Edit: our assumption is that someone can pull that off in 40-60 second Googling is a super-fast learner. So far we're doing great with our team.

Nothing was more frustrating when interviewing a candidate to be given like 5 minutes notice, put in a room to pair interview with a fellow engineer, and the fellow engineer running things like a pop quiz gameshow mixed with a courtroom interrogation, while I was trying to more subtly coax the candidate into comfortably showing their skill level and working style. The candidate basically shut down and stopped answering my fellow engineer's questions, but still answered mine. My colleague interpreted this as personal hostility, and things went downhill from there.

All that is to say, you will definitely learn more about a candidate if you take an interactive, rather than interrogative, approach, and you really need to be on the same page with your fellow interviewers about that.

I think this is a false axiom that young people have more potential. You actually have very low signal about people that age. They just went from a very structured context to a very unstructured context, so you may be assuming a lot from how they operated in the former context that may not be true now that they are in a different one.

This kind of ties in with another thread on here about OP being disillusioned with the skill level of their FAANG colleagues.

That's exactly why they have more potential: they're much higher variance. A lot of the "high-potential" people that have a bunch of experience will have already demonstrated this, and they'll be making $500k+ at a FAANG, which most companies won't be able to compete with.

I don't think the correlation is large enough in practice to be a useful metric. I'm pretty sure I learn new things faster than I did twenty years ago because usually I have a lot less stuff to learn. Learning how to spell queries for your tenth database is much easier than the first one, for instance, and I've got SQL, NoSQL, columnar, embedded, and I dunno how many other adjectives of experience vs. some relatively young programmer encountering their second database type. My slope on such a task can approach vertical whereas a younger person may need a couple of weeks.

(This example is on my mind because literally today I'm helping someone diagnose why a query is slow on a database I've never even used before. But I understand the fundamentals of how the DB works, and can read the docs really quickly now, because I don't even know how many DBs I've used at this point. Depends on how you define them.)

I didn't state that internships solve all of your hiring problems. I also seem to work in a different company than you because our tenure is higher than 2 years and many interns make it to the senior level.