Exactly!

And that's why I generally ask about FOSS work. If you're contributing to upstream projects as a hobby, then you've demonstrated that you can jump into a larger codebase and figure out their procedures and style guidelines, which means you can probably do the same here.

Failing that, I ask them to apply the theory they learned in school to practical problems, like "how would you use design pattern A for problem X? What about pattern B? How do you decide between the two?" Most people can't tell me what A or B is, and they can't even solve problem X with their own methods... I don't care about people knowing arbitrary design patterns, I care that they can reason about problems, consider multiple approaches, and decide between those approaches given the larger context of the project.

So many people just fall flat on their face in an interview on concepts they should have learned in their third year, which even our people who didn't go to college can do since they've been on the job for a few years. Show me you're better than a self-taught person and a few years of experience if you want anything other than an intern role.

I don't know much about IT (I'm CS), but Ad is very specific to Windows, no? Shouldn't you instead be asking them about higher-level concepts like access controls, networking principles (http vs tcp vs ip, routing, dns, etc), and basics of cybersecurity (attack surface, network segmentation, etc)? It sounds like you're looking for practical knowledge about specific solutions rather than familiarity with concepts.

in CS, I can't expect someone to know our specific stack, but I can expect them to know foundational principles, like data structures, algorithmic complexity, design patterns, design principles, etc. So unless they express familiarity w/ our stack, I keep the questions theoretical, and even if they are familiar w/ our stack, I still keep the questions high level (i.e. for Python, I'll ask "gotchas" like what's the difference between a list comprehension and traditional iteration, how does Python's threading work, etc). I expect them to need to learn something in the first month or two, but also to largely learn on their own. Learning our stack when you're comfortable with programming in general isn't all that difficult, learning our stack when you struggle with basic concepts will be a challenge though.

God this is true.

I've seen some real snake oil projects get massive finding and everyone on board getting promos.

I had a candidate apologize about 10 min in when it was clear that we expected them to know how to actually write code...

Interest rates in the states are higher than they were five years ago, which means borrowing money to pay those inflated salaries is more expensive.

Fresh college grads should presumably be taking entry level / junior positions unless something about the candidate speaks for itself, it’s wild how hostile you’re acting to the notion of having to teach people who are new to the field how to work professionally in it.

Given that out of college they’d typically at best have internship experience of some kind. People got to start somewhere.