That question translates to me as "your sister teams/leadership/communication infrastructure are completely incompetent/lacking and you're on the spot to pull an 18 hour shift to clean up their mess. What do you do?"

Sure occasional unforeseen emergencies/breakdowns in communication are expected even at the best of companies, but I'd replace it with a hypothetical that makes the company sound fundamentally competent. Perhaps something like "The company has promised the customer a To-Do List App, however automated testing failed to catch a mission-critical edge-case. This comes to light the day before it's supposed to be delivered. The flaw is so fundamental that the app will have to be re-written. Everyone else is handling other parts of the delivery, so you're on the spot to do it on your own. The only thing that matters is that it's done fast. What do you use?"

IMO your counterexample is wildly implausible, and is likely to sidetrack the candidate. "Is nothing salvageable? What was the flaw? What automated testing? Do I have to use that testing in my alternative fix? How does that reflect on the rest of my tech stack choice?"

Perhaps a more innocent miscommunication like the customer failed to clearly communicate requirements, and it was just discovered in an email conversation that they were expecting and as-of-yet un-implemented To-Do List App in the current release, which is shipping tomorrow/this week/etc. I've experienced situations like that before, not sure how applicable it is to your business.

My original example is born of a decade of cynicism, and you're right that it could reflect poorly on the company. Thank you for the feedback, though in fact I'm happily unemployed right now.

It would make no sense for an interviewer to provide meaningless context unless they were deliberately attempting to distract from the the question, or are otherwise simply incompetent/unfocused. I don't see how gas-lighting candidates would be a productive mode of interview, particularly given that each party only has the interview from which to judge each others' character. Even if the candidate were to successfully discern the gas-lighting, all it would do is prevent trust from being formed. At that point every interaction would be subject to question.

So with the assumption that gas-lighting is not the intent and that the hiring party is competent, the question is how is the context meant to inform the response?

Given that the interviewer is gauging the candidate's ability to perform a job, it is sensible to assume that realistic-sounding context applied to a question is meant to see how the candidate would perform in what the interviewer deems a "realistic" scenario.

If the scenario is unrealistic but meant to impart other information, then it should be obvious or stated as such, so that the candidate can attempt to parse to the correct information from the scenario to inform their response.

If the point is merely to motivate the candidate to answer the question by placing themselves in a narrative, I'd argue they should be motivated enough by the fact that they're in a job interview, without the need for unrealistic scenarios. If they aren't then they clearly aren't taking the position seriously or likely have other issues that would impact their job performance even if hired.

Take the hypothetical removed from context: "You have make a deployable to-do list app as quickly as possible, speed and basic functionality are the only priorities. What tools do you use?..." That format accomplishes the same goal of revealing the candidate's knowledge of what a quick/dirty workflow looks like. The followup questions mentioned "what problems to you anticipate when scaling the solution? How would you on-board coworkers? How would you shift from rapid development to ongoing maintenance? etc" would then flesh out the candidate's knowledge equally as well.

Good point I think

It's like you're aware of the issue (sales doesn't give two shits about the capacity of the engineering team) but you want someone that is good at wasting a lot of time efficiently instead of improving communication with the sales team.

If all your hypotheticals revolve around cleaning up the mess of flagrantly incompetent coworkers/leadership I'm going to get the impression that that's what I'm expected to do all the time. You could get the same information with different hypotheticals, so there's no point in making your company sound like a horrible place to work.

Happily, we would come to a mutual decision that I should produce profits for someone else. It sounds like you're one of those managers who wants supplicants, not applicants. Good luck with that.

It sounds like you're one of those managers who wants supplicants, not applicants.

Absolutely not. I want human beings with whom I can have a good relationship with, based in communication. I definitely don't want to hire a robot who is making important assumptions based on questionable (and totally wrong) heuristics, and Not bothering to ask simple questions.

So yeah, someone applying a weird algorithm to the questions I'm asking them isn't going to be a good fit.