As for the scope of the challenge: that's deliberate, and we're up front about it. If the challenge is going to take you many hours to complete, and doing that work isn't something that lights you up, then it's the wrong role for you. There are candidates that breeze through it, and there are candidates who wrestle with it for a couple evenings just because they're nerdsniped and enjoy doing that stuff. Both those kinds of candidates are super interesting to us! But we're very comfortable with the idea that the job (in this case: infra engineering) isn't a perfect fit for everybody.
I think your hiring process is great otherwise. And yes if someone isn't very familiar with every intersection of stacks there it will take them more time. That is fine too. It shows the person can learn on the spot.
I can't mitigate any bad experience you've had. I fucking hate getting ghosted, and I get a little nauseous when I think about us having ghosted people. But ghost people we have! All I can say is that it's not deliberate; it's just been a lot to keep up with.
For everyone else: my sense is that the majority of people in our process have gotten timely (if not as fast as I'd like) responses from us, but if it's been weeks and you haven't heard back from me, you can hit me up directly. We don't ghost people "communicatively"; that's just not how we convey decisions.
I'm not aware of us pausing any other roles; if they're not listed, it's likely we don't currently have openings for them.
Has it really?
Shall we check your HackerNews comments history and guestimate how much time you've spent commenting on randomness while ghosting people who've spent hours doing work for you?
I'm pretty skeptical of these hiring challenges at this point. It seems that they often require more time than the traditional model and provide worse outcomes for the candidates. For me it was particularly frustrating because I can typically write off the traditional model as irrational but I was drawn to fly.io because they make it seem so much better than that.
This one is much more time-consuming _up front_, but at least it gives you a sense of the job to be done _and_ doing the exercise lets you think through whether you really want that job after all.
By 1h leetcode, I meant the whole yak shaving of classical interviewing, which costs candidate many hours actually (in interview time and prep time).
We don't time our WSTs; it adds cortisol to the process that defeats some of the purpose of simulating what actually working here is like. So, it is the case that people can end up blowing way past our expected time budget working on things. We're not going to stop people from doing that; it would be hard to do, and we're also excited to get candidates who teach themselves stuff as they go. We're up front about this.
From my vantage point, this process is strictly better than conventional interviews. It demands the same amount of time from candidates, but allows the candidates to pick where and when to spend that time.
There is a lot of understandable enmity built up against "take homes" because firms have added them to their existing interview loop, so they become just another hurdle candidates have to clear before running through the same interviews they always have.
With respect to feedback: at some point in our process, we do start giving feedback. It has not been my experience that it is as appreciated by candidates as people on message boards seem to think it is. We've gotten to the point where we try to do a decent job of explaining what the best submissions have in common, and leave it at that. This kind of feedback is more than I'd ever come to expect from conventional interviews, so I'm at peace with it.
Finally, at to again be candid: we got a huge flood of candidates for several roles, and while for the most part we kept up and gave timely responses to people who submitted challenge responses, there have definitely been ticket mishaps that caused people not to get responses --- in other words, we've ghosted people. I fucking hated getting ghosted when I was applying for jobs and am mortified by the fact that we did it too. What I can say there is: we've never done that deliberately, and when we've caught that happening, we've gotten detailed feedback out quickly. So if the premise of your comment is: "submitting a code challenge and then never hearing anything back at all, even so much as a pass/fail, is bullshit", then yes, I agree, it's total bullshit. Not OK at all.
(With respect to the coding challenges we're talking about today: the public ones aren't a part of our hiring process at all! They're just there for people who are interested in them. We do have a related challenge Kyle and Ben worked on, as a post-L3 leveler. It's not a small challenge. But: any candidate that gets that challenge already knows they're getting an offer from us, so we're comfortable making it ambitious).
1. We have someone running infra now that also owns infra hiring, instead of me owning it. Infra is an ultra-important role here and we're still hiring for it.
2. I'm still on the hook for platform hiring, and we've paused it for a couple months (if you submitted a challenge, we're still moving forward! but we're not taking new applications).
I know people on HN don't know these details, but knowing it myself makes it especially goofy to see people calling these challenges an elaborate scheme to recruit people for platform development (which is where these challenges apply).