[FLUX-YOU]

Until there are widely accepted competencies, the hiring process will continue to be murky. That may not be solvable just because technology has such a huge scope.

Ideally you'd want someone to be able to take a test and have it spit back "Okay, this guy's a good enough junior programmer" and then have some certificate so that the job connections and interviews only are for personality. This would reduce the burden on companies having to do their own technical filtering and hopefully get more deserving butts-in-seats to get work done.

Right now it's all guesstimation, voodoo, and a few things that seem to work on both sides of the table.

[jiggy2011]

The issue is teaching them in the first place, a real apprenticeship program should be able to take someone with no knowledge of programming and convert them into a competent developer without taking up too much of the time of a senior dev who is billing $50/hr+.

The best way to do this is to outsource at least some of the learning to a classroom setting and ideally have the government subsidise this, but the government can't possibly subsidise courses in every single type of software development,