Am I the only one who is offended (but slightly amused) by this test? I would never work for a place that would play games like this. Are they also going to sen

Am I the only one who is offended (but slightly amused) by this test? I would never work for a place that would play games like this. Are they also going to send undercover employees to talk to you about the company over lunch break as your annual review? What's wrong with presenting the problem in a straightforward manner and see if the applicant can debug the steps, telling the interviewer what he's trying and why at each step? For starters you'd get way more out of his think flow. For "authenticity" you can add that this was a real problem that Cindy faced the other day and you may ask her questions. People tend to try what they know first (ie: pounding ctrl-p or ubuntu), and if it happened to be the issue, they were merely lucky and may not be competent at all either. How hard is it to ask them "What else haven't you tried? What would you have tried next if this didn't fix it? Why did you try those steps in that order?"