"How do payments work?" Ask a better question.
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 asked who uses it before naming what you would build it with.
The situation behind the question
A teammate posts in the team channel: "How do payments work?" Nobody answers. The interviewer asks you to rewrite the question three times, each better than the last, and to say what the best version makes answerable.
React to this
Say what you would question, what you would keep, and what you would need to know first.
The decomposition, the proposal, or the transcript as it stands
Team channel (illustrative):
10:41 dev: how do payments work?
10:55 dev: anyone?
11:30 dev: ok I'll just start on the stripe tutorial
Rewritten by a candidate:
1. "How do payments work in our checkout?"
2. "What calls happen between our backend and the provider when a
customer pays, and where in our code does that happen?"
3. "Which system decides that an order is paid — our DB or the
provider — and how does our backend learn when it changes?"What it is really testing
Whether the candidate understands question quality as a ladder — vague, researchable, decisive — and whether they know what makes a question answerable by a person, by documentation, or by an experiment.