# The four-hour take-home with 31 hours of scope.

**[TRUE STORY]** — by Staff engineer · HR-tech scale-up · company named in story

"Build a production-ready microservice with auth, tests, CI, and a short write-up. Should take about four hours." A. timed herself honestly. The repo's commit history tells the rest.

A. is a staff engineer with over a decade of experience. She started the take-home on a Saturday morning, expecting to finish by lunch. The first red flag was the "production-ready" requirement in the brief — auth, CI pipeline, test coverage, monitoring endpoints.

"At hour eight I realized I was building an actual service for free," she says. "At hour twenty I was too far in to stop."

The repo's public commit history shows 31 hours of work across two weekends. She submitted on a Monday night. The rejection came Thursday: "We felt the solution demonstrated insufficient attention to production concerns."

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