[throwaway1995v2]

Very long take-home assignments, I was interviewing with a startup for a backend position. they gave me 5 days to build a Cinema Ticket Reservation API, this by itself was long since it required managing 5 to 6 tables with it corresponding crud and business logic of each one (and also tests) but apart from that they wanted to see complex data structures, design patterns, caches strategies, be able to "scale", a design diagram, and as a bonus if I wanted add a CI/CD pipeline.

I did only the core app, but none of the others stuffs beacase that looked like way to much unpaid work just to "prove" my ablities.

I should have known better becase they rejected me because the project was to simple, wasn't going to "scale", and did'n used any complex design patterns, a day an a half of work wasted.

[Volundr]

This last search I had one like that. I wish I had done the bare minimum like you did. Instead I spent a weekish on this thing. They were suitably impressed and wanted to do an interview, after which I could expect on offer. A day before the interview I was told the pay for the position was about half what I was asking. Insanely for the skill set they were looking for. Mind you in the HR screen they had asked about expected compensation and I had been direct and upfront in my expectations, so it's not like they didn't know. Just decided to waste my time because they could.

[slyall]

I got the opposite. They requested a Infra design with one page of explanations and one page for the diagram, it was actually two designs, an onprem version and a cloud version.

Physically not enough room to put in everything with explanations.

I got the impression I failed because I didn't put in an WAF but then the recruiter said they'd decided not to hire anybody so I suspect they were not all that serious.

[sjducb]

I think that the take home assignment really helped. It showed you what they value in code, and how that’s not aligned with what you value

[gourabmi]

Is this a "Coupon*" company based out of India ?