I spent a full weekend building an end-to-end pipeline for a Series B startup. Ingestion from three sources, data modeling in their warehouse, dbt transformations, tests, documentation, and a 45-minute live presentation to their "data team" (two people). Monday morning I got a three-sentence rejection email. The subject line was "Update on your application." That was the update. I wish this was unusual. It isn't. This is the data engineering hiring process in 2026, and it's broken in ways that should make every engineer angry. The Take-Home Ballooned While You Weren't Looking Here's how it used to work: a company sends you a take-home assignment. Build a small ETL script, write some SQL, maybe model a couple tables. Two hours, tops. You submit it, they review it, you talk about it. Reasonable.…