Least relevant coding task I've ever seen! 3 hours to program a full-text search engine for 2.7 GB of data in 500,000 files, from scratch, just for the possibility of talking to an engineering leader? It even had to support letter-by-letter, immediate-response search-as-you-type. It might be worth jumping through hoops for the possibility of joining a big company with an established reputation, but I regret wasting time doing a silly exercise for an unknown startup. I discovered Column Tax when a senior company leader contacted me on a Web site that matches startups and job seekers. I self-scheduled an initial 30-minute interview. Feedback during the Zoom call, and by e-mail afterward, was enthusiastic. I was told that the company's hiring process required me to schedule a fixed 3-hour block for a programming task, to be revealed at the start and to be completed at home -- before an engineering leader would speak with me. My list of work experience on the startup matching Web site emphasized, and we had discussed during the initial interview, an infrastructure or backend API role. The company writes software to help low-income earners file income tax returns. I was surprised that a startup still small enough to evaluate candidates as individuals would rely on an artificial exercise that had nothing to do with its fintech domain, nor with the kinds of infrastructure, database, or security programming typical of the role. Though I gladly tried the contrived exercise, I also shared links to my real, public, open source code. I can see from analytics data that Column Tax never bothered to look.