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.
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.
Given that the job was supposed to be west coast based, I have to imagine they’d made their decision on Friday.
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. )
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.
Having me do two days of work and immediately throwing it in the trash without even glancing at it is the far worse insult.
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.