[ascar]

To be fair, I would say if your task is to design a system it's your job to find out what the person actually wants and not run with assumptions you made based on a bad description. The reality is that you will usually start with a bad description. So I'm not sure if these misunderstandings actually reflect that badly on the interviewer/the question.

[dkarl]

I think if they were testing my ability to work through misunderstandings in requirements, they would have been decently impressed that I got from "system for selling concert tickets" to "system for giving out random integers" in half an hour. But they weren't impressed, they were irritated.

Edit: Also I don't think a normal product requirements discovery process involves figuring out that you're actually being asked to solve a different problem in a vastly different domain. You shouldn't ask someone to build Netflix while thinking "let's see how long it takes them to realize I meant Twitter."