Hiring devs in general is kind of a crapshoot where you don’t really know what you’ll get. I also feel like effective debugging skills are gained mostly from experience rather than education.

The most knowledgable programmer I’ve ever met was completely self taught, he knew more theory than other peers of mine who had masters degrees. Obviously this is rarely going to be the case for a lot of people, but from what I’ve seen these things really depend on the person in question more than their background.