You buried your lede IMO. The interviewers had this cute game and when the developer didn't play by the planned rules (build up a monsterous collections of branching on top of a for loop) they were screwed. Issues:
* rules revealed one by one. Spec changes and is always incomplete, but you never even hear about changing spec that your existing solution already handles.
* artificially handicaping developers. This is the opposite you want; it's a bad smell if developers are not offloading to rock solid libraries and language features
* punishing creativity. You're getting a great view into how this person works and thinks; isn't that a primary purpose of all interviews?
* anti-lookup / matrix. Some of the most efficient solutions use this aprooach, or an inherient property of the desired state/input (data as code). This is super-common in game development; John Carmack would have failed this interview too.
A similar thing happened to me once in an interview. They said use any language, but were a TS shop. I went with Python, which is hardly esoteric. The interviewers were seemingly unaware of the breadth and depth of Python’s stdlib, and so I demolished their questions in short order. I don’t remember specifics, only that I used heapq for something, and itertools for something else.
The reply afterwards was along the lines of, “while you clearly have a solid grasp on Python, we didn’t get good signals from the interview.”
It’s very much worth noting that this was for an infra role, DBs specifically. The most advanced algorithm I’ve ever had (and “had” is a stretch) to use is Levenshtein.
How long ago was this? For at least the last 10 years or so (when I tried and completely failed my first Google interview), Google recruiters have asked what language you want to use in advance. The recruiter would then assign you to interviewers who know that language and can pick questions which are appropriate for that language.
The fact that one interviewer decided someone can't use Objective C shouldn't really give you any confidence that interviewers there are generally unreasonable.
That wasn't the only incident, nor is that an accurate paraphrasing of what I just conveyed.
And a few years later, Google basically admitted that their interview process was trash and, in not so many words, claimed that they were going to be less douchebaggy.
I had a similar experience at a different big tech company when I went to use Ruby. The interviewer suggested that Ruby was allowed, but I would be unlikely to get the job if I didn't use python.
I did get the job, and with almost entirely in Ruby and PowerShell, so....
Yeah, this was definitely a case of the interviewer looking for its soulmate.
It is frustrating but it's not personal, it's just someone bad at their job.
This only happened once to me: I got a feedback of "jumped straight into a cloud-based solution". The funny part is that it was a company that made tooling for cloud services. Naturally they went bust.
It's meant to be a test of creativity. You will while programming encounter limitations, so the interview tests your ability to handle that. Any limitation in the interview will be artificial because it's a test rather than an actual job.
You buried your lede IMO. The interviewers had this cute game and when the developer didn't play by the planned rules (build up a monsterous collections of branching on top of a for loop) they were screwed. Issues:
* rules revealed one by one. Spec changes and is always incomplete, but you never even hear about changing spec that your existing solution already handles.
* artificially handicaping developers. This is the opposite you want; it's a bad smell if developers are not offloading to rock solid libraries and language features
* punishing creativity. You're getting a great view into how this person works and thinks; isn't that a primary purpose of all interviews?
* anti-lookup / matrix. Some of the most efficient solutions use this aprooach, or an inherient property of the desired state/input (data as code). This is super-common in game development; John Carmack would have failed this interview too.