Stepful Software Engineer Interview interview questions

In short, they gave me an insane amount of pointless busy work before even speaking to me, then just ghosted me completely. Do not apply here, these people do not respect your time at all, they won't even get back to you! I had a short call with a recruiter, later I had a ~10 minute conversation with an engineer at the company. We did not even exchange introductions, they just went right ahead with introducing a take home task that serves as a technical screen. Stepful put zero up-front investment in the process. The take home was ludicrously long. It required setting up a back end and front end code base from scratch. The finished product was supposed to include six user stories related to managing meetings between students and coaches. It said that authentication was not required, but the app had to have some idea of who was interacting with it so it kind of was required. All of the user stories were the kind of trivial CRUD that any junior or mid level engineer can do without any problem. It was quite easy but very time consuming. The prompt said that the task should take three hours total. I accepted it because I was in a live in person zoom meeting and I leaned towards trusting even though my gut told me this was going to take much much longer. I asked a few friends who are in my line of work and everyone agreed that three hours is wildly unreasonable. They did not QA that estimate at all. This is a massive red flag. If they underestimate this work, they probably have equally unreasonable time estimates for actual day to day work. They also do not value the applicant's time one bit, therefore they probably don't respect employees time either. Ideally a take home is less stressful than a live algorithm interview and should roughly reflect how the applicant works. What they actually got was me just trying to power through it, getting more and more resentful as I went on, wondering why I am spending so much of my one precious life, in summer no less, doing boring unpaid work with no guarantee of any pay off. I regret every second that I spent on it as I have not even heard back from them! It is completely insulting that after putting me on this stupid quest they did not even get back to me two weeks later. --------- My advice to the management is to at the very least acknowledge receipt and have the decency to politely decline if you aren't satisfied. More importantly they should re-imagine the test and verify that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time by an engineer with around the level of experience desired. Perhaps create an incomplete starter codebase for front end and back end that is more or less set up, maybe including some bugs to catch. That would respect applicant's time and also reveal their competencies more realistically. In normal work you almost never set up a brand new code base much less two. My advice to applicants is to just steer clear!