Because I'm a senior engineer I am giving a lot of "Expertise" interviews for my company. Recruiters tend to presume that seniority implies broad expertise. In

Because I'm a senior engineer I am giving a lot of "Expertise" interviews for my company. Recruiters tend to presume that seniority implies broad expertise. In my case it doesn't. There's really only one subject that I feel I'm qualified to assess for expertise, but hardly anyone who interviews at the company claims anything about that subject on their resume. Ninety percent of the time when I interview on that subject the candidate ends up getting a "hard no" from me just based on the first ~10 minutes of the interview, but on a very rare occasion I run across someone who's actually an expert in the field. I'll know because we'll quickly blast past all of the "<subject> 101" questions in the first 5 or 6 minutes, and then I can quickly adapt to deep-dive into technical details, giving them what I know to be fairly novel problems in the domain and then seeing how they apply first principles to tackle them. The "interview" ends up looking more like a collaborative brainstorming session at that point. It's incredible when that happens, which sadly is only maybe once or twice a year. But usually I end up giving an "Expertise" interview for whatever it is they claim expertise in, whether I myself possess expertise in that subject or not. For the past several months the most prominent subject on literally every single resume has been AI/ML. I certainly don't claim expertise in that field, although I did take a graduate course on computational machine learning theory at university. That gives me "just enough" of a handle to not come across as a completely incompetent interviewer, but it feels like a farce. With all this AI/ML hype I feel like the "Expertise" interview just ends up being someone pretending to have expertise in AI/ML being interviewed by someone pretending to be able to assess expertise in AI/ML.