To be honest, this sounds extremely difficult and not in a good way. That sounds like many many hours of writing work, to describe a problem that might be many years in the past, that might have been solved by extremely intricate methods that are easy to forget, using technologies that are now not commonly in use, etc.

A good question to ask about each interview question might be: would a good liar have an easier time answering this than a person trying to answer honestly? And if so, retire the question.

Having read many, many, many answers to this question, I don't think that a good liar has a particularly easy time answering this question -- or certainly not in a way that gets them further consideration!

And yes, it's many hours of work -- but the work itself that we are doing is quite hard, and if someone washes out in the application process because it feels unduly arduous, we are likely not a fit for one another.

> I don't think that a good liar has a particularly easy time answering this question -- or certainly not in a way that gets them further consideration

How would you know?

> And yes, it's many hours of work -- but the work itself that we are doing is quite hard, and if someone washes out in the application process because it feels unduly arduous, we are likely not a fit for one another.

I sincerely hope that I never accidentally apply for a company that thinks an unpaid, long form writing prompt is an appropriate interview question because the work happens to be hard.

Eh, it also excludes people that don't have spectacular long-term memory, or people that don't keep a diary about bugs that they've chased down at work. Personally, I think you're overfitting to fight cheating, but maybe you work at a desirable enough place that you can afford to exclude so many people but still get enough good candidates.

IMO a good question provides the necessary context itself, and the candidate's thinking and reasoning skills are what's tested. With your question, it's basically turned into a competition of which candidate has tackled the most ridiculous/obscure/complex bug, so candidates aren't being judged on even footing.

Agreed completely. This problem borders on that common category of questions which test whether the applicant shares a specific fine-grained flavor of nerdiness as the interviewer, rather than whether the candidate is a good fit for the job.

Sounds like one where somebody does pretty well out of finding an interesting example from the internet and tweaking it slightly. They might not survive an interview asking them to expand upon it in an interview, but they could still succeed in passing the screening better than people recounting boring bugs they actually fixed...

(If ChatGPT wasn't busy I'd be tempted to see whether it can manage that, or whether your phrasing throws it off)