> It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI. > The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity

I guess it highly depends on where you are. Majority of the interviews I have attended were "We have this <problem>/<client request> and do not have expertise/capacity to solve/deliver. Can you come in and start closing tickets? yes/no". SRE with extensive experience in Ansible is barely eligible for a junior role at a shop using Puppet, a frontender working with Angular is unwanted at a react shop, Oracle DBA is a leper in the eyes of Postgres shop.

I am at my current place mostly because in the interview I have said "Hey look, buddy. I'm an engineer. That means I solve problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy." My team does not have a single "Certified Foobarizer Expert", but tickets tend to move through the pipeline one way or another.