Do programming interviewers use first question to disarm candidates?

Question

It might sound silly but in the last few days that I was searching for a job I noticed that I have been asked some strange questions which did not make sense at least to me and because it happened in a few of them I started to think it might be a pattern or some kind of technique.For example one of them asked my "How can you print number 4 without using numbers or strings?" Turns out the answer was "Make array of 4 elements and print its length!Just the other day I was shown a JSON file with a few objects then the interviewer asked me "How would you put this object into a mongoDB document"? The answer was that I should use the 'builder' pattern to do it.Then I thought maybe those questions are being asked for other purposes than technical reasons or maybe I'm just hallucinating, Something like this ever happened to you?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

If I were interested in breaking somebody's defenses gently I'd ask questions in the following order: (1) What do you think about the immediate environment? (2) Tell me about what you're passionate about (3) What were you like when you were a kid?Personally I would always ask type (2) questions because they usually put people at ease but also they give people many opportunities to self-destruct and show bad character.

eesmith · Answer

They are showing off how smart/clever they are by making you flounder for the answer they want.