Excellent points. I just wonder about the 2-on-1 interviews. I think they tend to double-down on the one-sidedness of typical interviews.

It's not a group engineering meeting. Unless it's big-tech hiring of fungible worker drones, everyone in that meeting should be trying to get more signal about the others as individuals.

I've been the "1" in 2-on-1 three times recently, all for startups. For me, it's hard to think about the hard-thinking questions, and also be finding rapport and getting signal from two different people at once. I'd much rather spend twice as much of my time, to get each person 1-on-1, no additional cost to them.

Two of the recent 2-on-1 interviews were on videoconf, and, with the videoconf setup they chose, I couldn't even see one of the people most of the time.

The other interview was 3 people in tiny conference room/closet (the size of what used to be a one-person cubicle), for an hour, so it was especially stuffy and crowded with 3 people, and a great way to get Covid.

Besides more people complicating the situation, people tend to speak candidly with me 1-on-1, but are less likely to do that if their colleague is in the room or on the call.

Here's an intuition: Imagine you were a company interviewing startup candidates, and HR suggested saving time by you interviewing two candidates at once. It would be awful, and you wouldn't be able to get much read off of either (other than to tell if one or both were sharp-elbowed). So why do it 2-on-1 in the other direction, unless you're saying it's not important for a candidate to get signal about the company and colleagues?