The two-month delay aside, which is stupid but quite common, the likely reason for asking for a private GitHub repo is to not leak your solution to other candidates. You can always add a LICENSE.md to your repo with two lines saying that the code is not meant for any kind of reuse. You can also change the repo to public after a few months.
I personally actually like being assessed via take-home challenges but understandably it is not everyone's favourite.
Yeah, I got the same email from the same person. Now, I'm feeling skeptical about this code challenge. The way you outlined it sounds perfectly reasonable that this person is trying to get free code from people that are actually looking for a dev job. I'm not going to do the code challenge anymore due to the lack of time that was made from the interviewer to respond back to my application.
what is it? a SaaS company for scrap yard business operations? they're not stealing the code; they're recycling it.
i dont do coding challneges. that's when i start ghosting employers.
I think you should take this down. It doesn't make you look good. So you think the coding challenge is beneath you and are offended you were not their first choice, don't do it then. Maybe you're an ace with job offers left and right, but at a time in the industry when many are looking for work who would give their right arm for any decent opportunities, it makes you look whiny, entitled and lazy, and like you're looking for an excuse not to complete the challenge because you're incapable of doing so. My 2 cents.
I had a similar problem back in the day when I applied for a job with a small, local payroll company. The MD was a nice guy and a small staff of a dozen long-term people. He figured the best way of seeing if I'd be "a good fit" would be to set me a task and go from there. Fine .. I did that and he set me another which was more payroll-business specific. Again, I did this, but then he came up with another one, and I realised he was getting me to develop his next project for free. I declined and made a hasty exit.