I got asked the same. I simply pointed out the test is a reproduction of last week's bug that took down prod at 2am and got paged to fix, and is therefore as realistic as it gets of what they'll need to be able to handle.

It's always DNS, everyone should know that.

Ahaha yes, that might be the case, but I started to lose hope if the top of the applicants (out of hundreds of rejected!) all exhibits this behavior. I can't help but feel that now we are looking for people with a mindset and skillset that is simply disappearing in the industry.

And as I said in another post, I perfectly acknowledge that if I stopped reading and investigating stuff on my own, I could absolutely keep my job by just mindlessly administering a few services and rephrasing CIS benchmarks...

Our entry test should have been dead simple for anyone applying to the position. Position: C++ computer graphics programmer, 1-2 years experience implementing technical graphics displays in C++ language. All resumes submitted, of course, claimed this and more. All interviewees, of course, professed great confidence in their abilities. 9/10 candidates, when presented with "the test" failed spectacularly. The ones who passed, generally, did it in less than 10 minutes - with a couple of interesting quirks which revealed their attention to and/or willingness to follow directions. The failures ranged from rage-quit and stomping out without a word, to hours of pleading for more time to work on it - which, in principle, we granted freely, but after 30 minutes if they didn't have it they never got it.

Ours is really simple, like something any somewhat competent engineer could complete in half the time we provide after going through the tutorial on the framework's website. Yet so many people fail, even when they claim to have years of experience with the framework.

There are a ton of terrible applicants out there.