[gsuuon]

It's been hinted at elsewhere but sometimes problems come in stages, and later stages are only revealed after finishing the first stage. If you've only finished stage 1 after 40 mins, they may be looking for the candidate who's already wrapped up stage 2 and is on to discussing improvements by that time.

[throwaway12412]

That is a very good point and something I didn't really consider. I've placed top 100 globally in advent of code a couple of times, so I do think my coding speed is relatively quickly, but maybe. Next time I'll focus more on speed, I was under the impression that showing your thinking and walking the interviewer through the thought process was more important.

Thanks for the feedback!

[thiago_fm]

I also thought about this in a few interviews and it wasn't the case. Often enough, the interviewer won't make this clear so you have to ask.

I've had this situation in a company where the interviewer told me they would like to hear my reasoning, but then I failed, because I didn't do exercise 2 and 3 and wasted all my time talking about tradeoffs etc, when the interviewed seemed interested about it.

Those recruiting processes are garbage, if you take this into account, it will help you to succeed at it, you need to play the game, many times and then you'll make it.

Wish you a good time on that career change, I myself, have given up and instead just accepted that I'll work with webdev for a long time, as recruiters and companies seem to be too concerned with experience to let a developer that worked on a different language or stack to work there and perform well.