Payroc Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It was a very one-sided interview process. The first interview involved a lot of OOP questions, but there wasn't any time left for me to ask questions. They didn't put much effort into getting to know me, and they never explained anything about the company or the role. The whole interview process felt impersonal, with communication only through generic email addresses and no actual person involved. After the first interview, I was given a take-home test to build a Layer 4 Load Balancer. The instructions were only about three sentences long, extremely vague, and I only had 72 hours to complete it. There were no acceptance criteria or specifications provided. After spending a significant amount of time developing my very first Layer 4 Load Balancer, the second interview required me to spend 70 minutes explaining my solution; it didn't seem like they even bothered to read my code. The interviewers didn't even appear knowledgeable about the language the role required (C#), and I had to explain certain language features I used in my solution, which shouldn't have been necessary. And after the audacity of not even reading my code and solely relying on my 70-minute explanation (unlike every other take-home test I've done where they actually read my code beforehand): I still had very little time for my own questions, no explanation of the company or the role, and they had the nerve to reject me afterward without any feedback. When I followed up for feedback, I was told my solution lacked unit tests, even though I was never asked to include any and only had 72 hours to complete the task, so why would I add unit tests??? Absolutely ridiculous. They showed no concern for my time at all. And yet, I still see them hiring for many roles. Please don't waste your time with this company; they're looking for unicorns.

It was a remote interview on Teams. We talked about my experience up to now. They asked the usual 'above and beyond' question. Then we got into technical stuff and how I approach projects. Monitoring and resilience came up, as well as some database design scenarios.

So there were three parts to the interview process. First up was an initial screener that lasted about 45 minutes. They wanted to know what I was up to and why I was looking to switch jobs, and then they asked some quick technical questions. After that, I had a technical audition where I had a couple of hours to design a system for a specific task offline. Finally, there was a follow-up interview to discuss the technical design and how to scale it. Both of these interviews were pretty casual, and the interviewers were nice. Some questions were tough, but it didn't feel like they were trying to trick me.