While I still think it's a good way to assess how a person works, by actually making them work, I do agree that there's an issue with people thinking that there

While I still think it's a good way to assess how a person works, by actually making them work, I do agree that there's an issue with people thinking that there's some trick. We've just completed a series of interviews and everyone below a certain age seems to think that we're pulling all kinds of tricks. During our interviews we'll ask a series of fairly simple questions about programming, operations, deployment, monitoring, all sorts of things. It's pretty clear to me that some candidates completely overthinks the problem. This was for a number of entry level jobs, so expectations aren't all that high, but we do want to make sure that people know the basics. It completely throws of a large number of people, especially those who have worked in startups and larger companies in the Silicon Valley / San Francisco areas. Our older candidate frequently just straight up answer the question and just comment "Or where you looking for something in particular?" Normally we're not. This is more a result of absolutely broken interview processes at other companies. I don't see us changing our interview process to include trick questions. Our questions are intended to make people talk, that's it.