I applied online and was put in touch with an enthusiastic representative who scheduled a video conference with my would-be design manager. This initial interview went really well (it was actually super fun and very natural, which I have learned not to expect from tech interviews), and I quickly received verification from the rep that I'd be moving forward to a design challenge. Except, instead of receiving the design challenge, I got a boilerplate email from a lead recruiter telling me that my application was rejected. Confused, I reached out to the original representative to see if I'd been flagged by mistake. She apologized profusely and told me it was sent in error. A few days later, I get the actual design challenge. The challenge was to reconsider the Pull Request workflow for non-technical people, and I was explicitly told *not* to design anything or even spend too much time on it. Maybe do some rough mock-ups with annotations if I had to, but this was to be a mostly-written exercise to test my communication skills. As a designer that codes and uses GitHub frequently, I felt I was in a pretty solid position, but it still turned me off quite a bit that they were soliciting feedback for a feature on their site as a "design challenge" in interviews (see: spec work). The original listing also encouraged designers with no coding or Git experience, so putting the onus on them to learn what PRs were, how they fit into the process, and expect them to speak to how they'd improve them without spending too much time seemed particularly strange. Still, after paring down my initial write-up to remove what I saw as potentially-frivolous feature-creep vs. quick-wins (both worried that that wasn't what they wanted + showed I'd spent _too_ much time on it), I submitted my work. About two weeks later, I got another email from the same lead recruiter that falsely rejected me informing me I wouldn't be moving on. I was told that they look for specific criteria such as "bigger picture" questions and user research that could be done. Couple things: a) I was told this was a written communications test, b) I was told not to get too invested in it ('big picture' and 'user research' initiatives are the opposite of things that should be done quickly), b) while better UI and clearer, non-Git nomenclature would help non-developers understand the feature better, the PR workflow is otherwise straight-forward, and I don't personally see a need to rethink and overhaul it if that's _really_ what this challenge was attempting to do Confused again (thinking maybe they got my challenge mixed up with someone else's), I reached out to let the recruiter know that that wasn't what I was asked to do. The response? "Thank you for the feedback on the gist. Always good to keep in mind as we move forward with examining our processes for any improvement." I'm not sure what was going on behind the scenes, but going from a really great video conference call, to being wrongly auto-rejected, to doing a design-challenge-that-actually-wasn't-and-left-applicants-doomed-to-fail was pretty embarrassing to see from a company like GitHub, and frustrating to deal with as a candidate. Also having a little empathy for someone who'd just sunk a non-trivial amount of time into doing pro-bono feature work that was reviewed on an entirely different basis than what they were told it would go a lot further than a boilerplate non-response that didn't even fit the context of the situation.