Thank you! yeah. I designed it with a thought in mind: A lot of the "exercises" or "challenges" that I see people ask for interviews are mainly stupid leetcode type puzzles that do not really reflect what you will be doing on the job.

I wanted to do a challenge that really reflected the stuff that we are doing at Paystand. When you are building a Web based SaaS application, the majority of time you will be a) Interfacing with crappy APIs. b) Doing simple processing in your logic (hence the string processing and sorting), c) Dealing with GET and POST requests in JSON

That's all I tried to present in the challenge. And if you read it, you will see that it gives A LOT of hints. There's even people who have asked me why do I give so many "clues". But on the other side I have gotten candidates that email me to ask me why they API call is returning an error (it is there in the notes that you must use the proper HTTP header). People are lazy, people don't read, and those are not suitable candidates for us.

Totally agree on all points. I don’t think it gives too many hints at all, in fact it feels very much like a half-baked product spec that you’ll probably have to deal with on the job as well :p

Also the point isn’t to demolish the interviewee with a difficult question, it’s to get a feel for how they are to work with (and of course, if they know the basics at all)