Honestly, what we define as a flood of unqualified candidates is kind of ridiculous, nowadays it refers to anyone who didn't got to a top state school or top 1%

Honestly, what we define as a flood of unqualified candidates is kind of ridiculous, nowadays it refers to anyone who didn't got to a top state school or top 1% equivalent. The reality is that there are too many qualified people at the lower end of the pipeline and this is because we don't hire enough people as it is for our current positions, why this happens is really simple. It's to save money. There's a reason why we have terms like rockstar developer and heavily advertise the idea of a developer doing 1000x work of another one, which simply put is not true. Most improvements to software and technology occur over time with experience and expertise what we see nowadays is an extremely self destructive behavior, at most top companies it results in heavy loss in expertise as most individuals will leave once their stock options can be sold. In order to maximize their profit while providing little to nothing of value to said companies. The idea we pay developers six figure salaries is inflated and has been a net negative. Resulting in inflated egos and an elitist environment which it is debatable to which provides anything of value or close to little at all. We don't really need certification programs as they're typically used to stop minorities from gaining access to fields due to barriers of entry and the fact they are systemically flawed as it results in people just chasing after their next certification as the "logical" next step instead of actually learning anything of value. Honestly, companies just need to be comfortable with hiring someone with a credible degree and taking a chance on them, it's basically the same thing as hiring with leetcode anyways according to google there is very little positive correlation. Anything else is ripe with corruption. But even this process can easily be corrupted, e.g. hiring only people from elite universities or select ones you have deals with in the area which already occurs in many places.