It could well be, as a non-native speaker I'm not aware of such shades of meaning. It sounds a bit "TopTal speak" to me. Probably I picked it up subconsciously as I was skimming my TopTal post during writing.
Scores are normalized so it doesn't matter. If you always give a low score, that score will count more after normalization. It would be interesting to know how they treat outliers: for example, if you give always scores 1-2.5 and then suddenly a 4.
Once upon a time, a hiring committee was presented some feedbacks and had to come to a yes/no decision for some candidates. All them were rejected. It turned out that the feedbacks were of the hiring committee's members, from when they got hired.
Actually, if you are a Google intern and want to become a full-time engineer, you still need to pass two interviews. While preparing, I found a ton of stuff on Quora, take a look there.
Grazie :)
Getting zero feedback sucks, but as far as I understand it, this is a way to cover their asses from lawsuits. Basically, if you don't get hired, and x gets hired, and you happen to know that your feedbacks were similar, then you could claim that you have been discriminated on. This is especially true if, say, you are black and x is white, or similar.
I agree with the noise of the process. Actually, the whole experience was a good one for me, maybe I didn't express it in the post? Anyway, I got a job in Amazon UK at the end, so not too bad.
I agree with you. I put more the emphasis on the optimality of the solutions because that was the feedback from the recruiter. During the interviews, I made sure to talk through the problems indeed. That is a whole skill in itself.