I was recently looking for a job and a company I interviewed at had the first round as a take home test. You had to write a CLI program that called their stupid

I was recently looking for a job and a company I interviewed at had the first round as a take home test. You had to write a CLI program that called their stupid-simple rest API (takes a number, returns 1+ numbers streamed) in the language/runtime the company uses. They said it shouldn’t take over 2-3 hrs. I set a 2Hr timer, completed it and got partway through tests, and stopped (leaving unfinished tests or missing tests etc). I spent 30 min writing todo comments (“TODO: refactor this method for easier test-ability”) and documentation. 2.5hr total, then moved on to next in-person round. Their in person interview questions are all based on either my code or their server side code for this test project. It was great because I already knew about it from the take home. They explicitly asked for a simple, working cli program in the language they use, in a reasonable time box. They said if you have time, consider test-ability, consider performance (the service streamed numbers so you needed to not store them in-memory), and other things a “real” program would need to consider. They gave themselves amble signal for a simple project, and set the time box low enough that most anyone can find that time. I will absolutely be using a similar process for hiring at my current company.