bombed a take-home because I over-engineered it and the simpler solution would've scored higher

Take-home asked for a basic CRUD feature and I built in caching, a queue, and configurable retry logic nobody requested. Feedback came back that the simpler version would've scored higher because it showed I understood the actual scope of the ask. Learned the hard way that showing restraint is apparently its own skill, one I clearly hadn't been practicing.