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Rigid interviewing techniques like that can easily weed out great candidates. Your confidence in your own process leads me to believe you may have missed a few great ones yourself.

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There are a lot more bad candidates than great ones, time is limited so it's usually more important to be able to weed out the bad ones fast.

Max gets brought up in these discussions a lot, but honestly I think the no hire was a good decision from what I know. Homebrew was a triumph of product design more than technical prowess, I suspect Google might have hired him as a product manager. Max was by his own admission was not a great programmer[0] but interviewed solely for a software role. I don't have a CS degree either, but I wouldn't hire someone to work google scale software if they couldn't invert a binary tree.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

I don't feel very confident in my process overall and I agree this test will produce a lot of false negatives (and said as much in my comment). But, I've never seen someone who had that sort of extraordinary performance on a leetcode style problem go on to bomb the rest of the interview. These extraordinary performers have pretty much always been solid in other areas as well.

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