When it comes to interviewing, I think the biggest problem is one of biases. When working at a company in Sweden, an applicant was braggadocious about their pri

When it comes to interviewing, I think the biggest problem is one of biases. When working at a company in Sweden, an applicant was braggadocious about their prior experience, which was normal for their culture (as a means of demonstrating value) but not the Swedish one (where modesty is king). He was almost excluded purely on that basis. I, as an outsider, was aware of the phenomenon, but my native colleagues weren't. At another job, a theoretically inclined colleague was grilling a junior candidate on DDD and hexagonal versus onion architectures because that interested him. I had to point out that wasn't relevant at all for a fledgling programmer's ability to write a basic web API. Self-selection is a big problem, whether it be through cultural values, personal interests or the topic at hand: degrees. Let's please stick to what a degree is: an authority argument and a semi-reliable proxy for intelligence. The rest is incidental, as you can be lazy and disorganised with a degree, or possess a broad theoretical background and be intelligent without.