Don't over-complicate the reason. ;) It's quite possible he was trying to test something else and the answer you gave didn't give him a meaningful answer to th

Don't over-complicate the reason. ;) It's quite possible he was trying to test something else and the answer you gave didn't give him a meaningful answer to that question. So while your solution may have been fine, it's not something you're going to run into in production code. But that hierarchy+command pattern is probably used in a more appropriate situation. And he wanted to see if you could deal with the pattern itself. Of course, I could be wrong. He could just be enamored with the overly complex solution because it's more "clever". Interviews are weird.