The truth is that while there are a ton of people out there with the qualifications to do the work, there aren't a lot of people out there who are going to be as good at it. I am truly suprised how many programmers my company has hired that looked good on paper and have basically been useless to do real tasks. I once heard someone say that only 10% of any profession is any good at what they do. This may not quite be true, but the idea is.

Having just been through a recruiting exercise for a Windows developer I would say this is absolutely correct. The problem seems to be the number of people with lots of experience who genuinely believe they are experts in any given field, but in fact are not. It is very difficult to pick out the people who really are good, but one thing I've learned is not to take salary expectation as any indication of someone's true skill level.

Luckily we were able to find a good chap to take over from Roger next month.

Rob