Ah don't put yourself down. Hiring is super hard and you're supposed to hire slow, fire fast, so perhaps you just did it the right way given your circumstances.

A whole host of factors come in to play too. Timing - was the market just not that full of good devs at the time? Location - you might not have lots of good .Net devs nearby. There's also a healthy amount of luck involved.

We hire .Net divs, and our theory test includes a FizzBuzz and we've seen some interesting results...