The strictness of the time limit works both ways. They'll be comparing you against other candidates who had the same amount of time. If nobody got a complete so

The strictness of the time limit works both ways. They'll be comparing you against other candidates who had the same amount of time. If nobody got a complete solution done, nobody is advantaged or disadvantaged. The employer onboarding is designed to guide them towards the best practices I've discovered. 40 minute time limit and a clear expectation set in the challenge instructions that a "perfect" response is not possible in the time provided, so just do what you can and submit what you've got. That avoids clustering responses near the top of the curve. It also provides talking points for the interview. "So, given unlimited time and budget, where would you go from here to make this code production ready? If you needed to scale it to an OOM more throughout, where would you start optimising?" Etc.