I've been asked to interview. I'm not a great interviewer, but maybe OK. I try to figure out if they can work the tools. I'm pretty lax - interviews are stressf

I've been asked to interview. I'm not a great interviewer, but maybe OK. I try to figure out if they can work the tools. I'm pretty lax - interviews are stressful and missing a comma can take a minute, I don't like people twisting in the wind over a syntax error and will point it out if I'm pretty sure they'd get there. I try to decide if I can work with this person. I try to figure out if they'd be ok with how things work at my current employer. I have two very memorable no's. They were for pretty senior/advanced IC roles. Juniors would get far more slack. I usually ask an expression evaluator question. One person, used eval(string). Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. full points for answering, but how do we make sure the string is safe to eval? Long frustrating discussion around regexes that that maybe a junior dev is responsible for maintaining. Man, just write the parser. I know you can do it. Give me something that's something that's not _crazy_ to put into prod. Give me something that won't be a bug tarpit. Sorry man, I loved your answer. I hated your response to how this can be operationalized. Clearly super smart. Maybe I should have given the green light, but the response to criticism was so bad. There are lots of people I disagree with, that I'm happy to work with. I think I made the right choice, but I wonder from time to time. Another person I absolutely would have loved to work with, and would have learned a ton. Very into formal methods, or slightly relaxed versions of verifying reliability. My organization at the time was pretty fast and loose. I believed they would be miserable. In the interview I told them I'd give them the green light, but they'd have a huge uphill battle. it's so hard to tell. People are adaptable, small mismatches can be papered over, but big mismatches - it's so tough to say. Relaxing and being vulnerable on both sides is so hard to do well. Maybe I was just a jerk. I think I made the right calls, but it haunts me.