Accurately evaluating a candidate is impossible, but surely asking a candidate these questions will yoeld a lower quality worker than if you ask them something related to the work they might do.
I disagree. I always go back to the blog posts that Joel Spolsky wrote 20+ years ago about his theory of hiring. The primary goal is to avoid bad hires. Even simple tech problems can easily eliminate (or rank) many software devs. As someone who regularly interviews candidates, I am blown away how bad are many of them.
