[Tainnor]

"Soft" limits as guidelines are fine (although in my experience they are often completely unrealistic - e.g. set up a spring boot app with tests, CI config and kubernetes deployment, that implements API XY - all in 4h).

But a hard limit (you will get the assignment at X o'clock and you will have to turn it in within 3 hours) is just bonkers. It's totally unnecessary and artificial time pressure. Maybe I'm having a bad day and I make a silly mistake that takes time to fix - or the assignment is complicated and it takes me half an hour to even understand it and decide on an approach. Or I could implement the assignment in a maintainable way, but the time pressure requires me to do it in the most hacky way possible. Basically, I don't do my best work under time pressure, so I have no idea why you would impose it on me. In my professional experience, there's very rarely ever been any time pressure like that, so it's not like it measures something important.

[stavros]

Hard limits are idiotic, people have things to do, they're doing you a favor spending any time on your assignment. We have soft limits, and it's "this should take around an hour, if it takes much longer please tell us so we can tweak the assignment for the future".