I don't have a better response for this than that we got a huge flood of candidates for that role, are doing our best to keep up, and have done an imperfect job. We're a small company. You're more than welcome to reach out directly to find out what happened with your application (it's entirely possible that what happened is that the ticket got buried somewhere, and that we'd have been excited to hire you had we not screwed something up on our end).
As for the scope of the challenge: that's deliberate, and we're up front about it. If the challenge is going to take you many hours to complete, and doing that work isn't something that lights you up, then it's the wrong role for you. There are candidates that breeze through it, and there are candidates who wrestle with it for a couple evenings just because they're nerdsniped and enjoy doing that stuff. Both those kinds of candidates are super interesting to us! But we're very comfortable with the idea that the job (in this case: infra engineering) isn't a perfect fit for everybody.
I really liked the take home. It is just that if you have someone doing this, you are having that person commit hours of their time to interviewing without the same investment on your end. So if you do not have the means or time to process these submissions then it is not fair to have someone spend their time on it.
I think your hiring process is great otherwise. And yes if someone isn't very familiar with every intersection of stacks there it will take them more time. That is fine too. It shows the person can learn on the spot.
I agree. We came to that conclusion about platform just a week or so ago and have paused hiring because we can't meet the commitment we've made about responsiveness. We haven't paused infra; instead, we've hired someone to help keep up with it.
I can't mitigate any bad experience you've had. I fucking hate getting ghosted, and I get a little nauseous when I think about us having ghosted people. But ghost people we have! All I can say is that it's not deliberate; it's just been a lot to keep up with.
For everyone else: my sense is that the majority of people in our process have gotten timely (if not as fast as I'd like) responses from us, but if it's been weeks and you haven't heard back from me, you can hit me up directly. We don't ghost people "communicatively"; that's just not how we convey decisions.
Shall we check your HackerNews comments history and guestimate how much time you've spent commenting on randomness while ghosting people who've spent hours doing work for you?
We've paused platform hiring; we have plenty of slots for it, but we don't currently have the bandwidth to run hiring for it (and we're also metabolizing a bunch of the hires we currently made).
I'm not aware of us pausing any other roles; if they're not listed, it's likely we don't currently have openings for them.
As for the scope of the challenge: that's deliberate, and we're up front about it. If the challenge is going to take you many hours to complete, and doing that work isn't something that lights you up, then it's the wrong role for you. There are candidates that breeze through it, and there are candidates who wrestle with it for a couple evenings just because they're nerdsniped and enjoy doing that stuff. Both those kinds of candidates are super interesting to us! But we're very comfortable with the idea that the job (in this case: infra engineering) isn't a perfect fit for everybody.