[lhorie]

> It's on par but still bullshit

I've actually had something like that happen to me too, but in a different company. From my experience as someone who's conducted a lot of interviews myself, I think this can happen due to various reasons:

- broken telephone (recruiting org rarely physically talks to eng org). If you call the recruiter after the fact, they may not have the context for the rejection and might make stuff up on the spot to get you off their back, because at that point, you're kind of "wasting their time" (given that their job description is to keep the hiring funnel greased, not maintain long-term relationships)

- technical interviewers don't always have interviewing training and may reject based on bogus reasons (e.g. feelings), then try to "justify the decision" after the fact. A few might not even keep good notes of their interviews

- sometimes candidates do solve a problem, but are legitimately rejected because they did so in a non-ideal way (e.g. performance problem, missing important edge case, struggling too much with basics like syntax, soft skill red flags such as lack of interest/proactiveness, etc). But often times the interviewer doesn't give the negative feedback to the candidate, leaving the candidate with a false sense of accomplishment.