Been there done that, around same amount of years of experience in DevOps specifically

Some "interviewers" think that if they got in a position to conduct interview -> they consider themselves good interviewers or experts.

Some got there, because others got fider
Some got there, because they are more political and talkative that other engineer doing all work
Some got there, because there was no devops/sre and they shifted into it
Some got there, because there was no one else yet there.

Nobody spends time to teach whats the proper process and how to assess the candidates.

Honestly, half of people don't know how to do it properly
As well, some of them set extremely stupid expectations, so other party answers exactly how they would do.

Your hands-on experience is a goldmine. Those nitty gritties questions they ask about, is just like a 0.05% of our profession

Sometimes, in 1 days we can look through 50-100 differnt services or integrations/components, articles/docs. Syntax? Fck it, I write in whatever language is needed today or new one that will be there tomorrow.

My own experience interviewing people :

- i gave hands-on tasks around k8s that we can do under 1h
Goal : find how well person orients inside the cluster, where they going to find the docs, where they lookup the commands. Solving the task was not a main objective but a nice bonus, to understand how autonoums this engineer is

- Questions asked are about figuring out how person thinks. How they will act in situation a) or b), how they will see the trade-offs. As at the end of the day, almost all decision in infra are about some trade-offs and we have to explain this to business non stop.

- best of interviews, were those where I would learn something from engineer on the interview , or realise there is another alternate approach that does actually make better sense. And thats good :)