[kruczek]

> I can guarantee that some ham-fisted chancer who'd flicked through the "Teach Yourself C++" chapter summaries put himself down as an 8, though.

It's very easy to filter out these guys though. I had one such come to my interview - on a scale 1-10 (10=best) the guy put 8s, 9s and 10s for several programming languages (C++, C#, Java, a few others); and that guy was fresh out of college.

Then during the interview it turned out the guy knows exactly nothing, even when I tried to talk with him about the most basic concepts of OOP (like, what is a class or an object), he couldn't provide any meaningful answer to lead the conversation further.

I have no idea how he hoped to pass an interview, perhaps he thought there wouldn't be anything beyond the online form to fill.