I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Fora Financial (New York, NY) in Jan 2016
Interview
This entire company is based upon a software system built by a single programmer. At some point, John Pelaschier was hired as a tech manager or "director of architecture" to grow the software team. At the time, I was interviewed they had already hired on developer and were looking to hire another.
1. I had a phone interview with HR.
2. I had a phone interview with John during which he asked me a couple of C# questions.
3. I was called down for an in-person tech interview during which I was asked some database and SQL questions as well as some other stuff.
4. I was called down for another interview to meet one of the company co-founders.
5. I was left hanging with no follow-up.
It's so frustrating that employers have no problem asking you to devote all that time and energy interviewing but can't bother to give you a simple "no, thank you" phone call or email. In this case, I actually called HR a few weeks later to "inquire about the status of my application" and I got some phony response like "we're interviewing some others and we wouldn't want to keep you on hold".
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The other dev kept silent throughout the interview but on my way out, he quickly followed me to ask the following very important question: "Do you have experience with MVVM?"
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Fora Financial (New York, NY) in Mar 2024
Interview
Contacted Via recruiter, sent resume
Initial interview was about 30 to 45 mins on camera; Interview with a senior dev and an architect, mostly done by the senior dev; casual (interviewers were in T-shirts). Asked generic questions about SOLID design principles and dependency injection (DI). Asked detailed questions about Unit testing and my experience with Unit testing and also got into detail about entity framework (EF) and optimizing queries with EF. Questions and expected answers appeared scripted due to their language and non-verbal queues as well as lack of clarification of unclear questions.
After the interview, I was emailed a coding "Challenge", which was actually a homework assignment. The assignment instructed me to connect to a government agency API, download and persist public financial information, and then provide an API end point that returned some of that information after doing some calculations on the persisted data. The assignment seemed very similar to the product and type of work that applicants were interviewing for which can make applicants concerned about providing free work. The instructions seemed a bit unprofessional and had ambiguous descriptions of requirements.
The feedback I received for the homework assignment was "they were looking for more of a foundation for an enterprise application"
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Fora Financial in Mar 2024
Interview
A recruiter phone screen, tech interview with a lead and manager, a take home assignment, and a follow up on the assignment to discuss it.
The HR recruitment team is downright rude at worst and bored/unhappy at best. They have extremely rigid compensation ranges with zero room for negotiation. I countered their offer with a < 10% ask above what they offered, just to get me up to near what I'm making now, and they flat out denied me. They said I was told the ranges up front and expectations were set. They didn't try to negotiate at all and for only a few thousand dollars lost me.
They are used to paying India wages as all of their current employees are low paid contractors. As they are expanding their engineers to hire in the US I know I won't be able to work with any other talented engineers since their recruiters are so bad and their pay ranges are so low.
To make things worse, they claim to be "required by law" to do a pre-offer background check, which checks employment records and references. They will not give an offer without using your references! New York has a law that disallows them from performing criminal background checks but nothing which states that they MUST perform an employment background check before giving an offer. This is a horrible practice and not a legal requirement. They should be sued for misrepresenting the law. If they want to do pre-offer checks that is their right, but don't lie and claim it is the law requiring them to do so.
So now I've used my references on this company, received a low offer, and got nothing out of it. When I pushed back on the background check they said they checked with their legal department and were forced to do so, which is a lie. But I went ahead with it anyways and they said they had no other candidates in the pipeline and were "very serious" about me and wanted to move forward. I didn't realize there would be zero room for negotiation.
I replied with a very cordial email stating that we should take a break from negotiating for a couple of days and they could let me know if they were still interested, but received no reply.
I only feel back for the engineers working there which are trying to build a US based team. Good luck!
Interview questions [12]
Question 1
Can you tell me the importance of dependency injection and why it's used.
I applied through other source. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Fora Financial (New York, NY) in Jan 2024
Interview
The interview process was straightforward: a video technical interview and a take-home assignment. The interview was with a director and a senior developer. The questions were reasonable and the take-home was a little involved but not onerous for a senior dev. The instructions indicated they expected it to take 3-4 hours, which I suspect to be an underestimation for anyone trying to do a thorough job with test and edge case coverage, by a factor of 2-4x.
If they had provided substantial feedback on the take-home, I would have rated the overall experience neutral/average, but I was given a single vague note of feedback, which was disrespectful of my time.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Are you familiar with SOLID Principals? Do you have a favorite?
Senior Software Developer applicants have rated the interview process at Fora Financial with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 20% positive. To compare, the company-average is 47.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Senior Software Developer roles take an average of 17 days to get hired, when considering 5 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Fora Financial overall takes an average of 15 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Fora Financial as a Senior Software Developer according to 5 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 25%
Group panel interview: 19%
Phone interview: 19%
One on one interview: 13%
Background check: 13%
Other: 6%
Presentation: 6%
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