I never mentioned academic degree, just expect a person to have the right level of education/knowledge. For example, i'd expect a candidate to be able to explai

I never mentioned academic degree, just expect a person to have the right level of education/knowledge. For example, i'd expect a candidate to be able to explain to me how a hashtable works or what a page fault means. Also, i'm shocked when a person doing 'database stuff' has only a vague idea about what SQL is One (very recent) example of what i'm talking about: There was a system that crashed once or twice a day, running on EC2 instance. I discovered that the program crashes because it runs out of memory, and also that the system runs without a swap file. Then a guy responsible for that setup explained to me that it's a bad sign when a program uses a swap, therefore they disabled it altogether. Curiously, aftere enabling the swap the problem disappeared.