[kello]

Just last summer I bombed a take-home interview project with Lufthansa Technik. They wanted me to implement Rock Paper Scissors a litte bit "over-engineered." Long story short their definition of "over-engineered" was much more involved than mine. I thought I would just need to implement it such that I showed that I wasn't bullshitting them about being able to do that which I said I could. Maybe 2-3 hours of work. I was wrong. Knowing what I know now, I would have had to spend at least 8 hours on it. They expected me to implement a complete backend, frontend, test suites, and design the application such that they would I would be able to extend it to fit an unknown requirement that they only revealed to me during the review of my assignment.

This culminated in the Engineering Manager saying to me at one point: "Wow, you have a lot of experience, it's sad you didn't show us that in your assignment."

TL;DR: Bombed a take-home assignment with the vague requirements of "over-engineer it on purpose" because my "over-engineering" was not over-engineered enough even though it completely fulfilled all requirements. If you're going to give take-home assignments please define hard requirements up front and avoid vague guidelines like "over-engineer this please k thanks"