{
  "registry_version": "2026.08.2",
  "data": {
    "title": "Take-home assignment exceeding reasonable stated scope",
    "status": "active",
    "evidence_ids": [
      "EVD-006"
    ],
    "content": "# Take-home assignment exceeding reasonable stated scope\n\nTake-home assignment requires building complex production-grade features demanding 20+ hours instead of stated 2–4 hours.\n\n### Diagnostic Non-Inferences\n- Does not prove the company is harvesting free intellectual property for production use.",
    "id": "A-006",
    "type": "artifact",
    "summary": "Take-home assignment requires building complex production-grade features demanding 20+ hours instead of stated 2–4 hours.",
    "stages": [
      "technical"
    ],
    "evidence_level": "supported",
    "probes": [
      {
        "id": "PROBE-A-006-1",
        "action": "Define explicit boundaries and trade-offs in submission README stating assumptions made to fit the agreed timebox.",
        "expected_signal": "Tests whether evaluators value scope management and communication over unbounded free work.",
        "cost": "low"
      }
    ],
    "specimens": [
      {
        "kind": "note",
        "label": "The assignment brief, as received",
        "subject": "Take-home exercise — Senior Backend Engineer",
        "context": "stated budget: 2–4 hours",
        "lines": [
          {
            "text": "Build a service that ingests order events, deduplicates them, and exposes a query API over the resulting state.",
            "tell": false
          },
          {
            "text": "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.",
            "tell": true
          },
          {
            "text": "Please submit within one week. We estimate 2–4 hours.",
            "tell": false
          }
        ],
        "reading": "Count the deliverables against the stated budget. The mismatch is measurable, which makes it a fact rather than a feeling."
      },
      {
        "kind": "chat",
        "label": "Asking about scope",
        "lines": [
          {
            "speaker": "Candidate",
            "at": "day 1",
            "text": "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?",
            "tell": false
          },
          {
            "speaker": "Recruiter",
            "at": "day 2",
            "text": "Ideally all of it — we use it to see how you work end to end.",
            "tell": true
          }
        ],
        "reading": "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."
      }
    ],
    "non_inferences": [
      "Does not prove the company is harvesting free intellectual property for production use."
    ]
  }
}