The usual HR phone screen and then immediately given a rather large take-home project. This project took many hours to complete, because it was requested to be "production ready", which I took to mean, full proper error handling, logging, full suite of tests, etc. It wasn't hard per se, but it was a ton of work. Easily 10-15 hours of work. I did it over the course of a week, but it took most of my limit free time. When I turned it in, they said they'd get back to me in 1-2 days.

12 days later, after I emailed them twice and had a friend at DigitalOcean talk to HR directly, I finally got a response. After reviewing my code, the reviewers "did not see a good fit for me". This is basically a non-answer. I write code like they asked me to write day in and day out. It was not a difficult project, it was in a language I'm an expert in, and I was very very thorough with my tests and implementation and code layout. I spent more time on their homework than I did on the homework for four other companies I'm also interviewing at, combined.

Note that I also had a referral from a friend who works there.

I recommend staying away from this company. I don't know what the deal is with their hiring process, but it's not good.

The project was writing a TCP server to a given spec.