Well, asking CS trivia isn’t going to tell you they have skills to do the job. What do you propose?

In my decade+ of experience building engineering teams, the only useful signal has been probing technical details of education and past work experience.

If a candidate has neither, they simply cannot emit any signal you could possibly use to decide if they can do the job. Quizzing them on sorting algorithms or devops buzzwords is not going to tell you anything.

...where did I suggest that you should be quizzing people on trivia?

If you need to work out whether someone can do something, ask them to do it. Talk to them about things they have done as a first step. Don't overthink it.

Where I am, no-one asks DS&A questions. Managers still manage to fuck it up by focusing too much on inane questions - a propensity which seems to be inherent to human existence - and discounting just sitting down, asking someone to do something, and then getting them to explain why they did it that way.

> “If you need to work out whether someone can do something, ask them to do it. Talk to them about things they have done as a first step. Don't overthink it.”

I agree very much. It’s why I would be substantially less likely to hire someone for a software engineering job if they don’t either have (a) a somewhat standard bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and communicate clearly about knowledge gained through coursework or (b) previous work experience already delivering software engineering solutions.

If instead they have self-taught academic certification and no professional software experience, it’s too unlikely they can do the job when I ask them about doing it, regardless of their ability to talk about CS topics traditionally associated with tech interviewing.