Like 75% of the candidates are cheating, and it's so obvious. It's a shame because even if I know they're cheating, it raises my subconscious bar on quality I expect from candidates.

"Oh I see you used Kafka in this design, but it appears to be pushing to your workers. Can you talk to me in a bit more detail about how this works?"

(note: You're only getting this question if you used Kafka to solve my problem. The answer is the workers pull off Kafka and store their own offset, or Kafka stores it in the case of consumer groups)

proceeds to read off the encyclopedia for Kafka

"that's great.. but explicitly, how are your workers using Kafka..?"