but thinking about doing it in an interview setting makes me nervous. I felt it went pretty well in the interviews and didn't seem to introduce any extra

but thinking about doing it in an interview setting makes me nervous. I felt it went pretty well in the interviews and didn't seem to introduce any extra stress. Personally, if I was being interviewed, I'd really prefer this to coding exercises as those really crank up the anxiety for me. (But of course everybody has different preferences!) not to mention that any serious production bug relies on knowing how the software stack operates & which things are relevant, Oh, I think maybe I didn't communicate this aspect properly in my post. There's no right answer. We're just looking for their thought process and how they might look up and down the stack to zero in on something. Of course they would need to ask questions about the architecture along the way. We do communicate all that up front - it's their questions that we're looking for. The rest seems fine, but I'm curious about your experience with the live debugging & if you've considered cutting it. Well it's only been a handful of developers, but I felt it was helpful. I think that kind of exercise is good for distinguishing "recent code school graduates" who are smart and can write code for one or two parts of the stack, from more experienced devs who have experience understanding how all the pieces of the stack fit together in a production environment.