Understood, but I'm asking how the hiring manager should be able to tell that. Here's where I'm coming from: at every company I've worked at (besides start-up

Understood, but I'm asking how the hiring manager should be able to tell that. Here's where I'm coming from: at every company I've worked at (besides start-ups) managers spend 2-3 months on rank-and-yank evaluations. That is an incredible amount of effort, from incredibly expensive people. But its worth it because getting the yearly evaluations right matters. It takes so long, because its hard to do. So how, pray tell, is somebody supposed to be able to tell, just from the kind of interviews which happen today, whether they are worth more than two junior programmers or not?