There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

I find that the ability of people to understand hypotheticals is extremely diminished.

"How would you troubleshoot x"

"I havent done that before"

"Ok, but how would you approach the problem"

"I dont know sorry"

There is a subset of companies where they test to see if you stop yourself and admit you don’t know.

It’s a question where you should preface if you don’t know, then make sure you’re game to just try.