I have interviewed many “senior” candidates who can’t do simple coding exercises. I think that starting out with a simple exercise like that weeds out a ton of people without putting undue burden on the good developers.
I have a series of questions in various areas designed to be in increasing order of difficulty, but I don't expect them to clear them all0-they ramp up to "deep and esoteric knowledge".
When I'm explaining the process I usually preface with these being designed to gauge their skill level, not just make sure they meet some minimum floor, so there are going to be some easy questions and some that are hard and I don't necessarily expect them to answer all of them and not to get discouraged or be afraid to say they don't know. I usually just keep going until they miss a couple in a row.
If someone actually doesn't know the job, I'm only asking maybe 5-10 relatively simple questions and thanking them for their time.
Because my goal isn't usually to get trivia answers. I'm laying foundation and jumping off points for a conversation.
I have some technical hurdles candidates have to clear, but I try to speed run past them and get the background stories on things that stick out to me in their resume. Also, hitting them with the DevOps equivalent of a LC hard right out the gate is a dick move that sets a bad tone and demonstrates a hostile process.
