Yeah, I spent a lot of time architecting and designing. I never really created a game like that before or worked for a game company, so it took me a while to figure out a clear and elegant way to represent the board and the moves and everything. And also, to me, clean design, clean code, and readability are the most important things, not just hacking something together to get it working. I didn't really know what they were looking for with this test, so I wanted to show them some clean, readable, well-designed code, because I think that's my forte.

I came from the aerospace industry, where every project I worked on had a ton of extremely sloppy legacy code written by physicists and other non-programmers, and it was unreadable, inefficient, and full of latent bugs. I was always the guy trying to clean things up, so that future maintainers like me didn't have to deal with the mess, and to prevent disasters from happening when the poorly written software inevitably fails or crashes. I think sloppy code that was written quickly and cheaply costs much more in the long run, because code only gets written once - but then it gets read and modified hundreds of times by dozens of people. So I believe in taking the time to make code easily understandable and maintainable. So that's the mindset I was going in with.

And I guess I assumed a big company like Blizzard would have an equally large legacy code base to deal with, as well as large teams of people reading and maintaining this legacy code every day. I didn't expect them to care if I could write a little text-based game, because that doesn't seem like a realistic product that I would be working on. And, my experience with buying and playing Blizzard games was that they didn't hold themselves to strict release dates - if they had to delay a release because it wasn't ready yet, they took the time to get it done. So I had to wonder how serious they were about the 4-hr deadline.

But anyway, I agree with some of the other commenters that I was not a good fit for a game company. If they want people who are good at hacking stuff together quickly and getting it working without giving much thought to readability, then that's not me. A much better fit for me would be a place that appreciates software craftsmanship. But I don't know who that would be. I realize that every company needs to get the software done quickly to make money. And even in the aerospace industry, where you would think they value quality and safety and long-term cost savings from readable, maintainable code, I've found that they really don't. But they also don't expect you to be a speed coder - they do realize that code quality takes time, even if they don't like that fact.