I like to ask the following as a starting point for an interview:
What is the most interesting project you have worked on recently? Doesn't have to be work related, but should be relevant to the job, e.g. programming, not gardening for a developer role. Why was it interesting? What were the biggest challenges on that project? How did you solve those?
Will show if people are passionate about something specific, and also gives a general measurement on what they consider challenging, and a first insight into their problem solving skills. If the person goes into detail, go along and ask more questions. Very helpful to figure out how a person works. This should hopefully be a low pressure "just talking" question to get started and help people to calm down a bit.
I was curious if there were going to be good questions at the bottom. I suspect the general idea is that good questions are essentially unstable due to Goodhart's Law. (That is, as soon as they are on a list, they are no longer good.)
I like to ask about tradeoffs - what kind of tradeoffs they've made and why they chose that; where their opinion lies on the pragmatic vs perfection scale and that sort of thing. Quite a lot of tech work involves making tradeoffs, so they should be able to talk about it easily, and it leads to some interesting discussion as well as giving you an idea of their opinions and decision-making.
There's no need to lie or have a canned response, because tradeoffs are inherently between things which are both desirable.
