I hope you guys gave the candidate another shot. And maybe an apology.
All this obsession with coding tricks in the interviews is just awful.
In fact, beyond a certain level of competence, interview results are mostly about luck. Sometimes you get a nice set of interviews, sometimes you don’t. Some companies will at least not reject you out of hand for one bad interview slot, but most companies are just so overwhelmed with unreliable signal that they’ll tank you for any kind of hint at incompetence.
I’ve been given offers from Google, been rejected by random web shops, and everything in between, all within the same year.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is put on steroids during tech interviews.
There’s this pretense that the interviewer is smarter than the interviewee, and an expectation that the interviewee will abide by that pretense as a show of respect.
That pretense leads interviewers to being unnecessarily ambiguous, and especially leads them to asking overly complicated questions. If you’re an insecure engineer, this allows you to impress your coworkers in the meeting afterward with your complicated question. You can act as if it would have been easy for you, the other engineers in the room won’t disagree because they want people to think they’re smart too, and one thing will be made very clear to everyone: You are smarter than the candidate, and the company is very lucky to have you.
It also leads interviewees to fake equivocating and feigning ignorance, and is overall a strong recipe for unconscious or deliberate bias based on the personal and professional insecurities of both parties.
From the other side of the table, when you’re the one interviewing candidates, you spend an absolute minimum of 90% of your time screening and interviewing people who are so bad that it literally hurts on an emotional level to interact with them. You develop compassion fatigue, like a nurse in an ER, and it’s very easy to find yourself in a place where you assume the worst of every candidate and don’t even care anymore if they fail.
The results of these interviews are influenced far more heavily by the interviewers than by the person being interviewed, in my opinion. And most companies (nearly all in fact) have literally no mechanism by which they grade the quality or subjectivity of their interviewers.