Comment by pSYoniK

Make an email client, email view+send, fake backend or real imap, handle plaintext.

At this stage, for a take-home, I'd start working and write down assumptions I made as I went along. I'm probably the opposite of the author, as a take-home (unless it's the last stage or something) is, in my view, a tester to see what a person can do within a few hours of work. I've had several take-home exercises during my time as a software engineer and they varied from "we have provided all details that a stakeholder would provide" to "if you have any further clarifying questions, please get back to us".

The most recent one I took a couple of years ago came with an internal library the company used. They said, "use this library to make a web app that takes advantage of these methods inside of it; create an app that simulates behavios using those methods. Do not spend more than 10 hours on the assignment."

I started coding, I threw something together that worked in about 6-7 hours and I was writing down assumptions as I worked as well as trade-offs from those assumptions. "I assume the user would not be bothered by a failure here, if reliability would be important, what would we want to do in the case of a failure? Retry? Back off retries? etc etc". I then provided the code and provided a list of improvements "Add unit tests to these 3 components, add integration test to ensure this functionality works end-to-end if its essential, improve UI, clean up code base, refactor these services, use a framework/library for the UI instead of hard-coded JS to make these few calls. I wrapped it up because I think I was 70-80% there."

During the next interview with the architect of the company, he said that the solution I provided worked fine, we discussed some things I did and he asked why I did them, but specifically, and this is why I'm commenting here, he mentioned that he appreciated the assumptions document, the future improvements and the "I stopped here because I'd rather get feedback on this and refine, as opposed to keep building something I imagine you want". He said that the ability to work up to a point where you hit the majority of the story and then get feedback on that incomplete project is better than having someone dissapear into a cave for a month to try and come back with the absolute finished product in their oppinion and then having to make changes to get it in line with what was actually wanted.

So I guess, become comfortable with uncertainty. If nothing else, ask only "hey, I assume you want something along these lines that I can bang out in 5-6-10-20-40 hours. If you're not happy with what you get for 5 hours, it might not be a good fit in general or if you think I prioritized the wrong thing in those 5 hours, then we can chat about that too". I am also saying this, because my current role is a lot more in line with what the author is looking for - they spend weeks refining requirements, they write documentation, they create mocks and they have meetings over meetings before I even know what I'm supposed to do and within a day or two they start realizing that what they described is about 10-20% off what they wanted or what is possible and the whole cycle of meetings starts again. Instead, and I've been pushing for this each sprint, I'm asking them to accept a certain level of unknown in a given story, we work on it, we see it behave and get used and refine it based off of that.

The author seems to want waterfall, but agile exists for a reason. Hell, let's not even call it agile or whatever else, in a real situation, you start doing and you learn as you move along. You refine based on feedback, you refine based on new experiences and based on new requirements. You work in the murky areas of someone elses mind. Or not, I don't know, but expecting a series of jira tickets with screenshots and deliverables from a company that just wants to see how you think, how you work with uncertainty and how you deal with unknowns feels... wrong.