[colanderman]

My (somewhat cynical) observation from 10 years in the industry (and 30 years total of coding):

A lot of people are in CS/SWE these days because it's what pays, or because they find technology interesting (i.e. "geek culture").

If you are in the field because you are passionate about the field itself, and/or have an aptitude for it, that puts you in the minority. But your skills will reflect your passion, hence, your experience with differential skill levels thus far.

I've been fortunate to land a few gigs with talented and passionate individuals (one recent gig I worked in the same room as two OSS figures whose work you likely have used).

But even then, I've met maybe only one or two individuals (both lead developers) whose multithreaded code didn't have obvious (to me) bugs in it. Even talented devs aren't passionate about stuff like that, and thus just don't learn it very deeply before applying it.

Just remember to be patient and humble, people will look to you as a leader.

[jleyank]

Others have said bits, and I’m repeating it for emphasis: don’t look at labels, don’t look at school name(s), don’t look at titles…. Look at the code. Can they design, can they code, can they debug, can they work on code they didn’t write, would you bet your ass on their skills? These are the valuable people to find and know. Be like them and you’ll never go hungry.