alt Hacker NewsI came across a version of a "just talking" interview which did work. You asked them to provide bring in a representative body of their code to the interview. During the interview, you ask them to give you any overview of what the project was supposed to do, how well it worked, what they would change in retrospect. As they do so you're scanning it looking for interesting or quirky bits. Then you ask them to explain the reasoning behind those particular lines in detail.
This lets you get a feel for their coding style, comments, unit testing and so on. The "explain why you did it the quirky way" is for proof of authorship. You may learn something from it as well.
It's a bit of work for interviewer, but far less stressful for the applicant than coding tests. But it's easier for the interviewer in some ways too, as you don't need conversation starters - the "tell me about this project" step is a perfect way to find out about their previous experience.
As you say, the charlatans are very good. I even tried bring in sales, with explicit instructions that their job was to spot the bullshitter. They were no better at it than we engineers.
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After about 150 interviews, I could do the "just talking" thing without needing any samples or anything else. If they were working on Java, I would ask what versions, what issues they had run into, what their experiences had been with various frameworks they mentioned on their resume, I would bring up recent events to see if they knew about them, just stuff like that could tell me whether someone was senior level or not.
Sounds like one of the many, many alternatives which "works" by just targeting a different subculture. This "representative body of code" idea is very strange to me - I don't have any such thing that I could bring to interviews, it's never occurred to me to write one, and my areas of specialization offer me no opportunity to generate one organically.
If this were the standard interview process, of course, I'm sure I could figure it out. There would be a site called "Leetportfolio", and I'd prep for interviews by implementing dozens of Leetportfolio mediums, and people would come to HN to complain about the obnoxious companies that expect you to include some Leetportfolio hards. For me this sounds significantly more time consuming and no less artificial or frustrating than Leetcode grinding.