I can't address most of your reply without sounding like an evil gatekeeper, but yes - it's safe to say that when I'm hiring, I'm interviewing the people our te

I can't address most of your reply without sounding like an evil gatekeeper, but yes - it's safe to say that when I'm hiring, I'm interviewing the people our team needs to rely on today, not someone who might grow into the role after the company fails. To be honest, it's super frustrating that we can't have that conversation without an army of bootcamp grads accusing us of elitism. Only a decade ago, it wasn't controversial to expect that people applying for highly demanding technical positions were ready to start on Monday. I digress. As to the senior HTML artist... I feel like that's on you to suss out in the conversation. Another one of my elitist views is that someone who can only do HTML - literally, text markup - is not a senior talent. If you want to make sure that a candidate understands how an MVC framework works, ask them to talk about their thoughts on service objects, or when they use Redis vs Postgres, or whether they have used Sidekiq jobs to do cool things. You can interrogate them to a wild degree and check off all of your boxes while making it feel like you're just shooting the shit. It's almost impossible to bullshit your way through explaining how you implemented a key-based authentication mechanism over websockets. Writing out the code on a board accomplishes nothing. I know how it's done, and I'll know in 15 seconds if a person shuts down, terrified, when talking about it.