Recently started looking for a new role and even though I have so many open source projects in my GitHub profile, I'm asked to do tech challenges. I spent 4 days in one, and at least a few hours for each other company I've applied to. There were two days last week I haven't slept.
Even though I put so much effort, dev teams seem to take the piss and take ages to provide feedback: someone is on holidays, there's a workshop, the job position opening was paused, etc. I find it immensely disrespectful towards the candidate. The company that I took 4 days to build their challenge only got back to me 8 days later, I got demotivated and won't accept their next stage interview. I've checked some of their Devs GitHub accounts and are empty and have no contributions.
One tech challenge was a cards game; I built something similar 6 years ago, vanilla JavaScript. Unfortunately, with having to build with trendy typescript, react it took way longer; I also do a lot of animations etc so takes more time of course, but still, is just a waste of time.
I think it'll just keep getting worse and there are way better and interesting things to do in life. I'd rather have used the time to help a charity for example.
This is also related with anxiety. After all, at the end of the month the landlord will knock the door and people like me have to pay rent. Time is worth way more then money, I know that. But there's no option regarding the tech tests etc and the time is wasted... and just gets worse if you apply to several positions.
The last challenge I wrote was for a bank. They said it'll take max 2 or 3 hours. But having to write all the tests, a reverse proxy because of CORS etc and typescript, plus the actual business logic, took 12 hours.
Regardless how much money they pay, I'll never get that time back and it's not that I own a house, a car and stuff like that.
Why can't Dev teams ask the candidate to go through an open source project they might have available publicly and explain what they did?