I feel like 99% of eng interview advice sounds just like this: "I've interviewed a bazillion people, everyone else is doing it wrong, here's the one good way."

Honestly, I think a lot of it is akin to medieval quackery. "I've treated hundreds of patients with leeches and the large majority of them eventually recovered - you should listen to me!"

I wish that we, as an industry, would spend less time reinventing interviewing from first principles. There are decades of research on how to interview people effectively. I highly recommend Schmidt + Hunter's meta-analysis (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232564809_The_Valid...) as a starting point.

From my read of the research:

1. Use work-sample tests. Yes, they're annoying, but they're high-signal. Take-home tests, online tests, in-person tests, trial periods - there are plenty of options here, but it seems clear this is the most effective way.

2. Use structured interviews. Engineers love to just have loose conversations and judge people based on that, but structured > unstructured. Plus (just my guess here), I suspect unstructured interviews leave a lot more room for bias.

3. Plenty of techniques are effective on their own (eg references), but add minimal effectiveness when you're already doing a more effective test (eg work sample) and are therefore pretty much wastes.