[quote=sdcellar]In my personal experiece, it’s been challenging to find truly talented developers for some time now and I don’t expect that the larger candidate pool that exists as a result of layoffs has done much to improve upon that.[/quote]

It’s been that way for years in SD. As recently as 2005 I was interviewing people and would get flooded with resumes. 90% of them couldn’t pass a basic phone screen dealing with some very basic java, web development and network programming questions that virtually any developer with more than 3 years of experience in the enterprise development domain should be able to answer. All of them thought they were rockstars…

And, btw, I vetted the phone screen with some of my colleagues who are truly good senior developers and none of them had a problem with the questions.

It’s like you’ve heard in one way or the other, the candidate pool you are choosing from when you are trying to fill an opening aren’t the cream of the crop. Those people already have jobs or, if they find themselves out of work, quickly find new ones.