There's a research paper from the University of Liverpool, published in 2006 where researchers asked people to draw bicycles from memory and how people overestimate their understanding of basic things. It was a very fun and short read.
It's called "The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work" by Rebecca Lawson.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/bf03195929.pdf
There’s also a great art/design project about exactly this. Gianluca Gimini asked hundreds of people to draw a bicycle from memory, and most of them got the frame, proportions, or mechanics wrong. https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
A place I worked at used it as part of an interview question (it wasn't some pass/fail thing to get it 100% correct, and was partly a jumping off point to a different question). This was in a city where nearly everyone uses bicycles as everyday transportation. It was surprising how many supposedly mechanical-focused people who rode a bike everyday, even rode a bike to the interview, would draw a bike that would not work.
I wish I had interviewed there. When I first read that people have a hard time with this I immediately sat down without looking at a reference and drew a bicycle. I could ace your interview.
This is why at my company in interviews we ask people to draw a CPU diagram. You'd be surprised how many supposedly-senior computer programmers would draw a processor that would not work.
Poe's Law [1]:
> Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
If I was asked that question in an interview to be a programmer I'd walk out. How many abstraction layers either side of your knowledge domain do you need to be an expert in? Further, being a good technologist of any kind is not about having arcane details at the tip of your frontal lobe, and a company worth working for would know that.
That's reasonable in many cases, but I've had situations like this for senior UI and frontend positions, and they: don't ask UI or frontend questions. And ask their pet low level questions. Some even snort that it's softball to ask UI questions or "they use whatever". It's like, yeah no wonder your UI is shit and now you are hiring to clean it up.
Raises hand.