"New rules will be revealed one by one. The candidate should note them as there won’t be shown again"
This feels more like a Squid Game parody than an interview.
I interview people from all walks of life. I would definitely not have hired some of the best engineers I worked with if I was trying to be too clever and quirky when giving out requirements.
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.
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.
> punishing creativity
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.
Friend solves it in Objective-C.
"Oh, except that one."
I have shunned every Google recruiter since.
I did get the job, and with almost entirely in Ruby and PowerShell, so....
I have no affiliation with Google.
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.
It was more than 10 years ago. And the candidate was from Apple, hence his currency in Objective-C.
Another good friend worked at Google for some time after that, and reported a pretty toxic evaluation regime that pitted employees directly against each other. He eventually left.
> Mutating array operations are forbidden. Arrays cannot have content appended or removed after initialization.
In a language like C, one could interpret this rule as making arrays containing anything other than 0 or a fixed-length list of expression be forbidden. And, in any case, who comes up with what are essentially style rules that are the same regardless of language?