An interviewer once gave me a problem about scraping some information out of a log file. I wrote a short shell pipeline. The interviewer asked for a more complicated analysis. I wrote a longer pipeline. The interviewer added more requirements, with aggregation, state, etc in order to push me to write an actual program. I wrote an even longer pipeline.

By this point we had both realised that this was a battle of wits: could he come up with a problem that i couldn't solve with a pipeline?

At the end of the interview, i had a pipeline that took up most of a piece of A4 paper to write out. I had won the battle, and was offered the job.

Of course, i would not advise you to actually write a pipeline like that in production, but it's a fun exercise.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that if the interviewer wants you to solve a problem a certain way, and you can solve it in a simpler way, then a good interviewer will mark you up, not down. Perhaps at Google they didn't; they don't really seem like a company that has it together.