First off, advice to software engineers in the interview process (which I've seen mentioned in another interview review here): the tech task description says something along the lines of 'if we want some changes, we'll raise an issue or a PR'. Do *not* rely on that. It doesn't appear to be standard procedure in the process of reviewing the work.
Overall, the process was positive, but with a slight bad taste left in my mouth by the tech task's overly vague description.
First stage: chat with a recruiter. Very positive and friendly.
Second stage: technical conversation with 2 senior engineers. That was a highlight - the discussion was fun, interesting, and very open. I learned lots from it, and it genuinely sounds like the engineering culture at Dice is fantastic.
Third stage: take-home tech task. Three issues I had with it is:
1) the code was outdated and parts of it were no longer working out-of-the-box, in particular the provided boilerplate dev container set-up. It means that, as an engineer unfamiliar with Elixir, the first hour or two will likely be spent on trying to figure out 'why is this infrastructure bit not working? how do I make it work?' This might be resolved by the time you're interviewing, hopefully.
2) The tech task had no indication on how long it's expected to take. I believe it makes a massive difference - I was under the impression it's meant to be a 'a one-evening job to implement a nice, working, but not perfect service with some TODOs left in'. Based on the feedback, I'm getting the impression that for a senior it's expected to take longer than that.
3) (and the biggest one, which I mentioned at the start): the tech task is described as essentially a back-and-forth, which, combined with the previous point, made me quite sure I didn't need to immediately implement a perfect service, and any bits that I left as a 'TODO' that the team would have liked to see better would be discussed later. This did not materialise - as I heard from the recruiter later, the interview is an anonymous round where the team gets the code, reviews it, but doesn't know who wrote the code (and doesn't have any way to contact the code writer).
The process took just over a month from the first chat with the recruiter through to getting the feedback for the tech task. A big positive is that feedback was provided via a phone call, and not as a quick email. The feedback for me was effectively 'the code was reviewed as mid-level, so we'd be able to offer you a mid-level role'. All the feedback points short one were positive, with the only negative being one on my code structure showing a lack of Elixir knowledge (which was true and expected), and with this, I'm quite positive this is more of a 'some things we wanted to see were missing' than a 'the code wasn't good enough'.
Overall, based on the interview process, I see Dice as a very interesting company and recommend applying - but keep these little bits related to the interview process in mind!