Tell this to my candidates:)

I have interviewed couple candidates that were offended by the fact that I am asking hard questions that I know answers to.

This resulted in remarks like "I have never seen this question on the Internet" or "So what is the answer to this question anyway?" or "If I knew questions would be this hard I would not bother to come".

Somebody explain to people that it doesn't matter how hard the questions are but how the candidates compare. I am fully prepared that the candidates study questions that are available on the Internet, I want to see how they deal with something that requires a bit more than couple hours of effort and rote memorization.

Most interviewers though aren't actually any good at it and very often don't like not being the smartest person in the room.

I guess it depends on where you're doing the interviewing. I've had surprisingly unintelligent people get to me in the interviewing stages. It amazes me how many developers, experienced even, who can't write a simple recursive function. And we're not even looking at, "can you come up with a recursive function as a solution to this problem?" we're looking at "write a recursive function to calculate the factorial" as the question.