---
id: A-006
type: artifact
title: "Take-home assignment exceeding reasonable stated scope"
lang: en
registry: 2026.08.2
canonical: https://hoba.work/artifacts/A-006
json: https://hoba.work/api/v1/artifacts/A-006.json
---

# Take-home assignment exceeding reasonable stated scope

Take-home assignment requires building complex production-grade features demanding 20+ hours instead of stated 2–4 hours.

## At a glance

- Stage: Technical
- Evidence: supported

## What it looks like

Composite excerpts, written to be typical rather than copied. No particular message, company or person is quoted here.

**The assignment brief, as received** · stated budget: 2–4 hours — *reconstruction*

```
Subject: Take-home exercise — Senior Backend Engineer

  Build a service that ingests order events, deduplicates them, and exposes a query API over the resulting state.
> Requirements: persistence with migrations, idempotent consumers, retry with backoff, structured logging, metrics endpoint, containerised local run, integration tests, and a short design document covering scaling and failure modes.
  Please submit within one week. We estimate 2–4 hours.
```

*What to notice* Count the deliverables against the stated budget. The mismatch is measurable, which makes it a fact rather than a feeling.

**Asking about scope** — *reconstruction*

```
  day 1 Candidate  Happy to do this. To fit the 2–4 hours, which parts should I treat as the core and which can I stub with a note in the README?
> day 2 Recruiter  Ideally all of it — we use it to see how you work end to end.
```

*What to notice* The stated budget and the expected deliverable are not reconciled when asked directly. That is the observation; the reason for it is not visible from here.

## From each side

The same entry from inside each position that meets it: what reaches them, what it means from there, and what happens next given what they control.

### Candidate

- **What reaches them:** A brief with eight requirements listed against a stated budget of two to four hours, and an answer to the scoping question that leaves the list unchanged.
- **What it means from there:** The stated time and the stated deliverables are two different sizes, and which of the two the submission will be scored against is not written anywhere the candidate can reach.
- **What happens next:** Decides how many unpaid hours to commit, and submits with the timebox, the deliberate cuts and the assumptions written into the README, keeping the brief and the reply on record.

### Recruiter

- **What reaches them:** A candidate asking which parts are core, and a brief that is the only document the recruiter holds about this exercise.
- **What it means from there:** A question about scope is a question about the rubric, and the rubric sits with the panel; the stage is measured by how quickly it clears.
- **What happens next:** Answers from the brief, since that is what the recruiter has, and returns the thread to a submission date.

### Hiring manager

- **What reaches them:** Finished submissions. How long any of them took is not a field in what reaches the panel.
- **What it means from there:** Differences in completeness read as differences in level, because completeness is the variable the submissions expose.
- **What happens next:** Compares the batch against itself rather than against the stated budget, and sets the bar from the fullest submission received.

## What this observation does NOT establish

- Does not prove the company is harvesting free intellectual property for production use.

## Diagnostic probes

- **PROBE-A-006-1** (low) — Define explicit boundaries and trade-offs in submission README stating assumptions made to fit the agreed timebox. → Tests whether evaluators value scope management and communication over unbounded free work.

---

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