My old colleague referred me. Next day after the referral i got an email from their senior HR, requesting for a phone interview. I scheduled the phone interview. Later on sent an email for a clarification, but got a response stating "our process has changed, we are not going to hire you". Alright, all happened in 3 days. After ~1 week, she contacted back saying, lets continue with our process and we set up another phone call ( i am not sure what has happened during the course of 1 week and they changed their requirements or they just wanted to make my friend happy while wasting my time ), basic phone screening happened. At the end of the phone call she mentioned about the code challenge with "no language preference, no time limit" requirements. Note to mention that her voice during the call showed no excitement for talking. There was only one thing that i requested from her to send me the code challenge Friday evening just because i am working full time and does not have free time apart from my off-work hours. She made me sure that i will get my challenge just before the weekend. As you might guess from the content, i did not get the challenge at the weekend, tried to contact but no-luck. I got the email to the challenge Monday evening. Here comes the funny part, mail was clearly stating "i should send back the solution in few days". To my knowledge "a few" means 2-3 days. What happened to no-time-limit? Anyways i felt myself like in my undergrad final exam days for 3 days, work 20 hours, sleep 4 hours. Thankfully, challenge was not so hard. I managed to finish it in 2 days while working full time. Of course it wasn't in the best form, but as a person who does hiring with code challenges and perform code reviews at my daily job, i was pretty confident with the solution based on quality/time ratio. I have also bad feeling about the reviews that reviewers did not read the docs because i already addressed their comments. One of the requirements of the challenge was "should be production ready", for that reason i added TLS support (and bunch of other things like CI, testing, linting etc) to the server and that turned as bad comments to my solution (i hope they are running their servers with TLS support even if they are internal) On the other hand i found two issues with their test harness while trying to fix my solution, one bug and one performance problem, sent patches for both with my solution. I believe they were left intentionally (read the following blog post). I had to follow up after submitting my solution to get a response. So don't expect you will get a perfect hiring process after reading DO's Engineering Manager's post on hiring. Expectations and reality might differ.