[ezrast]

Without wanting to be unkind, this author misunderstands the purpose of the exercise, which is to demonstrate to another human being that you can write code that meets the company's standards (as in, would pass PR review), not to ship a fully-functional product solo. The initial email makes it explicit that they don't care if the product even works ("Can use a fake backend") and that the specifications are deliberately open-ended. A little intuition and empathy can tell you that they probably are not going to spend many hours reviewing a complex submission, so the project should optimize for demonstrability of code quality, not completeness.

"I would like to know what kind of response I could expect..." - This is also established from the beginning: you can expect either a "Looks good, let's do some interviews" or a "Sorry, not interested," based on the code you submit. They can't narrow down the choices prior to your submission, because they're grading your submission, not your proposal document with an extensive list of details that they already told you they're mostly ambivalent to.

"So it is funny that my project is so weak, yet it made them update the guidelines to something stricter." - Main character syndrome. As someone who has been on the other side of these kinds of reviews, the far more likely explanation is that they kept getting submissions where the build instructions didn't work (which is not disqualifying by itself; the authors may not be on the same OS as the reviewers) and they got tired of spending time dealing with it.

Ultimately, the failure here was not a technical one but a social one. The author tried very hard to do the thing that it seemed like they were asking for, not the thing they actually wanted. The hiring manager's unwillingness to engage with the proposal doc was itself a form of communication that they were not interested in this level of detail, it was just an implicit one.

It's common for engineer types to want all that kind of communication to be explicit, and I have a lot of sympathy for those folks, but the reality is that teamwork is a skill, and the ability to suss out what a stakeholder actually wants, but isn't saying due to incomplete information and/or office politics, is a reasonable thing to select for. The ambiguity of the prompt is a feature, not a bug: it's kept the author away from a company whose communication style they're not compatible with.

(that said, this project does sound excessively complex for a take-home)

[edfletcher_t137]

> A little intuition and empathy can tell you that they probably are not going to spend many hours reviewing a complex submission, so the project should optimize for demonstrability of code quality, not completeness.

> "I would like to know what kind of response I could expect..." - This is also established from the beginning: you can expect either a "Looks good, let's do some interviews" or a "Sorry, not interested," based on the code you submit. They can't narrow down the choices prior to your submission, because they're grading your submission, not your proposal document with an extensive list of details that they already told you they're mostly ambivalent to.

Absolutely spot on, and you ID it later with "Main character syndrome", but it is so very clear from this post's tone & content that OP expected a symmetric outlay of effort & focus from the company's side. They thought they were the main character.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding that seems to have predicated a lot of their ultimate response: they feel as if they were entitled to much more effort from the company than they received. Such is often the case with strong entitlement, it's nearly impossible for the person suffering it to see it.

[Sleepful]

> OP expected a symmetric outlay of effort & focus from the company's side

And you don't? Do you enjoy being walked all over?

“If you're not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it?”

[josecodea]

> suss out what a stakeholder actually wants, but isn't saying due to incomplete information and/or office politics

What you are saying sounds a lot like this:

"it is common for engineers to communicate properly, but people above them prefer to be vague, because plausible deniability is a political advantage to them at the detriment of the engineer"

[ezrast]

EDIT: I originally had an escalatory reply here but have thought better of it. Trying again but without being an asshole: yeah, what you describe is one way miscommunications can happen. They can also happen in other ways that may be the engineer's fault, or nobody's at all. They may not happen every day, just like how you won't be deploying a new service every day, but anyone who works in an office is going to need to be able to deal with them regardless. Highly functional organizations are so because they can recover from mistakes, not because they don't make them.