I reviewed the code. They wanted it deployed.
Is the work sample an audition? A take-home exercise asked me to review a junior engineer’s pull request the way a senior infrastructure engineer would. So that is what I did. I found the problems, explained why each one mattered, fixed them, added local tests across the stack and the CI pipeline the repo never had, and wrote the whole thing up like a real review. I ran out of time before I deployed it. The deploy was the part that scored. I did not get the job. I made a tactical error, and given the same exercise again I would deploy first and decorate later. The interesting part is not that I lost a point. It’s that the exercise and I disagreed about what it was for, and the exercise had the only vote that counted. ...