I think that I was being fooled - that I was being made to work on a project for free

Yep. Sounds like a scam to get free work.

create a LinkedIn clone, without the feeds

Stopped reading there because that's absolute insanity to ask as an 'application test', no matter what your level is. If they ask you for more than a few short programming challenges it's a scam. I like to provide a bit of unoptimized code and ask the applicant to refactor it, added bonus: I learned a trick or two from some of our applicants.

My rule of thumb: if it takes me more than an hour to complete their tests, they should be paying me.

Lol, asking for literally months of work as a job interview. GTFO with that.

They're getting you to do the job for them lol, that's the kind of thing a whole internship should be based on, not an interview

That would be wildly unreasonable even for a senior role.

Yes that's unreasonable.

create a LinkedIn clone, without the feeds

Wut?!

should be SEO-optimized

The fuck does that even mean in terms of a social media app, where the content is 100% user generated?

should provide API for creating and editing profile

The fuck?

explain the reasoning behind the system design decisions

Considering the complexity of the task that explanation would need to be the length of the bible.

Yeah, no. I'd want a six figure sum upfront for that level of work.

The task wasn't 'pretty unreasonable', it was outright fucking insane, and was probably set by a manager who should never be in charge of a software project. They might as well have asked you to build a Windows clone from scratch.

create a LinkedIn clone,

Lol what? Just create a whole-ass social media site. They are trying to farm out work from applicants.

It's one thing to ask for a high level design graph.. asking for a functioning.. this.. is nuts. They're using you.

Sounds unreasonable.

A Twitter clone would be one thing (you need like two DB tables with four basic mutations, and the UI needs to serve create account, login, profile and timeline). I don't know what a LinkedIn clone without feeds is.

Two days though is ridiculously short.

Edit: this also assumes the UI is very minimal and unpolished, just using a skeleton CSS layout and very basic divs

Yeah, seems like they're trying to get you to do their work for them. And if not, their expectations are completely off the chart compared to where they should be. As much as it sucks, I'd say let this one go. You dont want to work for a place with red flags like this.

Lmao That's fucking insane.

They want you to build them their cash cow linked in competitor for free and without ever hiring you. Some dipshit manager figures they can glom together a bunch of the answers and have a working website lol.

I'm just a hobbyist. What do I know. But it would take me a few months to do this, easily. And it would be a pale, buggy, shitty vague approximation of LinkedIn at best ...Wtaf

PS: if they were smart (but evil) they would've decomposed the problem and had each candidate work on a small part of it and then integrated it lol

Agreed unreasonable, however if you are interested in building something like that make sure you self host it and have control over login and accounts so that they can't just freeboot it off of you.

PM me if you're in need of hosting resources. I have some temp space on my cluster I could give you.

https://engineering.linkedin.com/30/building-linkedin-opensocial-container

That could be a good spring board for a similar project you could build for your resume for other companies

Note: I am not suggesting you complete this project for that company within 2 days

Maybe it's just me but I'm happy when an intern knows how to write a for loop.

I don't think they're trying to get free work out of you - I can't see how the end result would be useful to them, really.

That being said, the project is absolutely unreasonable. If you had more time, that's kind of just a "fuck you" to you schedule and life, and this short is impossible to make any real progress on.

Many others have mentioned an internship is meant for you to learn, but the job posting reads as if you already need years of experience. If you haven't done so already, report the posting as fraudulent if you're able too. This is flat-out farming for free work by taking advantage of students. See if your college/university has a career center or any resources connecting with companies that recruit from your school. Those connections would be more reliable than shady startups.

Any interview process that asks for this level of work from a take hone project is a redflag for abuse. It tells me they will literally do any incredulous thing just to keep costs low.

that's WAYYY unreasonable

An internship is a role where a person learns how to do this. (And someone who knows how to do this knows it’s orders of magnitude more involved than the two days you were given — two months is a more realistic timeframe.)

Here’s a personal experience of mine, so you have more to compare this with:

When interviewing for a developer position (not an internship), I was once given a take-home programming task to complete over 2-3 days: basically a small, self-contained web app that they had made intentionally buggy and poorly-composed in various ways. I was tasked with identifying & fixing the problems, then providing a write-up of why I changed what I changed. (The package was different enough from their specialty that it was pretty obvious I wasn’t doing their work for them. I confirmed after being hired that this same task was given to all applicants.)

Again, that was for hiring a developer. The whole point of an internship is that you’re being taught and trained on the job.

If you’re already able to build what those people asked of you, then you’re overqualified for the role.

internship for a full stack developer

I understand I am not in that field specifically, just kind of adjacent, but a full stack developer intern? Is this normal?

Tell them that you'll be happy to do that for a substantial fee.

As a manager of a security team at a tech firm, that's idiotic and you were tasked with something difficult. Vocalize your issues, show them your efforts, and ask for guidance.

If you don't get help, start looking. It'll be a hassle, but but you'll be better off.

I barely touch any code beyond some excel automation macros, PowerBI queries, and mostly ProtoFlux for Resonite. But even I can tell, this isn't merely unreasonable...

This is flat out absurd.

I would have called them back ASAP and told them they accidentally sent me a long term internal project.

Having built similar applications, with my own boilerplate at the ready, I would budget at least 5 hours for this sort of mockup and would only accept a 2 day turnaround with a premium and full payment in advance.

For a junior with oversight from an experienced mentor I would budget at least 3 days with a turnaround of no less than a week.

For a junior with no guidance, I wouldn’t expect completion of this project at all.

Ignore this client. Even if they’re serious, they are clearly ready to undervalue your work in an extreme way.

I personally don't even apply for jobs that do BS like this. My current job had 2 zoom interviews with Dev teams and that's it. Best job I've had so far and I just got a 32% raise w/ my promotion after less than 2 years

I'd maybe email them and state that for a project, a requirements document is step one, so to do the project rather than a subtractive list of what not to include, a list of what features are to be included is step one.

It's possible the person seriously doesn't know how many features LinkedIn has, and all they want is just profiles, and private messages?

Its possible once they start listing features to you they themselves will realize what they asked was unreasonable and they'll give you something very simple, like all it has to have is sign up, login, and profile pages.

There's a small part of me that wonders if it's a test of some kind. To see how you react to absurd demands. Do you just make something shitty and pretend it's done? Do you reach out got clarification? Can you communicate very clearly, in business terms, why this project would take a full team of devs easily a year and a half to two years to make?

I'd approach it that way and ask to meet and discuss, and I'd say we'd have to work put a requirements document first and foremost.

That is the type of work of a full stack developer as far as I know. Is it a paid internship? Is this the type of projects the job listing indicated you would be doing, or is this the bare minimum level of experience they are looking for? Two days to build a LinkedIn clone seems daunting but could be done and may make sense IF the internship is for more complex things (and paid IMO).