A ten-engineer team has one deployable application. Deploys are getting scary. Someone proposes splitting into services. What do you say?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said.
The situation behind the question
The application is well-tested but the test suite takes 40 minutes, one team's change occasionally breaks another's, and a memory-heavy report feature has twice taken the whole app down.
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate diagnoses the actual pain before choosing a topology, and whether they can name what splitting costs. Every symptom in the scenario has a cheaper cause and a cheaper fix; some of them also genuinely argue for a split.