That style of question is perhaps the most horrible one to subject someone to.
Instead of focusing on the task of talking to someone, you end up trying to recollect instances of each kind of event, evaluate them on whether you can talk about them openly, whether they can sound impressive even if they actually are, whether they will sound plausible, whether you can recall enough details to avoid being called out as a bullshitter etc.
The people who can appear to answer these questions best are either a) prepared for them specifically or b) psychopaths who can comfortably lie and twist stories with a smile on their face on the spot.
Well I'm very happy if people have prepared for these questions beforehand, and I try and give people hints and nudges to help get good answers out of people (I want people to do the best they can!).
Do you think there are any style of questions that do work well?
I think a healthy mix of open-ended questions (such as those in your post) and closed-ended questions is key. Open-ended questions are useful for getting at how an engineer goes about solving a problem. Closed-ended questions reveal whether that engineer has the tools to solve the problem to begin with.
Interesting thoughts. What would you think of as a good closed ended question? I always worry that if I'm to specific I'll get false negatives (do they really not know what protected means or have they had a brain fade under pressure?)
The goal of the individual interview should be answering: "I have some particular problems I need to solve soon, and some undefined future problems to solve later, can hiring this person help solve the immediate problems and do I think they'll be an asset in solving future problems?"
Once you've got some questions in mind that should answer that for an individual, you need to reformulate the questions so that most of them are at least semi-objective and have a scoring criteria that you can use to rank multiple people who passed "yes" on the overall question -- and perhaps a threshold too if you think you can afford "yes, but let's wait to see if we can find someone even better".
In this light, 'tell me about a time when' types of questions aren't often very useful unless they're directly related to an issue you're currently facing and you've precommitted to some sort of score for types of answers. e.g. "time when you've disagreed with boss (or coworker)" might be relevant because your team currently has some drama dynamics. So 0 points for "Oh I never have disagreements", 1 point for "some story that makes me think they won't get eaten alive here and/or be a total pushover, the story details don't really matter", 0 points (or negative) for anything that raises a total asshole flag. The question about new C# features might be useful as a proxy for answering whether they'll be helpful in the future, i.e. do they keep up-to-date about things and keep learning, so maybe that's worth a point if they can name something and maybe you can ask a different question as another proxy to normalize across interests (they might not care about PL features but something else). And depending on the real concern being proxied, sometimes you can just ask about the real concern directly.
Instead of focusing on the task of talking to someone, you end up trying to recollect instances of each kind of event, evaluate them on whether you can talk about them openly, whether they can sound impressive even if they actually are, whether they will sound plausible, whether you can recall enough details to avoid being called out as a bullshitter etc.
The people who can appear to answer these questions best are either a) prepared for them specifically or b) psychopaths who can comfortably lie and twist stories with a smile on their face on the spot.