The company had already earned a bad reputation, in my view, after the obnoxious way that some of their staff had behaved at a Rails Girls event a few years ago. I'd put off applying for them for some time because of this as I'd assumed they had a culture of selfishness that would be quite toxic to be around. The main recruiter, who seemed to be phoning it in throughout with emails that looked like they'd been written with AI, didn't improve that perception very much. It was only after the first technical interview that I began to re-evaluate my position - the three technical interviewers were great! Unfortunately, this was in its own way one of the more upsetting things about the interview process as, whilst the technical interviewers seemed like decent, welcoming people who cared about their work, the three culture-fit interviewers were the polar-opposite.
My impression of the interviewers in the culture-fit interview was that of people who are easily intimidated intellectually - not something I expect from technical staff with their level of seniority. The interview felt like a set-up as it was clear that they had made their decision decision beforehand (most likely based on my CV or some other factor) and had chosen to focus on questions designed to prove their prejudices right. They seemed to really want to pretend that someone who had shown an ability to work with others in previous stages of the interview process, answered questions within the culture-fit interview itself that demonstrated pragmatism when performing collaborative work and had literally co-authored a Medium post about pair-programming during the pandemic was somehow too much of a "lone wolf" to work on their team. Rather concerningly, they used discussion of solo projects mostly worked on whilst I was effectively unemployed (in an economy where work is extremely difficult to find) as proof that I preferred working alone so much that I would be unwilling to work with others (despite a clear history of my having done so in a numerous roles). When asked about who would fit in on their team, they indicated that a desire to learn new skills was something they couldn't tolerate so basically, **wanting to become a better software engineer (especially if it's in spite of adversity) actually disqualifies you for a role as a software engineer at Simply Business!**
Ultimately, this is a company with leadership that lies about what they say they want: management will say they want strong collaboration skills but then insist on an interview structure (the "STAR method") that is designed to emphasise individual achievements, they'll say that they value learning but then discriminate against candidates who show a willingness to upskill outside of work hours, they rather infamously claim to provide flexible working even now, after they've deleted the remote working post published on their blog from before the pandemic (it's still visible on the Wayback Machine, to anyone interested). They are the sort of company that will waste three weeks of your life over a decision that could have been made during the CV-screening. Were it not for the dire jobs market, companies like this would rightly struggle to recruit anyone! Now that I've seen the cliquey anti-intellectualism that heads their engineering department up close, I actually feel sorry for the rank-and-file developers who work there as I can't imagine working at a company that selects its staff for perceived incompetence could be good for anyone's self-esteem. It's a real shame because the technical interviewers I met seemed like they deserved way better than this place.