There is no such thing as "reasoning from first principle" for most of our engineering situations that can be described in an interview, regardless of whether i

There is no such thing as "reasoning from first principle" for most of our engineering situations that can be described in an interview, regardless of whether it's hard or not. Because everything is based on tradeoff and very very specific scenarios. I will reason from first principles if the interviewer provide me with a 200 pages detail on the budget, timeframe, use cases, target users and all deployment constrains. Otherwise we all worked based on assumptions and experience we got, even if the interviewer don't want to acknowledge that.