An engineer walked into a five-stage gauntlet and out the other side holding a form letter. The process ran: an online assessment with three medium-to-hard DSA problems, a technical round built on a resume walkthrough, a 24-hour take-home assignment to build a full-stack monitoring system, then two more technical rounds. By their count, that is five stages of someone else’s time, a full weekend of it unpaid.
Then came 1.5 months of complete silence. When the reply finally arrived, it was the standard “You’re not a fit for this role.” The engineer’s question, posted to X, has the flat logic of someone who did the arithmetic: if they weren’t a fit, why did it take an online assessment, a 24-hour assignment, three technical rounds, and six weeks to reach that conclusion? They don’t mind rejection, they said. They mind investing hours of preparation in a process that cannot tell a yes from a no in real time.
The company is unnamed. The take-home, the rounds, and the silence are the story.