> “I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important.”

No, you definitely don’t need to come into it knowing about this, and even if you don’t know about this ahead of time, it won’t imply “just trusting” the candidate or being overly subjective. You will ask the candidate to explain why various decisions were important, and not stop at the top line answer but recursively probe into it, breaking it down into concepts and trade-offs that are universal in any kind of applied problem solving.

> “But now you're punishing someone for organizational things possibly beyond their control. If my job was to build a thing that made use of some blackbox algorithm, and John developed the algorithm, why should I put the algorithm under strong skepticism, perhaps that's how things work in your workplace, but there's no clear reason that mine work the same way.”

I’m sorry but this also just isn’t true. If you are describing your contributions to projects and all that keeps happening is you hit walls in your explanation where someome else did the work and you did not review that work at a high level of depth, then you’re just being misleading about your contributions at work.

Your job as an engineer in a company is to solve problems for your stakeholders, whether that means building tooling for other engineers, assisting designers with prototypes, designing algorithms for core product functionality, sales engineering for client stakeholders, etc.

It doesn’t matter how your company is structured, it doesn’t matter how the work was divided up. Your job is to know about the stakeholder problem you are solving, at a deep level, and when you represent your work to other people and you fail to offer technical depth about the trade-offs needed to solve stakeholder problems, that’s a clear mark against you as a candidate.

It’s bewildering to me that anyone would think that the way their current employer organizes assignments should reduce their burden of knowing how to represent their projects in significant technical depth. That is an always-on, never mitigated, constant responsibility for all employees anywhere. You’re not holding anything against someone if they can’t provide that in an interview... no, you’re just uncovering what they’ve lied about or embellished on a resume.

> “Except that, as I've literally just proven, you've failed to verify the authenticity of me because you've wrongly concluded that I'm not authentic.”

I see no such proof at all, and the cheeky rhetoric just makes me feel more entrenched that you are bullshitting hugely in this thread.

> “So again, either you take the candidate at face value in a situation where they have every incentive to lie to you, or you attempt to verify their authenticity, at which point that analysis is subject to a multitude of biases that have nothing to do with the candidates skill level.”

You are doing nothing but gainsaying here. You’ve made no argument that would support any of these strong conclusions, especially not any reason why this interview method faces the false dilemma between either just trusting the candidate or else succumbing to biases.

You are just asserting things, but they do not seem to be connected to or bolstered by any of the other things you’ve written.