How does the software industry deal with the fact that there

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How does the software industry deal with the fact that there is such a huge range of talent between different programmers and software engineers?

The fact that there are programmers currently working, who have roughly the same base of familiar knowledge, but who if you give them some unfamiliar code full of methods and objects unfamiliar to all of them and you ask them all to find the same bug and add the same piece of new functionality to it, some of the programmers will take a few hours to do the task while others could take a week on it?

Is this a problem for software recruiters?
I mean there will literally be people who have a decent amount of programming knowledge and a CV showing that they have been working doing programming for years, but if you give them some task they could be 4 times more slow and less producctive than another programmer.

Do any of you have any experience of recruiting ? how do you weed these people out?

And what about the fact that many programmers are weak or totally unfamiliar with important maths like geometry, trigonometry and linear algebra ?

How can you really discern a talented programmer from a mediocre but decently experienced and knowledgable programmer?
Do brainteasers or asking them write some simple code to solve some simple problem on the spot really work? because brainteasers you can hear the answer before hand and often test a slightly differnet skill from programming/software engineering, and the kind of small code tasks you get asked to do on the spot in interview often aren't representative of working on a larger product and can be within the ability of a mediocre-talent programmer.

What are your thoughts?