I've interviewed maybe 20 times in the last year and the best have always just started as a conversation about what a place is doing now, what they want to do in the future and how the candidates skills and experience can help them get there.<p>All the take-homes and whiteboards seemed like the interviewers special gotcha idea they'd been working on for maybe 10 seconds before asking me to do it and ended up full of holes, bad processes and generally showing more about them than anything.<p>One place that had no idea what devops was actually got upset I finished too quickly by making use of some FOSS tools and asked for a week to design a harder test. Huge red flag lol.<p>If you and your teams cant sit down and have one or two hour-long conversations with an engineer and get a good idea of if their skills and experience will help you - you're dysfunctional have bigger issues that you need to look inward about.