In my experience, the number of hours the company suggests is always BS. It takes 2–3x as much time to experiment and then polish your solution. It might take the states amount of time if you’re the person who came up with the problem and knows how to solve it right away because you’ve put much thought into it and have seen dozens or hundreds of solutions already.

Often the difference in time is simply whether you’ve seen a similar problem before or not. I wouldn’t jump straight to suggesting someone is less skilled. You can also end up spending more time on something simply because you’re trying to stand out or have some reason to believe more effort translates to a better results. If you’re a test driven fan, simply making your code more testable and adding meaningful tests can add time.

> If they said it would take 4 hours and you spent 10 hours on it, it’s likely your approach was ineffective compared to a more skilled engineer.

They promised this person if they completed it, they would get an actual human response back.

Not only did they not get a response back, they didn't get a response back from anybody, even when directly trying to follow-up.

And this was what was promised for spending 4 hours of your time on something.

At the very least, that seems unfair.

I'm doubtful. In my experience the hour requirement hours number is under estimated.

it is a nonzero probability that they are full of shit