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Comment by MangezBien | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I applied to DO about ten weeks ago. I had an initial phone screen, and they sent me a code challenge. I completed and turned in the challenge. Then I heard nothing for two weeks. I reached out to my contact there, and she got back to me a week later saying, "I've been waiting on feedback - sorry it's taking so long! I just pinged the manager again this morning." That was the last I heard from DO.

I feel like I wasted the half-day I spent on their code challenge. I don't expect a job, but a simple "Thanks but no thanks," would be nice.

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Consider yourself lucky. DO seem like a bunch of clowns. I'm not saying there aren't good people working there b/c I'm sure there are but by and large as an organization they are clowns, management recruiters etc. I think it was about a year ago that most of their ops department up and left. That should tell you something. It's not known as a great place to work(heard form ex employees) And if you consider their business model - a race to the bottom it's not surprising.

Nice. I had the same experience with DO last September...The same month Braintree asked me to write a ruby project that took about 3 days and then on the call only asked about python sqlalchemy database queries. I don't know what the disconnect is with these larger companies and their HR staff? By the time that third one asked me to write a node.js rest api from scratch. I just chuckled and said thanks for your time...I doubt I will commit more than a few hours in the future to any throwaway project for just a call back. Why can't we get paid for the time spent writing sample code like a freelancer...If it isn't good enough pay for my time (up to a max) and both parties can move on. Time is more valuable than the risk of getting passed that initial callback/more screens.

You should send them an invoice.

Yep, companies are really abusing the take home. A long time ago, when I was actually bothering with interviewing, I would ask for $1-2K depending on the size of the problem.

If it was about 10 hours, $1K was usually OK. I never had a problem asking for this, but the problem is that so many companies are doing it now that they cannot afford to pay everyone.

Yeah I ignore jobs that ask for these screens. I've spent a lot of time on them and then not heard anything.

When I'm adding to my own team I would rather talk to them about code than have them do these screens. It's more holistic and I get more of a sense of how they think. If I'm going to give them a code challenge like this I wait until after the phone screen so I don't waste people's time.

After having this happen a few times during my job hunt a few months ago, I decided I won't do any take-home coding tests if they take more than 2-3 hours. Even if you get great feedback on your work, there's still a very high chance that the company will just go radio silence on you. This seems to happen especially frequently with smaller startups.

Ugh, I have a take home assignment from them to do, worried the same thing will happen to me :/ I don't want to waste the time if they don't get back to me..

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