You can't teach iron ore to be gold. In most fields, as long as the person has a reasonable level of intelligence, some reading comprehension, and a true passion for the subject they will do well regardless of academic background.

Lots of people think they're good, but they're not. You'd be shocked (or not) at how many people fail the fizzbuzz coding exercise.

My general interview process is a brief verbal over their resume and some light tech questions, then you get a laptop with a dev environment and help files. You write a few coding exercises, stuff that would take a "good" coder probably 5-10 minutes.

My most recent hire was fresh out of college, he nailed it. I've had dozens of people claiming 5+ years experience that can't even finish it.

In any career you're going to be a lot like high school: You have your top 10%, your 10-25% that can bumble along, and then the other 75% who you wouldn't trust anything of value to.

It's what you see in fields of all sorts. There's your top 1%, top 10%, top 25% and then all the people that need to fill the seats but if actually had to compete in a limited market would be gone.

And after you modify your source version of the code, congratulations, upgrading to the next version is at best case going to require careful thought and planning, and at worst case a lot of time and effort on your part.

The danger of customizing your open source product is the same danger that companies face modifying products like SAP. Once you go so far down that path, upgrading is prohibitivly risky and costly.