Over the past several months, I and some people I work closely with have been attempting to find good developers to take over some of the work we’ve been doing, but time and again we attract people that totally overestimate their skills and don’t really know a whole lot. On a 10 point scale people consistently rate themselves at 7-9, where in reality they’re maybe a 3 or 4 if they’re lucky.

Where does the overestimation come from? My guess is that there are 2 types:
1. People who’ve done a project using CSS or JS and think that extrapolating what they learned in that project to everything means that they know how to use those technologies anywhere, and
2. People who don’t stretch themselves to learn everything about a language or technology before assuming that they’re done.

I’ve met more that fit into #2 than #1, thankfully.

I guess I’m just tired of people that don’t live up to what I expect. If someone wants to get paid a lot of money, they’d better know what they’re talking about, and not just BS their way through a project at barely above an introductory level.

Sorry for the rant.