I think a good interview puts you in a position where you are struggling and out of your expertise - being able to demonstrate you have a solution for a bunch of stuff is less important than being able to demonstrate how you do when you don’t know and have to figure it out.
In the general case, maybe you're right. In my specific case, "struggling" and "out of your expertise" doesn't describe it. It doesn't matter whether your question deals with my expertise or not; if it's technical and it requires me to actually think about it, I will be unable to answer in an interview setting. My mind will be completely blank.
Now, that's just me. Maybe I'm completely unique. Maybe there aren't any other programmers like me, and maybe nobody has to care about my individual quirks.
I don't have to care about them, either, because there seem to be enough people in the world who want to hire me. The only attention I need to pay to it is avoiding technical interviews to the extent that I can.
As a rule, when interviewing, I want to get to the boundary of a candidate's knowledge quickly. Questions they ace provide not much information (once it is established that they ace them), questions where they're totally out of their depth neither.
A bit provides maximum information when the chances for 0/1 are fifty/fifty.
So, agree with the sentiment
> a good interview puts you in a position where you are struggling and out of your expertise
as long as you are still at the boundary of your expertise, and have a realistic chance to make some progress.
> Questions they ace provide not much information (once it is established that they ace them), questions where they're totally out of their depth neither.
Agreed. The aim, for me, is to watch someone (try to) solve a problem and communicate about it. Ideally I'd like the question to rely on some previously unknown concept to see them pick up a new idea and run with it.
One of the best interview questions I ever had started with the interviewer asking me a fairly routine technical question, to which I gave a standard and acceptable answer. He then said, "Okay but what if I took away your ability to do X, Y, and Z - how would that change things?" He did that a few more times in different variations to really see how my answers would change especially as the tools/processes I would be forced to use started to stray from what I knew well.
