It’s been ten years and I am still mad at Facebook. Post phone interview on Friday I was given a code challenge to complete over the weekend. When I submitted it on Monday I received a response immediately “The team has reviewed your resume and decided to not move forward. We will not be reviewing your code challenge. Feel free to apply again in one year.”

I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and you could have at least glanced at it. Or at the very least lied to me.

> I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and you could have at least glanced at it. Or at the very least lied to me.

This is why coding challenges are an immediate dealbreaker for me these days. If I’m going to do a project to showcase my skills, you can be sure I’m going to put my all into it. Getting ghosted after that is insulting beyond words.

Put me in an interview setting and I at least know that it’s time-boxed and the interviewer is losing just as much time as I am.

That just sounds like an attempt to save both of you time (elapsed time, from interview to offer, not time spent) in case your phone interview did do well.

After the phone interview, somebody needs to write it up, a hiring committee needs to look at it, and then they can decide whether to move forward or not. If they give you the challenge after that it's easily another week.

Frankly I am surprised they gave you a full response on Monday after a phone interview Friday, that's actually quite fast given all the steps and people involved.

I went and looked up the emails. I submitted my code challenge at 9:45pm on Sunday central time and received the response at 2:18am Monday. Couple hours, and a strange time to get a response. I suspect the recruiter was not US based.

Given that the job was supposed to be west coast based, I have to imagine they’d made their decision on Friday.

Probably an auto rejection.

Would've been courteous to get a decision back to the candidate on Friday. Somebody didn't care enough.

I have been burned like that before.One time it was probably a days worth of work, but split over evenings of my free time took longer, so I didn't finish it.

Another time it was as if some junior developer was circle jerking. Whining about the most trivial things (a couple of whitespace errors in Pylint, not returning JSON when they had requested a "page without styling", Not adding a setup.py, when they didn't ask for it. )

> Or at the very least lied to me.

It sucks that they requested work from you that was not necessary, but would you really prefer that they lied about it?

I'd say they mismanaged the situation, but at least were honest about it.

Absolutely. If they had told me that the code was total garbage in a snide tone followed by derogatory remarks about my mother, I would be over it by now. I am a very forgiving person.

Having me do two days of work and immediately throwing it in the trash without even glancing at it is the far worse insult.

The reward is a pay increase (hopefully) and a delightful 6 months before you realize the new job has the same problems as the old job, then 18 months of stress while you try to change things, and then you get to do it all again. What's not to love about a system like that?

Do your thing I guess. The results will speak for themselves. Just know that even in the mid-2000s (when the market was red hot) there were all sorts of hurdles you'd have to go through to get a good gig. A lot of that involved doing work "for free".

A little hustle pays dividends long term. It's much worse in other industries.

"A little hustle pays dividends long term."

Only if you're lucky too. Hustle by itself means nothing.

You're not wrong, but there is a large spectrum of success out there. It's not like you get only "one shot, one opportunity" (Eminem) or nothing. Yes there's also a spectrum of the work/reward ratio and sometimes it's skewed in a crappy way. For some people it's too easy and for some people it's too hard

Point is that reaching upper middle class and higher is totally feasible no matter your walk of life as long as you keep the hustle going. Success could only happen in one's late 30s though.

(There are of course overriding factors like having an abusive childhood or something like that. Systematic discrimination plays a big part too. But that's outside the scope of this particular thread)

"Point is that reaching upper middle class and higher is totally feasible no matter your walk of life as long as you keep the hustle going."

It's also unlikely, even just looking at it statistically.

Perhaps it's only unlikely because most people give up, and if you don't give up, it's much more likely.

FanDuel sent me test (data science) before I talked with anyone. I'll admit the questions appeared aligned with the work and would be interesting. But I am not taking a test before talking with anyone.

Looking for a job means doing 'work' potentially for nothing. You have to apply, sit interviews, sit tests, etc. Investing half a day before a decision is very reasonable.

Coding and tech hiring challenges are far longer than half a day nowadays. Some are even up to two weeks.

I much prefer an hour of whiteboarding grilling than wasting an entire week on open ended problems full of fluff.

Person I'm replying to said half a day, hence my reply that this is actually pretty good!

That being said, I've never had coding tests for more than a few hours.

More than a few hours seems pretty extreme.