorly on the basis that I didn't provide the solution in a way that was expected, over and above a knowledge of the development language and the ability to produce object oriented code. There was a disconnect in that I wrote my tech-test product in a Windows environment, which the Bulgarians weren't interested in emulating in order to see if my front-end product or unit-tests worked. IRM have recently acquired Altran, a product written by mostly Bulgarian developers, and they're hiring numerous developers to take on and enrich the product, which makes a compelling argument that IRM eventually want to take the product fully in-house and release their reliance on the Bulgarian developers. So it is in the Bulgarian developers' interest that IRM find no one good enough. Having been around the block a few times with interviews, and experienced a few where the existing staff felt threatened or didn't want to retire, I know when I smell a rat. My suspicion is the Bulgarian developers have set a deliberately vague tech test with no real indication of what approach or methodologies they want to see, so that they can fail them. Beware of what you're walking into with this company. All is not as it appears. And if the Bulgarian developers are acting this way with tech-test submissions, then imagine what it'll be like to work on their product without support and obstructiveness. Don't think that's possible? Read some of the non-5-star reviews.