After an initial call with their HR recruiting person, I had a phone screen that was fairly straightforward. It included a basic discussion of my background and some coding exercises to see if I could code.

I passed and was given a take-home code challenge where I was asked to write a system monitoring app.

I spent 10 or more hours on this over a couple of days. The primary issue was that it required a graph with live updates, and I had no prior experience with d3 or other data visualization libraries. I spent a lot of time working with these libraries to try to get a well-animated, live-updating graph with scrolling axes and all; I put a lot of effort into it.

After 4 business days plus a weekend with no response after submitting, I sent them an email. I immediately heard back that they would be moving forward with someone else whose background better aligned with their needs.

After requesting more specific feedback (no comment on the code at all? Not going to talk about my design choices over a call? Not even going to mention it?), they told me that I:

• "could have separated the app into more React components" (something I had noted to them as a possible improvement myself when I submitted it)
• "used == in one place that should have used ==="

I started feeling like I dodged a bullet here. If they were going to give such superficial and dismissive feedback on an app encompassing 300+ lines of code (server+client) and a carefully designed data visualization, it seemed pretty clear I put a lot of effort into their take-home project, and now I felt like my time was wasted in an uncaring and disinterested way. Instead of looking for any positive aspects, they sought out a couple of things that were trivially less than perfect and made that the basis of their conclusions.

Would not recommend wasting your time with this company.

Implement a system load monitoring app.