[bonemachine]

Basically "the bar" stands more as an internal psychological mechanism than for any set of objective criteria. More about providing frustrated to feel good about themselves -- "we're soooo selective, that's why we can't find engineers that don't suck" -- rather than actually sit down and think about what what they might be doing wrong in their hiring process... or (probing further) why their company may not be doing anything all that interest in the first place.

As if, you know, the candidates don't also have a "bar" that companies have to muster up to. Yet if a candidate where to write a blog post musing that "only 1 in 100 qualified meet my bar", you probably wouldn't want to work with them.