It's a good investment for the company, if the interviewer can red flag a candidate who is blatantly lying on his resumé because the candidate would assume no one would know said technology, it would save a lot of money from cutting ties with an employee in a later stage.

As an anecdote, I used to work for a company and would require candidates to know some Ruby, for one guy with several years experience in Python we changed the requirements of the home assignment so he could write it using whatever he wanted. he hands over a nodeJS application claiming he took the opportunity to learn something new(why not Ruby?), seemed like it was well done, so we bring him in for an interview, unlucky for him, there was one member in our team with some nodeJS experience(me), having reviewed the code, I asked him to do a minor feature addition to his own code, he froze, couldn't do it because he didn't write the code(copying from some repo) and didn't know any nodeJS at all, asked him to do it in Python instead and he still couldn't do it, he had just spiced up his resumé with tech we didn't use to see if he could weasel his way in.

Yeah, bottom line, if you don't know an answer, then "I don't know" is always the right answer and the (ironically) most impressive answer. Plus you can always do things to mitigate, like talk about related or adjacent concepts a bit, state how you're willing to learn, maybe even take a guess at it. But if you bullshit you're either going to get caught, or, almost worse, get the job and feel like a fraud for months.

Always be hired or not hired for who you actually are!

that's why i like live coding. i had candidates who were dumbfounded with something like elevatorsaga.com.

Imagine he got the role and did well. Trying to find the perfect person doesn't always work out as expected.

Yeah, but lying to that extent is a huge red flag, not just saying your Spanish is "mediocre" instead of "beginner".

What? The person in the example lied about two entire programming languages and couldn’t even touch them. That kind of person can destroy a team! I wouldn’t hire them either

I think the problem is that programmers have been taught to list every language and tech they have used on order to pass through HR. So, for example, when I was a student I wrote a ton of c# code. I’d be inclined to put that on a resume. But if they then asked me to code something in the language, it would certainly go poorly due to rust. Heck, I was a TA for a course where we taught lisp, but that doesn’t mean I can just start coding.

But if it’s listed as a job requirement, sure start quizzing.

Agreed. But also I think a lot of job requirements list every programing language under the sun...so candidates just trying to match the resume screening algorithms.

I did C afor over a decade, I was really good at it. I haven’t used it in a decade. But, I left it off of my resume after an experience I had 4 years ago. I was applying for a C#/JavaScript job that didn’t have one line of C in the codebase, but one of the interviewers started asking me trivia about C. I happened to remember it, I got the job, but I learned my lesson.

You could also interpret as the interviewer making the effort to ask the candidate questions where they can shine.

I always try to start with a technical question where the candidate can make a good impression and get confident.

You could, but sometimes the interviewer doesn't even know exactly why they are doing it.

First, it's a natural tendency. If you want to find if somebody "knows" a particular subject, an inexperienced person would start asking for factoids and interpret every incorrect answer as the proof that they don't really know the subject.

Second, many interviewers learn from other interviewers or just by trial and error, or from some courses, many of which have very dubious origins. There are many beliefs that are simply wrong, but still get circulated among interviewers, because nobody does 30 year careers in interviewing React programmers - wonder why...

I didn't find this confusing. If scheme isn't the language used in the job them who cares? If I am hiring a C++ programmer then I don't really want to drill into your Algol'60 background to trip you up!

I 'did' find this confusing.