The team wants to rewrite a service from scratch. How do you decide whether that is the right call?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said — including whether you named a cost, or only a principle.
The situation behind the question
A five-year-old order service in an older framework version. It works, it is in production, it handles about a hundred thousand orders a month, and everyone hates it. Two engineers have volunteered to rewrite it in three months. The original team is gone.
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate treats the rewrite as a *migration problem* rather than a coding problem. The decisive facts are almost never about the code: they are about hidden behaviour, coexistence, data, cutover risk and the business continuing to change requirements while the rewrite runs.