Totally agree with this. I'm reminded of when I interviewed with Amazon a few years back and it was clear that the questions were best suited to filtering down

Totally agree with this. I'm reminded of when I interviewed with Amazon a few years back and it was clear that the questions were best suited to filtering down to the best graduates. In my mid 30's I was too rusty to satisfy the interviewer and my real world experience counted for nothing as the entire process was structured like a series of exam questions. I think there's a point - I would guess at about 8+ years of experience - where a technical interview will stop being a reliable indicator of an engineer's ability. It then becomes more important to evaluate what the candidate has been doing in their career and how that experience can be taken advantage of within the team that they'd be joining. Technical ability can still be judged by asking to see some existing code if it's that essential.