> The interviewers tried to tell him to approach it like an industrial-grade solution, not a weird academic exercise. Wrong. They put in silly rules like "Max

> The interviewers tried to tell him to approach it like an industrial-grade solution, not a weird academic exercise. Wrong. They put in silly rules like "Max of 30 lines" and "Mutating array operations are forbidden". These do not describe industrial-grade rules. They describe an academic, esoteric challenge. And then when he provides them with it, they punish him for his creativity by adding in bullshit rules retroactively e.g. "Hardcoding matrices is forbidden." You just sound upset that he's able to walk the walk but you WANT him to be just a bullshitter.