A CTO asked me to push my interview code to a public GitHub repo. They picked a referral. I think I just built their site for free. Final round with a local media startup. 3-person engineering team. CTO for 90 minutes. After we walked through my take-home, 15 minutes in he opens their own live site. Pulls up the homepage. Asks: "imagine you are an advertiser. You look at this page. Would you pay for a banner ad? Or hesitate? What specifically would stop you?" (my reaction: what the hell? this again? am I another lab rat for you? why are you asking me this? if you need product validation, hire someone, pay them, get validation. what does this have to do with a software engineer?) I compared it to Axios. Said placeholder photography cheapens the feel. The CTO narrowed his eyes (he probably did not love the answer). What I should have said (figured out 3 days later): "the top 3 articles all use the same AI-stylized photo aesthetic. An advertiser would assume the traffic is bot-inflated and walk.…