I hate that. It turns the problem into one of those lateral thinking puzzles we were told some basic information and then the answer winds up being something totally wildly different. It wasn't being very random in the end not being very productive

Are we describing interviews here, or the process of software engineering in practice? It could be either imo.

Those clarifying questions and some of the thinking through consequences are the only really topical part of SE interviews, the rest is just math you won't use on the job 99.99% of the time anyway.