I think it's a fine question. You are asked to design a program that would do something sufficiently complex and ill specified, which is something you will enco

I think it's a fine question. You are asked to design a program that would do something sufficiently complex and ill specified, which is something you will encounter on the job. I am not saying that you shouldn't test the coding abilities of your candidate, but it looks to me a good way to see how he/she reasons about the various components of the system and asks for requirements.