We don't really give individual feedback on the take home challenges. Where we struggle is explaining this to people, it's not obvious to every dev _why_ we don't give specific feedback. Here's what we send:
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Unfortunately, we’re not going to be moving forward with your application for the backend role at this time.
The first thing we want you to know is that we got a lot of applications for these roles. Like, a lot a lot.
The way we evaluate candidate submissions is that we’ve built, over a year or so of running this challenge, a written rubric for what the strongest submissions look like. We started with something sane looking, and then iterated over time as we got a sense of what candidate submissions actually looked like.
We score submissions according to that rubric. Different members of our platform team score different applications; they’re just jumping in and looking at the code and making grading decisions. In the pool of candidates we’re evaluating right now, your code submission missed our cutoff.
A natural thing to want from us next is a copy of the rubric, or specific information about what your submission was missing. We’d want that too! But we can’t give that to you, for (at least) two reasons:
(1) The outcome on your code was a weighted combination of a bunch of different factors, so there isn’t a simple answer that doesn’t just dump our whole rubric to you.
(2) We want to preserve the opportunity for people to apply to these roles in the future, and spoiling the challenge would break that.
What we can tell you is that the most successful submissions had a combination of these attributes:
- Heavy user focus. Successful submissions explained how the system could do good things for users.
- Straightforward database models that make the queries we care about fast to run.
- Transactionally safe sync with Stripe. For example, the best submissions mentioned that Stripe API requests had to be idempotent to ensure the user is not charged multiple times.
We sincerely hope you stay in touch and re-apply in the future. In the meantime, we'd like to give you some Fly.io credits to play around with! If your email address here matches your Fly.io email, click here to get them. If not, please let us know which email you use for Fly.io and we'll set that right up.
Please feel free to reach back out to us about other roles, or about this role in the future. Thank you, again, for doing this.