My experience interviewing and hiring tech people is that this is one of the worst possible …

I think your approach is fine, but I should mention that it will, like any interview approach, misfire with some people. Episodic recall and emotional recognition are both talents that vary across the population. If I want to do well at an interview like this, I will have to spend a bunch of time in advance refreshing my memory of various projects I have worked on so that I can simulate a neurotypical response to those questions. If I don't, I may just stare at you nervously and break out in a sweat when I realize I don't have anything filed under, "project I am most proud of". Or that pulling up the narratively engaging details of a project I haven't thought about in years is a process that will take me hours of specific effort. And it's not just me; I've hired great developers who were also terrible at "humane" interview questions but who did great when we just sat down and coded toget…

From what I've seen, getting a regular job in classical music is difficulty and pressure on a level few of us can imagine. Might be easier to get tenure at Harvard than a rostered spot in an orchestra.

Can you explain to a non-musician what playing with an orchestra entails? I'm unfamiliar with the challenge.

I love the comparison to music auditions, and I mostly agree with the advice. I would still require the candidate however to write some code. Something rather simple, not leetcode, ok, not fizzbuzz either, and something that proves their familiarity with at least one language and platform. I should be a GM by now simply watching chess analysis videos on Youtube, learning the names of some openings etc. I can talk about it all day long. But since I don't play at all (I'm not interested) when I actually do play on occasions I revert to 500 ELO... You can easily tell a seasoned veteran from a rookie just by looking at them code for a few minutes, working on a simple task. If you can't, you have no business in interviewing others :)

Aesthetic judgements, and the ability to justify and defend them, are very important, but not the only important thing IMO. Someone who can explain why they love Rust and hate Python (or vice versa) is a convincing candidate but I think you need to see a couple of other things from them. In addition, sometimes you just don't hit on the right question to get evidence of their aesthetic judgement. (Like the candidate who doesn't care about Rust vs Python, but who hates Postgres and loves MariaDB..)