The questions are fine for SRE. The problem is the behaviour and the expectations of the interviewer.

The people doing these interviews are non-technical people who read off of a cheatsheet. The cheatsheet covers alternative answers, but a situation like the OP describes can never end well.

If that's true, making non-technical people conduct technical interviews is also a pretty big failure.

Thanks, I am realizing now that it was SRE. All I can say is I'm definitely a fan of how we interview SWEs and I'm sorta bummed this is how SRE interviews go. TIL.

I got these questions when being interviewed for SWE and SRE. My answers suggested to the interviewer that I should go down the SRE route. I passed in the end, because I felt the culture regarded everything as a technical problem (which has worked out for them so far) and Google was a company where you did things their way, and don't rock the boat.

Are SWE and SRE interview the same? I thought they were different enough job descriptions that it would require different interview questions.

They are different, but a lot of the skills are similar. SREs need to problem solve and while they may need to have more domain-specific knowledge I'm not sure a facts quiz administered by someone non-technical is the best way to do that.