9y
I'm sorry you did not have the best experience with our interview process. We're always aiming to provide a top notch candidate experience and sometimes we get it wrong. I understand rejection can feel personal, especially after you have spent a lot of time working on a technical solution that doesn't quite pass the review process.
It is important to note that *everyone* who has applied or expressed interest in a backend position (yourself included) since January 2017 was informed from the get-go that the backend hiring process would be slow-rolled and that there would be delays in interview traction and challenge feedback until June 2017.
To put it in context, 2016 was a breakout year for Canva. We've had some amazing talent join us from around the world, we've released some amazing new features, products, and we've launched in over 40 languages.
With that sort of growth, comes many challenges. We realized that we needed to ensure that the recent starters were being on-boarded and mentored with the same care, attention, and quality as every other person who's joined us over the past few years. To ensure we set our engineers up for success, we chose to slow down backend hiring.
Finally, we do not expect job-seekers to spend 8-10 hours on the assignment, that's incredibly excessive and in no way our intention. To be perfectly transparent, the average time spent on the challenge by successful hires is 4 - 6 hours at a maximum, so I'm surprised you worked on it for so long. Perhaps we didn't get it right respect to managing your expectations as to the difficulty of the challenge and we apologize the experience wasn't positive for you.
Thank you very much for the feedback and don't hesitate to contact your recruiter directly if you have any further questions or want more clarification on the specific feedback you were given with respect to your challenge submission.