My take is the interviewer is looking for
- did candidate ask others for help, or stayed quiet (team player)
- did candidate finish the task even if was demotivating (self-motivation)
- how did candidate deal with stress, e.g. a deadline or pressure from management
- how deep did the debugging go. Surprising number of engineers don't know how to create smaller test cases, don't know how to do stack traces or run debuggers (I'm also bad that this).
- did candidate strive for an elegant solution, e.g. add test or documentation so it never happens again, or got it done and moved to the next task immediately (creating a stable infrastructure)
- my personal bonus is: if problem could be solved by just spending money (e.g. upgrade hardware, get consultant in, buy book, travel to another office to talk to a person who build it) was this considered? Spending some (company) money can be a fast-track compared to optimising software.
What the technical challenge was doesn't matter.