I’ve never worked for one of the big “big tech” companies so I don’t know how deeply they’ve drunk of the kool-aid, but that attitude isn’t uncommon at smaller shops. Questioning assumptions is an important part of the engineering process after all. I have been on the other side of the interview table a few times and I like to make up my own questions, and part of the interview process is seeing how well the candidate clarifies the parameters of the question. It’s not dissimilar to GMing an RPG. You lay out an environment, the player-candidate asks questions about it, then they take a course of action and we see how it proceeds. I try to be prepared with a solid, work-related scenario because I don’t like candidates having to workshop my questions for me when they’re hunting for a job, but if they spot an inconsistency or something else I hadn’t thought of before, it’s a positive sign that they’re thinking about the problem the way I expect an engineer to think about problems.