I spent around 20 hours on a take-home coding assignment with vague and unclear requirements. I explicitly asked about evaluation criteria beforehand. The response contained generic statements like “write clean code” and then casually added an “optional” note saying it would be nice if the solution was deployed. I went the extra mile anyway. I deployed the project, handled edge cases, polished the codebase, and focused heavily on quality and structure. After submission, I received a one-line rejection email saying: 1/ details page is missing 2/ edit functionality is missing 3/ no proper UX None of these were clearly required or even mentioned as expectations. There were no UX guidelines, no feature list, no scope boundaries. Then they added that they “have many other assignments to review,” which says everything. This process feels careless, dishonest, and fundamentally broken. It looks like they are offloading product thinking onto candidates without clear requirements and then rejecting people based on unstated expectations. That is not evaluation, that is wasting people’s time. If a company cannot define scope, cannot communicate expectations, and cannot provide meaningful feedback after consuming hours of unpaid labor, that tells you a lot about how they likely operate internally. Save your time, energy, and self-respect. I strongly recommend not applying to this company.