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If They Ghost You After the Take-Home, Do This
Sergey Nes11 min read·Just now--
The code they never reviewed ended up being a playground to try new concepts and getting me a contract at a different company.
A weekend. A spec. Complete silence afterward.
The spec came through on a Thursday. Reasonable requirements: build an Android app using the Google Places API, raw HTTP, no official SDK. Handle location permissions, show nearby restaurants in list and map views, add search, persist favorites. Standard take-home territory for a mid/senior Android role.
I spent the weekend building it seriously. Single module, functional architecture, working tests, a proper README. Submitted Sunday evening.
Monday: nothing. Tuesday: nothing. The recruiter who had been replying within hours went quiet. By the following Friday I had my answer, even though nobody sent it. Ghosted.
The urge to delete the project was real. The folder sat on my desktop for a week making me mildly annoyed every time I opened Finder. But I didn’t delete it. I made it public on GitHub instead, and kept going. New patterns as I learned them, experiments with APIs and libraries, ideas I wanted to try before using them anywhere that mattered. Over many iterations it grew into something I wouldn’t have designed all at once: a three-module Clean Architecture playground that I eventually…
