One of the companies I work with has been trying to staff up so I have been doing some interviewing. The company's needs are relatively modest: demonstrable skill in a couple of production programming languages (C++ and Java, say), demonstrable ability to design programs and data structures when given a specification, a basic knowledge of algorithms and performance analysis, an understanding of production operating systems that goes beyond having used an editor running on a Unix system editing, compiling, and then running a "hello world" program, demonstrable skills in one or more real-world application domains, some basic knowledge of hardware, an reasonable understanding of parallelism and concurrency, some basic knowledge of networking, and so forth. It is very hard to find candidates who really can demonstrate a level of skill commensurate with the <i>great</i> credentials they provide in their resume.