[bluejekyll]

I disagree. I suggest you read about the behavioral interview. By using pretty well known techniques you can quickly get people into a situation where they feel comfortable in telling you about what they did or did not do.

For example, I recently had someone run through a distributed system's set of questions related to kafka and some AWS services. It became obvious through this questioning that what he had built was not capable of guaranteed message delivery, i.e. the system was lossy.

The rest of the interview was about this system and how he would rebuild it to make sure there were no messages lost between all the handoffs of the system. We got into many very detailed areas about persistence, atomicity, idempotentcy, etc.

It should not be a shoot the breeze conversation about buzz words, it should be a very detailed process of getting down to the most complicated piece of software someone has worked with. It becomes very clear, very quickly, if they are bullshitting you, and then you don't hire them.