weareelectricals.com

I’ve noticed the company We Are Electricals have numerous complaints online. A lot of people think they’re running a scam, they’re not a real company, etc.

They are a real company. I should know, they interviewed me for a web development job (or rather, Turn90 did, but I don’t think there’s any difference between Turn90 and WAE, or any of the other companies that operate out of that office). They are a real company in the sense they have an office and they interview people for jobs which are presented as being legitimate jobs. They are not a professional or respectable company and they appeared to be run by and employ only 20-something year olds, but they are real.

They are the only company I have ever been interviewed by who never bothered to contact me after the interview, ironically after stating they “weren’t like other companies” and would “definitely let me know one way or the other” (which struck me as a bit strange…). They are also the only company who have kept me waiting about 10 minutes for an interview because the lead developer (or whatever his title was) was too busy chatting to some girl whilst the second interviewer was sat there apologising awkwardly to me.

The interview was alright in the sense that nothing terrible happened, but their interview skills were bad. They seemed largely uninterested in my technical abilities, or to rephrase, my general competency. Usually at interviews, I find a perverse pleasure in having a nerdy chat to someone I’ve never met before, but with WAE I didn’t really get that feeling. I didn’t find that they were people who cared a lot about what they did. If I am interviewed by a developer, I expect him/her to be genuinely excitable about the technology they use. I expect them to see programming as an opportunity to be creative and to create something useful or innovative. That’s why I do it. That’s why the web team at the company I now work for does it. We don’t do it just because we’re paid, we do it because it’s fun and we enjoy it. As a result we make high quality stuff. But that particular vibe was completely missing from my experience with WAE.

And this is evident in their totally awful web design. I mean, seriously, who thinks that having the entire viewport taken up by banner images is a good idea? Who thinks that horizontal scrollbars in a 1024×768 browser window isn’t a complete show-stopper? Not to mention the numerous rendering peculiarities. I simply couldn’t put my name to a site like that in either a personal or professional context. It’s just amateurish.

I view the whole thing as a close escape. Most of these complaints have only sprung up recently and WAE would look really bad on my CV.

I don’t know if they really still exist though. I walk past their office every morning and there are never any lights on, although maybe I’m a little too early.