Interviewed for an entry/mid level Cloud role. Entry level pay, midlevel job title, senior+ level technical assessment. After the screener, they required to a full stack AWS hosted project called "Flamingo Bingo". Unpaid, despite AWS costing money to build in. "The purpose of this challenge is to assess both your AWS cloud skills and front-end web development skills. That’s a lot! We appreciate that you are spending some of your precious time to demonstrate those skills. We don’t want it to be an undue burden for you. We tried to craft a challenge to assess your skills in a way we hope doesn’t take more than about 4 hours total—roughly 2 hours each for the front and back end. We’ve offered some shortcuts, but if you don’t finish a completely functional full-stack solution, *that is OK*! Please spend time on both and be prepared to talk about what you would have done if you had more time. If you want to add pseudo code and/or descriptive comments in the absence of fully functional code, that will help us make the most of our time with you in your next interview." As you can see, the instructions sounded really nice, forgiving, flexible, etc. Sounds like it's meant for entry/mid level. It estimated only a few hours of commitment to the project in order to reach completion. I had a Principal and a Staff AWS engineer review the project guidelines and they both separately told me it was an advanced project that even they'd be surprised to see in the Senior+ roles they aim for. Therefore, I assumed IA would definitely be understanding about whatever form my submission took, and would provide feedback I could grow from in the follow-up. I was completely wrong. After about 12 hours of creating the MVP and meeting the minimum requirements, I decided it was sufficient. I had created front end UI with buttons, form submission, API Gateway connection. A back end with a noSQL DDB database, Lambda function, etc. It was all hooked it all together and functioned as an MVP for a serverless app. The API call produced the JSON in the meta data formatted exactly as requested in the project guidelines etc. I created a CI/CD workflow from IDE to GitHub via GH Actions to AWS etc. I wrote up a long explanation with my submission about items I completed, items I would like to get better at, items I missed etc. I put literal sweat and tears into this project. And here was the sum total of their response to my submission, my time, and my effort: "Thanks for completing the coding challenge. Unfortunately, we are not moving forward with you as an applicant. We are looking for more AWS experience. Good luck in your search." The message sure didn't feel like the tone delivered in the project excerpt above. They were even supposedly OK with pseudocode!!! No follow-up discussion, no review, no effort to reciprocate my own. I bet this is a nice symbol of the culture at IA; claims that they are understanding and flexible, but in reality... nothing of the sort. This experience left me legitimately traumatized.