[brey]

> ...why not just ask a question about building a real-time monitoring system itself and judge the responses there?

agreed. these abstractions for their own sake don't help, make the candidate feel like they're jumping through hoops for no reason

and they're intrinsically less useful than simply talking about real problems you've faced; you can't follow up an answer about golf balls down various interesting avenues of discussion when a candidate touches on some other area, because your job is not packing golf balls into a bus.