[rachofsunshine]

This is true, and it's part of why this is one section of three.

If you were slow but high-quality on the coding section but crushed the knowledge and system design, we'd probably recommend you - or at least, recommend you to clients that aren't specifically looking for fast coders. Someone we recommended to a client recently had the equivalent of like 1.75 steps on the task linked here, but got consistently high scores everywhere else.

I do wish we could do a more complex, longer coding problem, and one of the things I've been considering is cutting some other stuff to get it up to 45 minutes or something. The current length isn't a principled decision, it's a resource constraint - keeping interviewing costs manageable is essential when you're trying to bootstrap a company in a rough market. Speed matters, but speed over such a short timescale is absolutely artificial (I'd much rather measure speed over a day instead, it's just not practical to conduct a top-of-funnel interview for so long.)