Factorial Senior Software Engineer interview questions

My original review was suddenly removed yesterday. My experience from last year: They have an exploitative and unmeritocratic interview process that took nearly two months for some reason. It seemed like they'd built in the delays on purpose where the first stage interview had to be booked a week and a half after their first email which was itself over a week after I'd applied. Though the second interview was scheduled shortly after that, I was then expected to complete a coding challenge that took about a week and a half (working all day and night) to complete. During the second interview, I was led to believe that I could submit any Ruby project (ideally an API) and discuss it in the third interview. When I received the email describing the task it became clear that the expectation was that candidates for the senior software engineering role submit an API and a separate frontend application (2 repositories) regardless of whether they were stronger on the backend or the frontend. The project was expected to collect user metrics and visualise them in some way which implies the heavy use of another third-party library on the frontend and a requirement for authentication on the backend. I submitted a Rails API with Swagger documentation and a NextJS frontend that used an old-ish Javascript library that I had to modify in order to use. So essentially I had to work on 3 repositories for Factorial's take home challenge. I also included significant levels of documentation in my code samples, explaining technical choices made. As you might expect, the third stage interview where I presented my code went really well. I quite enjoyed talking with the staff who were present at this meeting in particular and could imagine working well with personalities like theirs. The final interview however, did not go so well. For one, the job listing said that there would only be three stages in the interview process when I applied, so a sudden fourth interview felt like a bit of a set-up. It was especially bizarre as it was clearly more of a culture-fit interview, something that had already taken place during the second stage interview. I spoke to a member of senior management who seemed more concerned with my work history than my abilities as a developer. In particular he fixated on time spent at a company that I had left during my probation period, one that could be described by some as mildly “toxic”. The interviewer seemed to be of the opinion that if I didn't want to work in a toxic, poorly-run or "bro-y" culture before then I'd be unlikely to fit in at a company like Factorial. He also felt the need to explain the business model of another company that I'd worked at many years ago, as if I didn't already know how it worked. Early on in that interview, I asked if my submission for the coding challenge was what was expected (as I know I have a tendency to overdo such things) and he said that it was what they expected and that he thought the task would take about eight hours. In fact, the coding challenge did not take “eight hours” and no reasonable person would have expected the challenge set to take less than a week for a single developer to complete. Clearly the management team at Factorial have no respect for their candidates' or their employees' time and attitudes like theirs are exactly why developers looking for work should avoid companies that ask for take home challenges like the plague! I received the rejection email almost a week later. The email was littered with spelling errors and claimed that delays had been caused by a company team building exercise. What struck me in particular about the email was the lengths to which they tried to present the whole thing as if *I* just didn't want the job enough. After I'd spent nearly two months going back and forth with them, a week and a half of barely sleeping whilst performing unpaid labour for their elaborate coding challenge - this was all apparently proof that *I* didn't want the job enough! Honestly, from reading some of the truly miserable reviews on here, they're lucky anyone would want to work for them. When it comes to pay, most likely their only selling point is the transparency (because when you know that everyone is on relatively low pay, you can at least assume that you aren't being individually discriminated against). All in all, if you aren't interested in having your time and energy wasted, being expected to constantly self-exploit and you aren't willing to crawl on your hands and knees begging some entitled psychopath for a job then applying here is probably a huge waste of your time!

La entrevista fue bien, durante todo el proceso había un ambiente muy cercano y agradable pero profesional. Sales de las diferentes etapas con ganas de trabajar allí. Finalmente recibí la oferta y todo en la línea de lo esperado, mucha transparencia y gestión de expectativas. Como único punto negativo diría que el proceso es demasiado largo. Tardé aproximadamente unos 2 meses desde que inicié el proceso hasta que recibí la oferta. Se siente un poco frustrante tener que esperar 1 semana cada vez que hay que hacer una nueva etapa de 30 minutos, sobre todo si el proceso tiene tantas partes, como es el caso. Respecto al challenge técnico requerido, es una prueba chula y divertida, pero creo que se podría enfocar en algo que mostrase mejor la seniority de la persona en un tiempo más reducido. Hay que invertir bastantes horas en ella y aunque es cierto que te dan tiempo de sobra (unas 2 semanas ampliables), puede llegar a sentirse lento de hacer (y frustrante si luego no consigues pasar la etapa). En resumen la experiencia fue buena pero creo que se podría acortar un poco todo.