Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

Interviews should be as close as possible to the work that the candidate would do if they join. Candidates have to first prioritize the queue, which means deciding which issues seem important and which can wait. Candidates have to be able to parse through questions that are vague or maybe misinterpretations of what's happening. Candidate: As a sanity check, could we have them make a request to a different service in production and see if that times out? Us: They said that also timed out. To be clear, we aren't expecting the candidate to say "Oh it's probably in a private subnet," or even go into the networking weeds with the user, but we are expecting that the right prompts will lead the user to figure it out. Some candidates will ask if we are down before saying anything to the user, some candidates will try to reproduce the issue themselves, and some candidates will lean more heavily on their intuition to figure out what's wrong. We've also received the feedback that it's a much more enjoyable interview process than most - and it never hurts to provide an excellent candidate experience!