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    Thought Machine Reviews

    Updated November 20, 2018
    12 reviews

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    4.4
    StarStarStarStarStar
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    Approve of CEO
    Thought Machine CEO Paul Taylor
    Paul Taylor
    12 Ratings

    Employee Reviews

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    1. "A great start for a recent engineering graduate"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Anonymous Employee
      Current Employee - Anonymous Employee
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time

      Pros

      Interesting work, very engineer driven. Fantastic atmosphere and community, extremely welcoming for people of all levels.

      Cons

      Work volume/pressure can be quite intense, depending on what area you work on. Still a few start-up style kinks to work out.

    2. "Fantastic place to be"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Anonymous Employee in London, England (UK)
      Current Employee - Anonymous Employee in London, England (UK)
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (More than a year)

      Pros

      - strong culture
      - lots of autonomy in role
      - bright, focused and brilliant colleagues

      Cons

      No real cons - only the normal challenges of working for a scale-up business

      3. Join the Thought Machine team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. "Fast-paced engineering haven"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Site Reliability Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Current Employee - Site Reliability Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (More than a year)

      Pros

      - Learn from top engineers.
      - Work with cutting-edge technologies.
      - See the impact of your contributions.

      Cons

      - Rapid growth can sometimes be disruptive.
      - Limited work-from-home policy.

      Advice to Management

      As the company grows rapidly, ensure the needs of employees don't fall by the wayside. Invest in human-resources, and work toward a more inclusive company culture.

    4. "Top place to work"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Back End Engineer in Old Street, England (UK)
      Current Employee - Back End Engineer in Old Street, England (UK)
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (Less than a year)

      Pros

      - Great company culture
      - Working with really smart people
      - High pace and having real impact on product and company
      - Great tech stack
      - Amazing package overall

      Cons

      - Can be stressful, having a lot of responsibility early on

    5. Helpful (5)

      "Interesting but not for everybody"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Former Employee - Developer in London, England (UK)
      Former Employee - Developer in London, England (UK)
      Doesn't Recommend
      Negative Outlook
      Disapproves of CEO

      I worked at Thought Machine full-time (Less than a year)

      Pros

      Modern technology, a fast pace of work and a super-keen team.

      Cons

      Frequent crunches, inexperienced management, and unproven product. A great many needlessly proprietary components: The company suffers from "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and may be accumulating technical debt faster than it can be paid back.

      Advice to Management

      Focus on security, stability before anything else. Normalize the working day and address issues of work-life balance.

    6. "Great culture, fast growing heavyweight company"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Backend Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Current Employee - Backend Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (Less than a year)

      Pros

      Great projects, a lot of responsibility

      Cons

      Pay is relatively low compared to other Fintech companies

    7. Helpful (9)

      "An empty box"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Anonymous Employee
      Current Employee - Anonymous Employee
      Doesn't Recommend
      Negative Outlook
      Disapproves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time

      Pros

      You will be surrounded by really smart people, and the location of the office is great.

      Cons

      You will have no work/life balance. 'Voluntary' events are mandatory, and there is a strong drinking culture. While there are some really bright and awesome people, generally, their talent is being drowned by a bunch of youngsters without any life experience and the wisdom which comes from this. Diversity is extremely low, even for a tech company.

      Advice to Management

      Work on the work-life balance and invest in processing both technical and social debt; people are working themselves straight into a burnout and hard questions about overtime should not be whisked away. Invest in diversity, we can do better than this.

      Thought Machine Response

      Nov 8, 2018 – Chief Design Officer

      Thank you for your honest feedback. As a rapidly growing tech company we are putting every effort into making our culture world class. If you are still working at Thought Machine then please pop by... More

    8. "Great, friendly place to work with cutting-edge technology"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Software Engineer
      Current Employee - Software Engineer
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (More than 3 years)

      Pros

      - Working with cutting edge technologies and modern architectures, e.g. Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, etc. It is a great place to understand how these tools are deployed.
       - Friendly environment; people are always happy to help and explain various parts of the system if you ask.
       - A very social group; there are frequent social events, like LAN parties, pub outings, sports events (football, basketball, running...).
       - Solving interesting problems in the banking industry and genuinely changing the way retail banks operate from a technical point of view.

      Cons

      - Work can sometimes be chaotic (requirements might change quickly), though this is better compared to 1 or 2 years ago.
       - Things move very quickly, it can sometimes be overwhelming when so many code changes go through.

    9. "Highly talented team working on an interesting problem"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Software Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Current Employee - Software Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (More than a year)

      Pros

      - There is a huge amount of Engineering talent in the company with great people from a variety of backgrounds - making it a great place to learn.
      - The technology stack used is cutting edge and modern. You get the opportunity to use interesting tech.
      - A significant number of founding Engineers previously worked at Google. As a result of this, many of the better Google practices were transferred over and adapted to Thought Machine.
      - Building a cloud native core retail banking platform is a genuinely interesting, challenging and potentially lucrative problem that has the potential to change the industry.
      - Culture throughout the company is excellent and there are a good range of events to get involved with.

      Cons

      - The current nature of the retail banking industry means that projects are long running and it can take time for code to hit production (this is not due to the Engineering practices at the company). This should hopefully change over time once more banks switch over to Thought Machine's main product, Vault.
      - Requirements can be at times ambiguous meaning that Engineers often need to take the lead on what should be done (not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion but significantly different to corporate environments I have worked in previously).

      Advice to Management

      Focus on maintaining the high standard of employees and the cultural feel of the company as we continue to expand aggressively.

    10. "Great Culture and Highly Skilled Team"

      StarStarStarStarStar
      • Work/Life Balance
      • Culture & Values
      • Career Opportunities
      • Comp & Benefits
      • Senior Management
      Current Employee - Back End Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Current Employee - Back End Engineer in London, England (UK)
      Recommends
      Positive Outlook
      Approves of CEO

      I have been working at Thought Machine full-time (More than a year)

      Pros

      - Very smart, capable team - a great learning environment
      - Friendly, sociable people - collaborative, interactive atmosphere
      - Company makes sure to maintain fun culture and hire the best people and these aspects are considered important by the senior management
      - Engineering-friendly culture, relatively little process overhead
      - Good software engineering principles being used and enforced within the company and being acknowledged at all levels (testing, code reviews, continuous delivery etc.) as well as state-of-the-art tools and practices being used
      - Good work-life balance
      - The main business problem being addressed is a complex one and therefore yields a lot of interesting engineering challenges to work on

      Cons

      - Remote working arrangements are sub-optimal and not fully fleshed out, there could be better support for this. However, AFAIK this is something we're working on.