After doing an extraordinary number of technical interviews of people, I began to think of it as a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. Despite headhunte

After doing an extraordinary number of technical interviews of people, I began to think of it as a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. Despite headhunter filtering, resume filtering, and short phone interviews, one out of six people slips through those filters without knowing much. On the other hand, one out of six can answer pretty much every question, clearly and in some depth. These are the people, the unprepared and the very prepared, who are one standard deviation below and above the mean. Insofar as the other four of the six, they all are more-or-less average. They are working at the job, and are competent, but minimally. They can give basic answers, but can't go into much depth on most topics. They are kind of an amorphous blob that blend into each other. For example, I used to ask sysadmin/devops people what syslog was. One of six would not know, four of six would give a basic answer, one of six would give a more in-depth answer. Then I would ask what syslog's various facilities were and what the severity levels were. Only one of the six would give a good answer. Actually, I program Android now, but knowing the order of severity is still useful as it is in the same order in the Log class (althouh they add one beyond DEBUG - VERBOSE). Once I read an article about the top people at Google, and they claimed these people are three standard devíations above the mean. I noted that the author saw this in the same pattern I did.