You sorta evaluate the soft skills while evaluating the hard skills - how they approach a question, how they solve the problem, etc. Our general rule hiring was hire sharp people, but no assholes - at least nobody more of an asshole than I am ;)
I think the biggest problem is actually whiteboard coding problems - nobody does that in real life.
I interview people in non-coding disciplines and this is what I try to do. Ask them technical questions from a soft-skills perspective. I like to ask questions where they criticize their own work, or get an idea of how they approach and tackle a problem. I look to see how they react to being corrected or taught in a similar way to how you would with a coworker.
We have a question on a quiz that we give to every potential employee that very reliably tells me early on whether someone is going to be a potential hire. It looks super technical, but in reality anyone should be able to work out a reasonable solution logically. I always ask the same question in the interview: "Walk me through how you solved the problem." Good candidates think past the problem to things like maintainability, really good candidates tend to ask for feedback on what the answer is.
Coding on a whiteboard is the worst. I’ve been in google interviews where I mention that the whiteboard format makes the process very difficult because of how much work it is to rework existing code.
The interview replied “well wouldn’t you have to do the same on a computer?” chuckles to himself at how clever he is that he realized that
No numb-nuts, on a computer I can move lines around by pressing Alt+Down. Here I need to erase the entire thing and re-write it, which wastes precious time, so instead I spend way more time pre-planning the exact layout of the code, which wastes more precious time.
And in the end you take a picture of it to transcribe into the computer to send to the hiring overlords. Just let us use our tooling to begin with.
Interesting. This was 2019, but it was a SRE position. Don't know if that makes a difference. Probably not, because the interviewers didn't even know it was for an SRE position.
I think the biggest problem is actually whiteboard coding problems - nobody does that in real life.