[deanCommie]

It would be the highpoint of immature unprofessionalism to reveal company strategy or policy in interview questions.

I ask a coding interview question where I tell my candidates "Assume you have to do everything in memory; there is no database - you just receive events; everything is in one host, or multi-tier architecture." That's because it's a test of their ability to reason about data structures, and implement a short (20-30 minute) algorithm.

In real life, there is no way the "feature" I ask them to implement would be done in memory, and the data would naturally be in a database. It's not a architectural design question (i have others for that), it's a coding question.

I should hope nobody comes out of it thinking "wow, the engineers at this company are under pressure not to use databases, or have durable L2 caches"

I suspect you are reading into the constraints of an interview question, and the effects on the consumer was just not relevant to the technical concepts they were trying to evaluate.