[dmansen]

[edit: Both the reactions you listed seem fine, depending on what you're looking for. But I wouldn't do this myself, anyway.]

I don't know the correct reaction, and don't do this when I'm interviewing. My point was that I could easily see a different side of this story, from the interviewer's perspective. Maybe the interviewer understood the OP's solution, and wanted them to explore a different angle.

We're lacking so much context here - what did the interviewer actually say? Was their tone gentle or aggressive? Were they flat-out ignoring the OP's answer, or acknowledging it while taking it through different use cases? We can't know, we weren't there.

I understand there are many places with poor interview practices, but I've seen enough devs come out of these types of interviews with wildly incorrect self-assessments that I no longer blindly trust these anecdotes. Unless they told you the exact reason you failed, you're speculating. And if you're an engineer that repeatedly gets turned down after these interviews at many different shops, you may not know what you don't know. Complaining about the interview process isn't a productive way to improve in those situations.

[note that my critique goes both ways: I have no way of knowing OP's skill, and their story could be completely accurate. however, I see this attitude a lot from overconfident junior devs, and that's to whom this rant applies.]