When a technical interview happens, two (of many) competing motivations arise within the programmer who interviews a candidate: 1. I don't want my company to h

When a technical interview happens, two (of many) competing motivations arise within the programmer who interviews a candidate: 1. I don't want my company to hire someone smarter than I am -- eventually they'll make me look bad and I'll be relegated to uninteresting work or made redundant. (Also, that person will end up condescending to me and that's simply not allowed; I'm the only genius in the village...) 2. I don't want my company to hire someone dumber than I am -- we cannot work with some half-productive person whose work needs constant fixes/rewriting/maintenance -- don't waste this brilliant team's time. (Plus, what would we talk about at lunch with this kind of person -- old episodes of Little Britain? You must be joking.) Now, maybe this is wrong, but it seems that situation #2 arises a lot more often than situation #1. It only looks like a "growing elitism problem" to some observers, but maybe the level of elitism is the same as always. Maybe what's happening is that a lot more applicants are encountering situation #2 than in previous years.