[fpater]

I interviewed for a role there, got quick replies to my emails too. Didn't need to use any credits to do the challenge (but they mentioned that I could ask for it if I wanted to). The challenge itself was not easy, and I assume that was exactly what they were aiming for. Besides the interview I've already talked with them and they were really friendly and eager to help (it was not a business talk, I'm doing some academic research and wanted to discuss some things regarding networks/infra-sec). I believe you just had the wrong idea, specially when you mention "some weird sales tactic".

Edit: in my experience, the code challenge made a lot of sense.

[aosmith]

It just felt wrong, thanks for letting me know. Seems weird to run an orchestration system in another one. Fly wasn't meant to be a VPS / server host and using it as one seems odd to me.

[anuragsoni]

I don't work for fly, but I'll say that while the end-user of fly.io isn't expected to run an orchestration system, fly.io themselves runs an orchestration system (nomad from what I can tell), so it seems like a fairly reasonable idea for a take home evaluation for an infrastructure role at the company to evaluate skills/knowledge about orchestration systems.

[pcthrowaway]

They posted maybe 6 months ago that they were migrating from Nomad to K8s (and expected it to take a while) so it's possible they're not on Nomad anymore.

[kasey_junk]

I would be _shocked_ if they moved to K8s.

[pcthrowaway]

I must have misremembered, they did say they're moving away from nomad in https://fly.io/blog/a-foolish-consistency/

edit: And here they say they're replacing nomad with their own thing: https://fly.io/jobs/platform-engineering/

[tptacek]

The new thing is `flyd`. I'm writing a blog post about it, right after I write a blog post about our inscrutable hiring process.

[tptacek]

We would sooner all eat a bug.

[tptacek]

The orchestration system you're talking about is Nomad. We run a huge Nomad cluster (we're in the process of moving away from it, but it's one of the harder parts of our infrastructure to wrangle).