Three hours, six endpoints, and a frontend from scratch
The recruiter sent a zip file. Inside: six backend endpoints, and a frontend built from scratch covering six separate flows. The budget given for all of it was three hours.
He worked out what was actually being measured — and it was not engineering.
When a brief is impossible inside its own time limit, the limit stops being an
instruction and becomes a test of who will ignore it. The candidates who
comply are scored against the ones who did not.