I’m not going to justify going in depth in topics not relevant for the job. However going deep in tech topics is necessary to evaluate experience and seniority. The “best interviews” process you described is adequate for the first eng levels but if you want to interview for senior, staff, principal; etc it gets harder and going into depth and breadth is necessary.
Heck. Sometimes going into topics “not relevant” for the job is revealing. If their cv says they spent 5yrs writing Linux dev drivers but the position is to write golang web services I may still ask about device drivers if I can get a domain expert. Good people tend to understand very well the things they’ve worked on.
‘going into topics “not relevant” for the job is revealing‘
I would suggest anything on the applicant’s cv is fair game. What makes no sense is asking about removing duplicates from a linked list when that’s nowhere near what the job will entail.
Heck. Sometimes going into topics “not relevant” for the job is revealing. If their cv says they spent 5yrs writing Linux dev drivers but the position is to write golang web services I may still ask about device drivers if I can get a domain expert. Good people tend to understand very well the things they’ve worked on.