TLDR: Don't waste your time. I applied online in early December 2018, and after no contact, eventually forgot about it. February came along and I was contacted by a recruiter; typical phone screen. This was followed by a call with a senior engineer, talking about experience, work history, and some technical stuff. More fairly standard stuff. Moving forward, I was given a technical challenge, to complete over the course of about week. The challenge itself and the acceptance criteria was fairly straightforward; essentially setting up a small version of their infrastructure and CI/CD pipleline. The project was finished and submitted. Here's where everything fell apart. After about a week of radio silence, I made sure to check in, as I was still interested in the role. I was told it would be another week before someone could review the project, and then there would be another call with the reviewers to discuss the results and their thoughts. Another week goes by, another vague response about waiting for review. At this point, I should mention, the project itself was to be hosted in AWS (by their requirements), and specifically stated there would be no reimbursement for any charges accrued. That's fine, we're working with free tier instances anyways, but a month of IP reservations, ECRs, and everything else does eventually add up. Since a month later, I still had no idea what the status was, I check in again to ask if they've had a chance to review, as the project is still up and running on my dime. Again, I'm told now that the hiring personnel have not been able to review due to personal reasons. I understand things happen, people take time off, whatever, but you couldn't have told me that up front in the first place, especially since it's at my expense? Another week goes by, I check in again, affirming my desire to continue the process, inquiring about the status of the project. The next day I receive a canned, generic 'Important Information about your application...' email. Womp womp. So much for that. Obviously disappointed, I reached out for any feedback as to how they came to their decision, and I was slightly surprised with what the recruiter shared. While I won't go into specific detail, the feedback shared showed a disturbing lack of technical sense from whoever ended up having to review the project. How you can get into a position like this, but not understand how something as simple as JSON works makes me glad I didn't end up here. While I can't get back my $17.21 from the AWS charges I accrued, I can safely say I wouldn't recommend wasting multiple months trying to get in the door here. Just not worth it.