I was genuinely excited to interview with Reform Collective. I applied online and they emailed me back immediately. The next day I met with the team, and they seemed friendly and enthusiastic. Then came the take-home assessment, which they claimed was something one of their developers could complete in 4–8 hours. This should have been my first red flag. The take home assessment was a fully responsive and complexly animated Next.js landing page for a health insurance company. The design they provided was multiple pages long and included a fully functioning carousel with animated left/right controls, embedded text that shrinks and vanishes between other components, sleekly animated buttons and a couple other things, such as the carousel switching from horizontal to vertical scrolling on tablet view. They also required that my work be production-ready and that it must match their design perfectly. It was an incredibly demanding, highly polished UI task. I spent over 20 hours on this because I really wanted the role. While it wasn’t perfect, it was damn near close, especially considering I was a candidate, not an employee. In hindsight, I should have recognized how inappropriate it was to demand this level of labor from a job applicant. It felt like I was working for free. They then rejected me and told me that my work wasn’t production-ready, and they said that they needed someone who could contribute immediately without much onboarding. Isn’t onboarding... part of the job? And do you really expect a fully production-ready Next.js landing page from a candidate FOR FREE? They didn't even give me a chance to walk them through my code and explain my functionality tradeoffs, which I felt was totally unfair. At the end of the day, I felt exploited. I’m not against take-home assessments. I'm against interview processes that demand 15–20 hours of unpaid labor from candidates.