It's not that the candidate is underqualified, it's that they demonstrated more hacking skill than programming skill in that interview. I feel like the rules about program length were mistaken for coding golf rules?
A small company hiring a programmer isn't looking for super clever type system hacks, they're looking for someone to crank out code to solve problems fast. It's not readable or efficient to use the type checking system as a general purpose computation system. If this is the code that your teammate wrote and now you have to debug it, good luck...
The candidate is certainly smarter than the average code monkey, just not "housebroken". Once they've worked at a team where they mostly get to fix and improve long-gone coworkers' code all day is when they gain more of an understanding of what programming is about...
A small company hiring a programmer isn't looking for super clever type system hacks, they're looking for someone to crank out code to solve problems fast. It's not readable or efficient to use the type checking system as a general purpose computation system. If this is the code that your teammate wrote and now you have to debug it, good luck...
The candidate is certainly smarter than the average code monkey, just not "housebroken". Once they've worked at a team where they mostly get to fix and improve long-gone coworkers' code all day is when they gain more of an understanding of what programming is about...