you have essentially admitted that you cannot tell the difference between someone lying about journeyman skills, and those who are not. Your solution is to resort to "do an entry level thing while I am watching" as a test for advanced skills.
If they can’t pass an entry level test, there’s no possible way they have any advanced skills. Once we’ve established that they have a pulse, then we can spend time discussing their more advanced accomplishments. Unfortunately, I can’t assume right off the bat that people with 20 years of experience can actually code; there are too many people who look good on paper and can talk a big game but don’t actually have any basic technical chops to back it up.
I am guessing that you are part of a C++ crew somehow, and that you are talking about advanced C++ and entry level C++, for a "senior" C++ production job. If that is true, it inserts multiple contextual restrictions that were not addressed in this exchange.
Secondly, a colleague in California, another twenty veteran coder (like me) told me that he recently took one of these interviews we are talking about, and his first reply to me was "It does seem designed to disadvantage senior coders" .. his words without prompting.
Tons of the context here (and verbal pugilism) is about the human interaction and not the skill set. You may be flooded with fakers, and I may have no time for being treated like a truant at the Principal's office.
