I see that you're located in the UK. In Europe the hiring process is much different than in the San Francisco Bay Area for instance. Here it's crazy, we don't hire software engineers, we hire "developers" instead, which tells you what people are looking for. We love hackathons and we believe developers dream about code all night long. Since people are coming from Asia, India, Eastern Europe, etc. the environment is interesting. People think differently in general about software development. It's all about hacking rather than designing or thinking high level. Being smart here means being able to crack tough algorithm problems. This is a very old school way of thinking, it reminds me google back in 2000-2005.