I completely agree with your core point. I really hate gotcha questions too (and have come close to walk out of interviews over them quite a few times). On the

I completely agree with your core point. I really hate gotcha questions too (and have come close to walk out of interviews over them quite a few times). On the other hand, ""gotchas" are usually easily Google-able too." isn't that simple. You don't know what you don't know. We're in a world now when even some extremely senior devs don't know the tools they use. A lot of it can be blamed on the whole "if you know one language you can learn any other in an afternoon!" tenet. Having so few people these days with vertical/deep knowledge of the tools they use gets really annoying when trying to deal with major production issues and no one in the room can debug them in a timely manner. Almost makes me think that some form of "tech guru" role should start being a thing, and THOSE people could be interviewed with the stream of obscure gotchas...because sometimes you need a tech guru.