The willingness to hire "unqualified" people directly depends on how expensive bad hires can be.<p>For example, if your product is a static website (no database), and you are using version control, the worst thing bad software engineer can do is to bring the website down for a few hours. So by all means do hire people without the right technical skills, and see how well they do.<p>On the other end of spectrum, there are industrial controllers which controls huge factories and where many mistakes can cause loss of productivity on the entire floor and/or multi-million-$ machine physically breaking. And those systems frequently have no version control nor any sort of tests. You really don't want anyone without relevant experience touching those.