The Interview Doesn't End
Some companies interview candidates by having them open a real pull request against a real repository, sometimes one the public can browse. That's the whole appeal from the hiring side: no whiteboard, an actual codebase under actual conditions. Nobody asks what happens to the pull request after.
What happens is nothing, technically. The branch sits there. If the exercise repo is public, or if the interview runs on a real ticket in a real product repo, the PR is a permanent object: author name, commit timestamps, a comment thread where a staff engineer notes the candidate missed an edge case, a CI log showing two failed runs before the third one passes. None of it gets cleaned up, because cleaning it up isn't anyone's job. The hiring decision the PR served has an expiration date measured in weeks. The PR does not.
Compare a resume. A resume is authored by the candidate, about the candidate, revised at will and retired when it stops being useful. A git history is authored by whoever committed to it, preserved by a system built for exactly one purpose, and readable years later by anyone with a search engine and a spare afternoon. The candidate has no control over the record's afterlife, because the record was never built to have a public afterlife. It was scaffolding for one Tuesday's decision. It outlived the reason it existed.
The context that made the artifact legible disappears first. A stranger who finds the PR two years later doesn't see "forty-five minute timed exercise, candidate under pressure, unfamiliar codebase, reviewer watching over their shoulder." They see a diff and a comment thread. The reviewer's notes, written fast for a hiring panel and not for the internet, read sharper out of context than they were meant to: "misses the null case again," "solid but slow." Nobody appends "we hired her anyway, she was great that day" or "we passed for reasons that had nothing to do with this." The verdict, the one part of the whole exercise that actually mattered, is the one part that never gets attached to the artifact.
That's the actual asymmetry. The parts of a hiring process meant to be durable, offer letters, performance notes, references, live in systems built to be private and eventually forgotten. The part meant to be disposable, a scratch branch for a coding exercise, lives in a system built never to forget anything. The two properties end up swapped, and nobody chose that on purpose. It's just what happens when a private judgment call gets routed through a tool whose entire reason for existing is permanent record-keeping.
The candidate ends up representing a version of themselves that never got to argue its own case. The PR doesn't know it was a screen. It doesn't know whether the answer was right, whether the reviewer was having a bad morning, whether the person got the offer. It sits in the history, indexed and attributable, answering a question nobody's asking anymore, for whoever happens to look next.
The interview ends. The commit never finds out.