The hiring practices around here for developers is standard for most jobs in the US (from what I'm told). Students from top schools get recruited right from the university if they have good grades.
However, as you may guess, grades aren't always an indicator of quality. Of the seven developers that had been hired since the time I was hired, only around three have any code quality. I've seen front-end developers struggle writing simple Javascript. A backend developer with supposedly three years of experience as a lead can barely write coherent Java, always scouring stackoverflow to find snippets. That same developer also had tried to steal code from me and claim it as his own. It was a git-deployment tool, and given that he never learned to use Git, I was immediately suspicious. Looking through the repository he had created, most of it was copy-and-pasted code with the author attribution overwritten with his name. Thank god for the logs at that moment!
To clarify, I have also seen some excellent developers here. They work extremely fast, and so their work-ethic is enviable; exceed expectations and then work at east on the next features given. They rapidly implement changes in UI and features at a pace I no doubt could not do.
Overall, I agree with this article's point. Maybe myself and the author are wrong, and I just have a bias based on my experience.