I had an initial call with a recruiter and chose the take-home interview option. I didn't get past that stage, receiving a canned rejection email and the recruiter refusing to forward any feedback.

The app's functionality was basic, but other technical requirements were quite extensive, including disk cache, error handling, and testing. For a senior position, I also considered an extensible architecture, dependency injection, and good adoption of design patterns. It was stated to take 4-6 hours; I didn't really keep track but would say it definitely took over 6 hours. Building projects from scratch properly takes time. Functionality often takes very little time after establishing a good architecture.

I submitted it feeling pretty good, given the supposed 4-6 hour constraint, with a clean codebase, a good start to an extensible architecture, and so on. However, all I received was a canned rejection email.

Upon further inquiry for feedback, as I was very puzzled, the response was:

"I totally understand. However, we are unable to release feedback."

They basically treat candidates like used napkins. Until these practices change, I do not recommend anyone wasting their weekend and their dignity on this process.

Fetching some JSON and displaying things.

Disk Cache, Error Handling, and a bunch of polishing type requirements.