The best engineers I’ve hired didn’t have the strongest résumés in the pile. They had the clearest answer to “tell me about a time you were wrong and what you did about it.”
Credentials tell you what someone has been exposed to. They don’t tell you how someone behaves when the spec is ambiguous, the deadline is real, and the obvious answer is also the wrong one — which is most of the job, most of the time.
I’d rather hire someone who can reason honestly about a bad decision they made than someone who has never had to.