Annoying automatic emails, they feel they are written fully by AI, pushing the candidate to do a camera and screen-recorded 90-minute technical challenge ASAP.
The challenge itself doesn't make any sense, it relies too much on DOM functions that 99% of us do not use at work, felt like I went back to 2010 or even before jQuery was a thing... and if you don't know a specific function that gets the response structure you want from a DOM component, then you waste too much time and it will be not enough to complete the challenge.
The challenge doesn't really test your React skills because the custom hook they tell you to create must use all these functions you need to create using DOM functions.
They want you to do a solution done their way as they already have tests that must pass according to their solution.
I believe that if the candidates provided their own solution, it would be a much better way to evaluate the candidates. I think what they are doing is using the tests to automatically dismiss the candidate if a single test didn't pass.
This challenge is feasible to be done in 90 minutes only by the people working there already, and if they want someone from the outside to join, that's not how the challenge should work.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Find top level readable nodes by parsing HTML (yes, really)
2. Get the height of the first line of a paragraph from an element
1 Long take home coding project that you had 90 minutes to do. Was very complicated and asked a lot. Followed the rules that was outlined in the email but did not pass.
Take home coding project that you had to do in 90 minutes. Consisted of some challenging problems, but you don't have to answer all of the perfectly. It says to use the time wisely to lay down some good answers to as many problem as you can.
I applied online. I interviewed at Speechify (Dublin, Dublin) in Jul 2026
Interview
Applied online through linkedin, instantly got an email about a technical interview that needed to be scheduled.
The initial technical interview is a screening interview where you are required to share your screen and use your webcam. There is nobody in the interview with you.
I was given 90 minutes to clone a repo, setup the local environment and then read through the task list of 5 tasks. The tasks themselves are essentially what you would be assigned as a ticket to fix bugs and optimize. However for someone who wants to figure out the codebase first before tackling tasks, having a 90 minute countdown is not helpful. They are essentially having you do the job of a developer but from day 1 with zero onboarding.
They did allow AI usage but I am not here to be tested on my prompting ability, so I left after 30 minutes and did not complete the assessment
Personally, its possible that this role was out of my capabilities, or it was just not meant for people who prefer to fully understand a codebase before making changes without relying on AI
1
Speechify interviews FAQs
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Speechify with 3.6 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 35% positive. To compare, the company-average is 52.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 18 days to get hired, when considering 49 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Speechify overall takes an average of 19 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Speechify as a Software Engineer according to 49 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 39%
One on one interview: 21%
Phone interview: 16%
Background check: 9%
Other: 4%
Presentation: 4%
Group panel interview: 4%
Personality test: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 2%
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