What I've found is they're actually looking for the candidate that goes above and beyond. That "should only take 3 hours" might be true for the basic ask, but y

What I've found is they're actually looking for the candidate that goes above and beyond. That "should only take 3 hours" might be true for the basic ask, but you'll never get called back. It's especially common for startups because they're looking for someone who is going to generally have longer hours and lower pay. It's smart for them because it puts most of the work on you, just a very bad experience for the prospective candidate. I figured out it's code for: build me the assignment, plus other functionality you can think of, polish it nicely, write unit tests and integration tests, and deploy it so I don't have to pull down your github repo. I'm not against take home, I just don't want to spend my entire weekend just to get to the phone screen. These kinds of assignments are usually step 1 of the funnel and it was very frustrating get rejected without any feedback. Now I just screen for any companies that require it because it's better for my quality of life.