I used to give a code review task, of some particularly egregious python code. I'd provide all help with the syntax, and emphasise strongly upfront I don't expect them to know python or its syntax. It has proven to be a low stress task for candidates. They're not trying to solve a brain teaser, they're just doing something that's going to be part of the job. Reading code, understanding what it is doing, and providing feedback to make it more maintainable.
When all around me in this FAANG type role are engineers giving leet code esque questions, I was trying to be a breath of fresh air for them.
Sadly, I need to rethink this now, because you can throw it in an LLM and it'll give you a nearly complete answer. I've already had one candidate clearly do that.
The most "refreshing" interview I had was one where the guy had a list of like 100 questions about C++, and he would just go through and ask "do you know what SIMD is?" or "are you familiar with smart pointers?" or "tell me about templates" (most were less open ended than the template one). If I responded yes, he'd follow up, and it was more of a discussion. If I said no he'd just move on to the next one (sometimes I'd ask what it was and he'd explain).
At one company I lobbied hard against standardizing our interview on a question designed to test the candidate's multi-threaded knowledge. I insisted that if we needed multithreading, we could just ask the candidate, and ask them to elaborate. Fortunately I won that little battle.
Sometimes in interviews you get tunnel vision and you can't see the forest through the trees, and you don't realize that the interviewer is asking you about multithreading because they're being coy. That's the kind of shitty interview we need to avoid, because it leads to the false conclusion that the candidate doesn't know about multithreading when actually you just don't know how to ask.
When all around me in this FAANG type role are engineers giving leet code esque questions, I was trying to be a breath of fresh air for them.
Sadly, I need to rethink this now, because you can throw it in an LLM and it'll give you a nearly complete answer. I've already had one candidate clearly do that.