It seems pretty reasonable. As in, can be answered honestly without ruining your chances and reveals valuable information to the applicant and the employer. But

It seems pretty reasonable. As in, can be answered honestly without ruining your chances and reveals valuable information to the applicant and the employer. But I assume that the applicant actually honestly believes themselves to be fit for a role. After all, the desired goal of the question is to weed out people who can't or won't perform the needed tasks. If I really thought coming to an office every day at 9am was your idea I wouldn't offer a salary. There's an understanding that the salary is compensation for the difference between ideal and reality. Even if I were to believe you, it wouldn't be in your best interest to tell me my job was ideal for you... I think the scenario people imagine in all these interviewing-question threads is themselves looking for work and all that is available is a junior dev position in an unpopular language, or a QA/QE role, etc, and that they have to lie and pretend their life-goal is picking up after others in a corporate environment. Like a waterfall Java QE. If you could honestly describe that as your ideal you really wouldn't be the type of person I'd hire... But if you respond that your ideal is a dev role in a better language I'd probe your dev process and see what you'd do to ensure the connection between customer-spec-code-reality. Then I could say "Well, the code you'd be reviewing is legacy and Java, so that's inflexible, but our test infrastructure is out of date and needs to be re-integrated - I think that could be done in your language of choice ... etc" Ideally you'd offer these yourself. "I see myself in more of a full-time dev role, but with so much legacy code the sane thing to do is to get a reliable and useful set of tests running before the product is modernized. So as long as the QE role involved creation of new tests and new test frameworks - and especially if you'll let me implement at least one in Xlang to demonstrate its benefits ..."