A candidate made it through all six rounds at a Series C startup, ending with a conversation with a cofounder that seemed to go well. The rejection arrived anyway. The process had stretched past five weeks and swallowed roughly thirty-five hours of take-home project work, preparation, and interviewing.
The take-home, round two, was complex enough that getting it working ran up $950 in Claude API usage, and the first successful build took seven straight hours without a human touching it. The role was forward-deployed engineering. The project worked. The offer did not.