I provided my resume and cover letter, and received an invitation to perform a take home coding challenge. I did well on this, and was flown out for an interview. The interview consisted of a conversation about my prior coding experience followed by a 1-hour coding challenge in C. I got almost no sleep the night before and so did poorly during the whole interview. However, in addition to this, their interview style was bombastic and unnecessarily stressful. The interviewers were very poor communicators, and as a result the questions they asked were fairly confusing and difficult to answer. They rapid-fired questions at me, and were clearly expecting cookie cutter answers. When I tried to clarify their questions or provide context within my answer, they blurted out the answers without letting me finish my own and looked at me as though I was an idiot.
The hour coding challenge wasn't too difficult, but it was a lot of questions to finish within a short time period. There were about 10 questions in C, but you were expected to type these out in a text editor without the ability to compile the questions. I don't know what this is supposed to prove, because I've never written code without compiling it and writing tests. It was like the equivalent of having to write code in Microsoft word. Shortly after this interview, I interviewed with Microsoft. Not only did they let me compile the code that I wrote, they gave me two hours to complete 5 problems of roughly the same difficulty. FutureX seemed to value quantity over quality for these questions in the sense that they gave no consideration to time / space complexity and were really testing for knowledge of sometimes obscure edge cases.
Ultimately, I feel that I was not offered the job because I was not used to writing code without the ability to compile it. Overall, I feel like I would have problems with their management style because it was obvious that they were the type of company which would be very inflexible with expectations, while simultaneously being extremely unclear about what those expectations might be. I am not at all surprised to see that other reviewers feel that the company is basically a boys club. That being said, it does seem like a cool company, with a good product, nice campus, and interesting projects. But honestly, I've never run into anyone who feels that arrogance and poor communication equate with professionalism. Ultimately, I feel that their interview process did a poor job of assessing my abilities as a candidate, although I'm definitely bitter that I didn't perform well as a result of sleep deprivation. Either way, I was still glad for the opportunity to interview and check out the company and don't feel that it was a waste of time in terms of gaining interview experience.