Can they write a function?

For a software developer position, there isn't a trick to finding the best candidate. Your criteria do not determine how solid the candidates will be. Everyone is submitting 500 applications a month now, and those who automate the process submit thousands. So how do you hire a great candidate? Pick a few from the lot, ask them if they can write a function, have them do a live FizzBuzz test, then ask them to deploy a service from localhost to an actual public server. That's it. Hire them after that. As far as experience is concerned, they will learn on the job. If you think they don't know how to write tests or use a particular paradigm, they can ask ChatGPT and apply what it tells them a few times until they get familiar with it. People learn on the job. Nobody knows what the hell back pressure is until they encounter it in a particular service. Everything else is really just random. We insist on things like culture, but we have no way of measuring it. It's all so arbitrary. For…