A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and invited me to apply. I agreed, and she followed up with a 30-minute conversation on the phone where I had to describe my experience.

After that, I had a hiring manager interview with a director. This interview was not technical, mainly just slightly deeper questions about my experience. The interview was scheduled for 1 hour, but we finished after about 30 minutes, and I used the rest of the time to ask questions.

The director offered me a choice: either go with the classic problem-solving interview or a take-home assignment. I said that I didn't mind either, which was a mistake, and he decided on the take-home assignment, which he said would take 3-4 hours.

I got the assignment a few days later from the recruiter. It was basically a project build-from-scratch type of assignment that required the use of GenAI without any subscription I could use. All I got was a sample output. I was given 3 days to complete it while working full-time at another company.

It took much longer than 3-4 hours (around 12-15 hours), but I did it regardless. I paid to OpenAI out of pocket for testing and uploaded it to my own GitHub.

After sending it back, I had a technical interview next, which was a code review and system design. We spent most of the time reviewing the code with some minor design questions, not the standard system design interview experience, which made sense in the context of the assignment. The last 15 minutes were random behavioral questions.

I felt like the interview went relatively well. The questions weren't difficult, and the interviewers didn't really follow up on any of my answers. A few days later, I got an automated status update that my application would not be processed any further, without any explanation.

I don't mind at all being rejected. This was more of a practice after years of not interviewing, but the minimum I expect is feedback on why the application was rejected, especially after all the time and effort I had to put into this assignment.

I recommend taking the traditional problem-solving route, because in that case, it's very clear whether we succeeded or not. In my case, I spent much longer on an assignment I got no feedback on. Not a great interview experience at all.

Build a project from scratch that takes a legacy Java codebase as input and generates a migration plan. This plan will update the web framework to the latest version of Spring Boot and the database repository to MongoDB.