Such interview processes are big red flags. The company can't afford taking a risk with you and at the same time tests how desperate you are by making you work for free. They are likely short on cash and short on experience. Expect crunch and bad management. Run.

> The last interview was to write an blog post for their blog

Where you applying as a Software Dev.? Because that's not a software (or an interview) assignment.

Yes I was applying for software engineer. I think they wanted engineers who were good at explaining the product to users.

Sure. Writing and a good command of the language is important. There are multiple ways to showcase that. Writing a blog post for their blog is not one of them.

I was willing to jump through hoops—I really wanted the job.

Did the blog post get published on their blog?

I don't believe so.

IMHO companies should aim for courteous interviews, with faster decisions, and if there's any take home work then it's fully paid. I've seen your work at Beaver.digital and on GetFractals.com. If you're still looking, feel free to contact me; I'm hiring for a startup doing AI/ML data analysis. Specifically Figma + DaisyUI + TypeScript + Python + Pandas + AWS + Postgres.

Did their engineers spend time with you or did they get their blog post otherwise? I once made 1 minute videos for interview process of an AI training data company. I have a hunch they were just harvesting the data.

They did get the blog post but I don’t believe they used it; it’s possible that they didn’t think it was well written and that’s why I was ghosted but I will never know. I know they were interviewing many very talented people for the position. It’s okay to be disorganized as a startup, but I think that keeping people happy, employee or otherwise, should always be the top priority. It would have taken just a few seconds to write an email to me to reject me, and by not doing so, this comment has probably evolved into a big nightmare for them. I didn’t expect it to get this much attention, but yeah; I guess my general sentiment is shared by many.

Were you at least paid?

you know that paid interview processes are not the norm, "at least" is unlikely

If I was paid, I probably wouldn't be complaining publicly. :-) It's probably better for both interests if these types of engagements are paid.

I've worked with paid take home tests for a while, but stopped again. Hiring managers started to make the assignments more convoluted, i.e. stopped respecting the candidate's time. Candidates, on the flip side, always said they don't want to bother with the bureaucracy of writing an invoice and reporting it for their taxes etc., so didn't want to be paid.

Now my logic is: If a take home test is designed to take more than two hours, we need to redesign it. Two hours of interviews, two hours of take home test, that ought to suffice.

If we're still unsure after that, I sometimes offered the candidate a time limited freelance position, paid obviously. We've ended up hiring everyone who went into that process though.

I just finished interviewing with a company called Infisical. The take-homes were crazy (the kind of thing that normally takes a few days or a week). I was paid but it took me 12 hours.

Was the process worth it?

Hope they paid for the work.

Did they post the blog publicly?

your first mistake was doing any kind of take-home exercise at all.