Your story both makes me want to laugh and cry because I've seen this pattern so many times. These days when I do architecture interviews, I always make sure t

Your story both makes me want to laugh and cry because I've seen this pattern so many times. These days when I do architecture interviews, I always make sure the problem can be solved distributed or monolithic and when they do distributed, I asked them why and to explain the trade-offs. If they do monolithic, I ask them why not distributed. Etc. For senior engineers, it's such a good indicator of whether or not they've truly worked in distributed systems and understand the human side of the problem. The big O stuff is great, but the human and organizational costs are easily as important to assess as the computational and memory costs.