RE: Why the take-home is now "a weekend, max"

FROM

Engineering Excellence Guild · Gormless Systems Ltd

TO

All Interviewers

RE

Why the take-home is now "a weekend, max"

Following feedback from the last three candidates who withdrew at the take-home stage, we have made the following improvements:

The take-home is now spec'd at "a weekend, max." We have reduced the scope from "production-ready microservice with auth, CI, tests, docs, monitoring, and a retro" to "production-adjacent microservice with thoughtful stubs."

Candidates should budget one weekend. Which weekend is at the candidate's discretion. We respect work-life balance and will be assessing it.

What we're looking for: clean code, thorough tests, meaningful commit messages, a working CI pipeline, load-test results, and a one-page reflection on the architecture trade-offs. We estimate this at approximately six to eight hours, which we arrived at by asking nobody who has ever completed a take-home.

If you have concerns about the realism of this estimate, please submit them in writing. The committee meets quarterly to review the take-home brief and has never once changed it.

The briefing document is sixteen pages, including diagrams. Candidates who ask clarifying questions will be evaluated on the quality of those questions.

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