One of my wife's friends is a Dropbox employee who submitted my resume to the hiring manager. A recruiter emailed me the next day to schedule a phone screen interview.

We spent about 40 minutes on the phone, talking about my past experience, the position, and the company. The recruiter told me he would talk to two teams' dev leads and ask them if they wanted to conduct a phone interview or a take-home interview.

The recruiter didn't ping me for four days, so I emailed him and asked for the status. He told me that he forgot to send me the take-home interview and asked if I had two take-home interviews to choose from.

Since this is a front-end position, I chose a "build a web page" interview (the other one was an algorithm quiz). I spent almost 28 hours creating this web page within the five-day period (while I still had my full-time job). The project wasn't super hard but was very time-consuming.

Five days after I submitted the solution, the recruiter emailed me and said the team had decided not to move forward with the interview process. I called the recruiter to ask for feedback so I could improve myself for the next time I have this type of interview.

The recruiter was trying to be nice, but I got the impression that the people who looked at my code thought I had copied and pasted some of the CSS code from the Bootstrap framework. My defense would be that I am very familiar with Bootstrap, so some code I wrote could be inspired by Bootstrap. If you take a close look at some responsive frameworks out there, they are all very similar.

I also asked how much time other candidates spent on the same take-home interview. The recruiter told me some good ones spent 8 or 12 hours. I didn't say it out loud, but I wanted to say, "This is BS." No one could possibly finish the project within 8 hours. If they spent only 12 hours, I would be extremely impressed and consider their solution very buggy.

Overall, I learned a lot after finishing the project, as I had limited exposure to CSS3 animation and transitions. I am very proud of what I built. However, I am a little miffed because I spent numerous hours on the interview and believe I deserved at least an in-person interview, which I didn't get.

Take-home interview. The recruiter sent me instructions and assets that I could download. The project was to build a page for Dropbox business clients. He gave me a mock which contained the visual design of the page, including font size, font color, and the overall color scheme. I could use jQuery, but not any other third-party JavaScript code.