A candidate aced our design round: clean architecture, sane queues. Three weeks in, they rewrote a reconciliation job they didn't like. It worked. It was ugly for a reason nobody had written down.
Now the take-home is our own real code and one question: what would you leave alone, and why? Restraint is harder to fake than design. We still don't have a good read on what tells you that someone can resist a rewrite.