In my experience interviews are not the main place to evaluate technical skills, people get nervous and asking too specific technical questions is not good also, some people can be good at remembering then but can not do anything with then.
I came to the idea that to interview&#x2F;hire&#x2F;select a software engineer he&#x2F;she should show at least three bug fixes on any opensource project and if the fixes are way back the interview&#x2F;job advert the better. So one can at least have a concrete idea of the candidate skills&#x2F;interest when confronted with a third party code base and how she&#x2F;he understood&#x2F;solved the problem.<p>This way the interview can be used to access other important aspects of the candidate.<p>I interviewed several people that seem to have paid someone to write their C.V. very well but when in person was a lost of time.