Confused about recent Google code screen feedback - seems incorrect
Hi all, I just recently took 1st round of Google interviews (my 2nd time interviewing for google) but got rejected by the recruiter for not being strong enough in the coding round. However the feedback he gave me didn't seem right at all (and I was too devastated in the moment to bring it up).
Googlyness - nothing but praise, said he's never seen feedback so positive, clear Leadership skills and should pushed to L4/L5 level
Coding round - Said the solution had a few bugs and I took too long to implement not leaving enough time for follow-up ups. This makes no sense to me. The interviewer joined about 5 mins late and seemed quite chill and friendly, we had a short introduction with each other and then he dropped the question about 10-15mins in. Reasonable directed graph question. The pressure hit me here but I think I coded up a very clean looking solution, and I self corrected 1 or 2 bugs after looking at it. No major guidance here apart from a detail about the "visited" hashmap logic. I'd say it looked really clean, had good code style and the shape was 100% correct (I confirmed with chatgpt afterwards)
I finished about 30 mins later. I asked if he wanted to ask follow-up questions, he said "no it's fine, you already explained a few performance trade offs, it's just a screener, we get people who can't even code". This made me feel pretty good and optimistic. We then spent the next 10 mins just talking about general working at Google questions. I left feeling that surely, this is a pass at least for a initial screener.
I get the feedback call a few days later and the recruiter informs me that it's bad news, I didn't implement the solution fast enough, it was full of bugs and didn't leave enough time for follow-up questions. I accepted it in the moment but pondering about it, I'm like WTF? Bugs I'll accept, but the rest seems like total BS. Am I just reading too much into it or does this seem like fake news?