We (the whole developer community) really need to stop responding to such companies.
I did one recently after the initial HR person chat. I spent a morning on it as they suggested 2 or 3 hours. But then I was rejected for the most pedantic reasons (2 white space PEP violations), not setting up mocks for testing (that would have doubled the scope of the project). Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling". And various other trivialities.
I tried passing on my complaints, but the HR girls didn't like that. Pretty disrespectful after giving up a morning of my free time.
Sennder is the company, as I feel that we should be naming and shaming.
I just completed this exact challenge (Yes, for Sennder) and I think their challenge is fine. It is not really difficult or takes much time at all. They didn't seem too strict in their review and I was able to discuss some of the "mistakes" and choices I made in the tech interview. Including some PEP8 violations. Despite these mistakes I passed the tech interview just fine and I just have the CTO interview left.
I don't see how mocks would have doubled the scope of the project. I think I have mocks set up in a few lines of code or so. If your project is so difficult to test or if it is difficult to set up mocks for it maybe there is a serious flaw in your project structure?
> Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling".
I don't understand what you mean with this. Did you provide a HTML response or did you provide JSON? I did a super simple HTML response with no styling and that was fine. If you did JSON I could see how they would mark it as a mistake when they clearly asked for a HTML page.
They did say that they were planning on changing it so maybe you got a different one. I gave them HTML, and they claimed that "JSON would have been better" despite the specification asking for a "page" with "no need for styling".
It sounds like your submission was unrefined, maybe amateur. That's what tests like this are for. Referring to "the HR girls" isn't winning you any points either, and makes me wonder what kind of attitude you displayed to the people involved.
I did one recently after the initial HR person chat. I spent a morning on it as they suggested 2 or 3 hours. But then I was rejected for the most pedantic reasons (2 white space PEP violations), not setting up mocks for testing (that would have doubled the scope of the project). Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling". And various other trivialities.
I tried passing on my complaints, but the HR girls didn't like that. Pretty disrespectful after giving up a morning of my free time.
Sennder is the company, as I feel that we should be naming and shaming.