[iffybookmark]

10-20% seems really low in my experience. Do you mainly hire out of the industry?

Hiring heavily from colleges results in 60%+ of applicants that somehow have a B.Sc. from a university that produces amazing applicants with great (3.5+) GPA's but stall at either fizzbuzz or (just in case they memorized fizzbuzz) i-can't-believe-it's-not-fizzbuzz.

Furthermore, some candidates (20ish percent?) can't even answer basic, non-trivia questions about their language they self-report to know best. e.g. Java programmers who either don't know or cannot articulate what the static keyword does.

I'm convinced there's a path through every university, no matter how good, where you can avoid all the good professors and only pick babysitter professors and squeak through your four years with a piece of paper and a well-tuned sensor for which profs actually grade homework instead of just giving 100's so people don't complain.

[bryanrasmussen]

My experience is only as a programmer, maybe HR has kept most of the bad ones out, but I doubt it based on my experiences with HR. So 10-20% is my experience of how many programmers I encounter are bad in a big organization, and bad is a relative thing of course.

But often when I am brought into a big organization there is one out of every 5 programmers that just should be something else. They're not necessarily stupid, just shouldn't program.

on edit: in my experience small organizations don't have quite as bad because for the organization to be able to exist their programmers must be able to program. (for any organization heavily focused on tech of course)