[icelancer]

We had a similar experience at my last company I worked for - except even worse. On average, applicants for the Data Science team that held degrees in CS/CIS/CE were on average FAR WORSE than ones who held degrees in other disciplines or simply did not have an undergraduate degree.

It got to the point where we heavily weighted applicants who studied Physics/Mathematics/Economics over the CS ones.

As my co-worker said: If someone in our city has a CS degree and needs a job, he probably really sucks at software development.

The real competitive advantage was hiring people with very good math/quant skills and teaching them software development concepts through Coursera and pair programming. We saved a lot on salary and we got very good developers.