I'm gonna get some downvote, but I'll say this. Over the last 10 years, the quality of the juniors trends opposite of salary curve. We don't have a crazy interview process, nor are we working on anything ground breaking. By any measurement, we are a run of the mill company that don't offer top end salary but market competitive. The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1. Most of them can't even answer basic computer science questions such as under what condition that a binary search is useful, what's the difference between NoSQL database and relational database, or converting binary to decimal, etc.. They all talk about cloud and distributed computing, etc..
> The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1.
I'm sorry but to me this part reads like a humorous phrase that's popular in some circles in my region which goes:
"Maybe <list of negative things, usually correct characterizations of the speaker>, but at least <something even worse>"
The companies I worked for used automated coding quizzes like Codility to weed out the worst applicants, but I suspect you're already doing that.
How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?
I feel this pain.
We have an intern that is finishing a four year computer science degree that has no clue what git is, never used a log and all he presents is AI garbage.
I find it profoundly depressing to try and teach someone who has no interest in the craft.