Stepful has an awful take-home project that is somehow boring, unreasonable, time consuming, and vague all at the same time. The take home only wants the candidate to produce a large number of CRUD loops in a short period of time, and it does not provide engineers with any meaningful opportunity to demonstrate the depth of their knowledge and abilities. It gives a terrible impression of a company that values how much boilerplate code you can write in a few hours.
Stepful also does not bother to explain what criteria they are using to evaluate your work, and does not bother providing you with feedback of any kind, and they do not even bother to communicate with you at all.
As other reviews have indicated, Stepful's take home assignment requires the engineer to create a backend app and a frontend app from scratch. They say not to waste time on an authentication system, but the acceptance criteria require a user to be logged in, so the engineer needs to waste time figuring out their own fake session management method and simply guess at what type of solution is acceptable. Asking candidates to spend hours on a take home project with vague directions is unacceptable and ineffective in that a candidate can spend hours only to fail due to poor directions.
As other reviews have pointed out, the take home also requires the engineer to complete a series of extremely basic CRUD loops. There are no meaningful backend or frontend challenges that would allow the engineer to showcase their abilities. The instructions say that the engineer should only spend three hours on the assignment, but three hours is not even close to enough time to complete the assignment and get everything functioning well. It is even more impossible to actually refactor anything into production quality code in that time frame.
Do not waste your time applying to this company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Create a full frontend and backend app made of several basic CRUD loops in 3 hours.
Call with a recruiter covering past projects, product thinking, and expectations, followed by a technical screen to debug and add features to your preferred tech stack. Overall, it felt like a standard straightforward interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Assessment that involves working through a browser based IDE and fixing and updating the post /api/documents endpoint so documents could be created successfully using json input and returned a proper response. This required debugging and fixing controller strong params handling. Also on editing and persistence, making sure update parameter keys were formatted correctly and that changes made via PUT /api/documents/:id were saved to the database and reflected after page reloads. Also to Implement document sharing via email, which involved a post /api/documents/:id/share endpoint and verifying that shared users had appropriate view or edit access through get /api/documents/:id/view.
I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Stepful
Interview
They have a take home assignment which they warn to do quality over quantity. They list a ton of requirements in which I only did half, and even that was too much. They want it to be production ready, so really only a few endpoints is necessary. Huge waste of time interviewing here.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Take home exam, asking about design and production readiness
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Stepful
Interview
Intro call with recruiter, create crud app from scratch. I pushed back on the crud app because ALL of the other companies im interviewing with don't require me to create a full app. I'm not sure if they just wanted to see candidates use cursor or AI tools unspokenly or what. But, still unreasonable.
I've heard companies that ask this of candidates steal UI/UX design ideas and then just reject them. Don't interview with this company. Preys on desperate candidates to steal ideas and/or waste their time.
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