I wish someone quantified what 'good' is. Ask 2 tech workers to rate each other and they are most likely to rate each other mediocre by each's standards. Each would nitpick on what the other didn't know.
If you are not FAANG or some other large company, the question is not if somebody is "good". It is if they are "good enough".
I feel there is often a bimodal distribution of applicants. Those who can do the job and those who are completely not suited. There is a shortage of workers, so you try to get as many as you can from the first bin. It doesn't matter if they are 10x rockstars or Joe Blub.
You just try to sieve out the ones who apply for a DevOps position and then it turns out they are "good with MS office". Or those who neither speak the local language nor English good enough to communicate with anybody. Or those who show up on day 1 and are clearly not the person who interviewed.
I's a luxury to have more than 4-5 good candidates who you'd have to rank. (But to be honest, I'm in education / public sector and the pay here is not competitive with big tech...)
I was picking on the person who was saying that there are not enough good candidates, where I have worked in most cases they were good enough, so it baffles me when people frequently say that there are not enough good candidates. I'm just wondering if my sample data is different from others . Again I think quantification of what is good enough will go a long way example: Must be a able to solve the fizz/biz example.
You cannot say either way. There was a point I was trying to get at: Devs access each other just as several religions people do : one's own religion is the best, and that there cannot be any other right way to do things. This why the whole hiring/interview process is broken.
I understand the point you are making and I disagree with it.
Software is not a religious text. There is good software and bad software and good and bad ways to make software. Usually the devil is in the details and context matters a lot in practice, so it's hard to just write down the answer to all things in all scenarios.
But in a technical interview things are pretty cut and dry. There are in fact right answers and wrong answers and if an interviewer is nitpicking during an interview then they are in fact not doing their job as an interviewer well. If they do the same thing on the job then they are at best a mediocre engineer.
I wish someone quantified what 'good' is. Ask 2 tech workers to rate each other and they are most likely to rate each other mediocre by each's standards. Each would nitpick on what the other didn't know.