This was a complete joke.

I was initially contacted through a recruiter on LinkedIn. We scheduled a quick phone screening, and she passed me along to the next recruiter, who scheduled me for a phone chat with the hiring manager. The call went great, and I was moved along to the coding challenge (Battleship).

I completed that and had to send repeated email follow-ups because my recruiter had just fallen off the face of the earth. Their email stated they would get back to me within the week, but mine took over two weeks for them to respond. Setting expectations is important, in my opinion.

After two weeks, the recruiter told me they had changed their mind about the coding challenge and wanted to do a different one. What? Who does that?

I had to wait another week for someone to come up with the coding challenge, and then it was scheduled for me by yet another recruiter. By this point, it had been over three months, and I had been passed around to four recruiters.

I finished the new coding challenge and waited another few weeks, and then I received my decline note. I expected this because the coding challenge literally made no sense. I chatted with other engineers who have been doing this for decades, and none of them could understand what they were asking for. It was as if the hiring manager had just made something up and then gave it to people in haste.

The entire process was confusing after being randomly passed from person to person and felt absurd for a company like GitHub. I've never heard of a company issuing a coding challenge only to say, "Just kidding. We changed our minds."

Battleship coding challenge and a secondary coding challenge after they changed their minds.