If you think your hiring criteria are some kind of general yardstick, I wouldn't want to be hired by you in the first place. What's with people using their position of power (hiring people) as some kind of argument - or perhaps threat?
>Something like the "single responsibility principle" is just good software design to anyone who ever had to maintain any piece of software.
The "single responsibility principle" is an ad hoc, ill defined idea. A bad idea for many real world cases, that has to be applied with discretion - not taken as a core guiding principle. Not to mention that neither "reason to change", nor "change" is well defined by Martin.
It's as bad one-size-fits-all advice as advising about the ideal function being "two to four lines of code long" (also by Martin) - leading to crappy, hard to follow code, and needless abstraction.
KISS - now that's a principle I would get behind.
Hence why I think why the OP's idea to ask candidates to critique is good. It shows whether the candidate blindly follow things as the gospel or is able to articulate limitations but also the reason behind a "principle" because there are very good reasons behind them.
Something like the "single responsibility principle" is just good software design to anyone who ever had to maintain any piece of software.
Quite extraordinary how commenters in this thread discard things as old without even understanding that core principles are as valid now as they were then.