We're working on societal problems that impact millions of lives in meaningful ways. That kind of change doesn't come easy.
We want people who are passionate about our mission and passionate about solving those problems. People who will persevere through the inevitable bumps in the road. When your company is forged in the crucible of the healthcare.gov turnaround, willingness to fight through adversity is deep in its DNA.
For the people not passionate enough about our mission to tackle the code challenges, what good would a phone call first do? We'd just end up using 30 minutes of your time to figure that out and say "No thanks." That doesn't feel very useful or respectful of your time, at least to me personally.
Each solution turned in takes about 1.5-2 hours total of our engineers' time to review. It's a meaningful commitment since we see no revenue for that time. It's worth it to us to weed out those with a "spray and pray" application model right up front, so that we don't keep asking our engineers to spend meaningful time on candidates who aren't really interested in us.
Our hiring process isn't going to be everybody's liking, and we're going to miss out on some great folks because of that. It's just a cost of doing business. No hiring model is perfect including ours.
But, our experience has shown that the cost of deterring the multitude of minimally interested candidates to allow us to put more resources into reviewing the passionate candidates has been worth it. That trade-off wouldn't work for every company, but it's been useful for us thus far.