I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.

The Wire

The Sopranos

Generation Kill

The Deuce

Treme

Show me a Hero

Luck

The Expanse

Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)

Mad Men

Honestly, I don't think it's that hard. I assume we're talking about fairly senior candidates here.

"Tell me about the most complicated projects you contributed a significant part of the design, implementation to, or ideally both."

Start with the problem they aimed to solve.

Probe for how they chose the solution, and what alternatives they considered.

Get into the details of specifically what artifacts they produced, and if part of a team what role they played.

Get them to describe the solution in technical detail.

Probe into trade-offs they had to make or compromises.

Ask what aspects they found novel or innovative.

Once they finish describing the system, ask if it was successful, and how they measured it.

If they were around after launch, how did they operate it, monitor it, what unexpected challenges they encountered that they didn't foresee.

By the way, all along it doesn't matter if the domain or technology they are describing to you is totally different from your own experience. A senior+ engineer should be able to explain their domain to someone equally technical in a different domain with some competency.

Finally, since you now understand the problem space and the solution yourself, ask them "How would you scale this out to 10-100X" (by some metric).

Altogether, this is a dense 40-45 minutes extremely well spent. And it weeds out the phonies and charlatans.

Some yellow flags that individually aren't a problem but when you start seeing multiple of them turn into a red flag:

* Someone who didn't question the requirements and just accepted them from upstream.

* Someone that wrote a lot of code on the project, but didn't make any of the tough decisions.

* Someone that avoids talking about what they did, and focuses too much on "we"

* Someone who did all the initial decisions but did none of the actual implementation work.

* Someone who describes how X solved the problem, but you realize that's the only option they really considered

* Someone who left before the project finished, or immediately after.

* Someone who isn't sure if the project was a success or didn't see it their responsibility to find out.