Form3 interview questions

tl;dr: Challenging, educative, and fun Step 1 - Initial Interview: Had initial phone interview with one of the company's recruiters. Topic was my background mostly as well as the position itself. Interview was pleasant, brief (30mins) and on-topic. Had the opportunity to answer a lot of my questions through it. Step 2 - Coding Test: Was given a coding test without a time limit. Estimate was 4-8 hours; took me ~20 hours. Topic was to create a REST API client in Go. Overall level was average. Coding-wise I'd consider it an easy case. What I liked the most was the many different aspects you'd need to take into consideration; from infrastructure to documentation to implementation etc. Depending on experience and the assumptions I had to consider, the implementation time could have been ~10 hours. There were some things left up for interpretation on the assignment, but I found this part to actually be the challenging one and I enjoyed it a lot. Step 3 - Final Interview: Duration was 1.5 hours. Interview was split into 3 one-on-one 30min sessions, with 3 of the company's senior software engineers, respectively. First part - Info about form3 tech and brief code assessment of my test: We had an interesting discussion around my code, going through decisions I had made while implementing it. All comments were valid, I agreed with almost all of them, and got the chance to explain why I did what I did. Second part - Knowledge check: Basically many questions around specific topics of interest, where I was asked to expand on in some form of Q&A style. I hadn't expected the topics, but the interviewer was very collaborative and willing to have some sort of discussion going on around those. Final part - Debugging case and Q&A: Went through an interactive debugging case, which I enjoyed A LOT! I had expected something completely different and that was definitely a pleasant surprise for me. Was challenging and fun at the same time. Afterwards there was time to discuss around some questions of general interest that I had and the interviewer was willing to prolong the session a bit, in order to answer to all my questions. Overall: I got a very nice vibes from all 3 members of the team and I could definitely imagine pair programming and in general collaborating with any of them. Each one had a different personality and seemed to have different experience level and area of expertise. It was a balanced mix of people and content and I really enjoyed it. Finally, the recruiter herself was very friendly, helpful, and easy to talk with throughout all steps of the process.

I was initially contacted through Hired by one of the internal recruiters and it sounded like an interesting role. The recruiter told me the next stage was to write a client in Go to interact with one of the Form3 APIs. It was made clear to me that not knowing Go wasn't a limiting factor and just to do the best I could. The test itself wasn't particularly challenging in itself - the need to learn the idioms of Go proved more challenging. I think the key is to treat the take-home test as a way to show your approach to solving a software problem; don't overthink or over-engineer it but also try to ensure it's of quality and as accessible as possible for the reviewers. Successful completion of the test puts you up for a video call with the 3 separate engineers. In my case, the first interviewer stepped through my code with me and asked where I could have improved it, asked me to explain my thinking in other areas and gave me an overview of the Form3 platform. The second interviewer asked me a series of questions that probed my knowledge of distributed systems and general software good practice. We also discussed the merits of remote working and he inquired how I would get on with it. There seems to be a genuine interest in making sure it would be a good move for me. The final interview was arguably my favourite - I'd been woken at 2 am with a platform failure and now had to work out the issue and resolution. The interviewer was mindful of the fact this was the first time I had seen the platform. Top tip, as with most interviews, talk openly about your thinking and ask questions - nobody solves issues in isolation so don't try to do it any differently here. Overall, an enjoyable and relatively straight forward interview if you have the aptitude and level of experience for the job.