I interviewed for an internship an Indian woman pursuing her masters in computer science at a nonaccredited division 1 university. Her undergrad came from some Indian college. Her resume was fantastic.

She couldnt do merge sort, nor could she figure it out when I told her the algorithm.

We picked the guy with 2 semesters of programming at a local community college for the internship. He was/is a fantastic intern.

100%

At my company we have 3 types of developers. Leaders, Architects, & Developers. Everyone starts as a Developer and you hope they can progress to Architect at the very least. Some come with leadership skills at entry level, but those are rare. Leadership skills can be cultivated by the environment of the company which starts with good mentoring.

This is wrong. This is the opinion of either a good developer who has been working with low quality developers, or a good developer who has been working under poor quality leadership and mentoring. I run a software department and recently transitioned from Waterfall to Agile. It took us 3 years to fully get to test driven as well. The quality of your developers and the quality of their mentoring are what determine the quality of the software you produce under Agile.

Exactly. At my company we say there are Software Engineers and there are Coders. We only hire the former.

sounds good in theory, but in practice its not always possible because:

maybe use a bit more memory

Is a constraint in and of itself.

Yes, hence critical sections only.

I recently wrote a P2P VoIP app that used threading for the capture, playback and audio mixing & aysnc for the p2p mesh service. Each solve a different problem. Both are useful techniques.

but avoid locks as much as possible

Locks are fine if you know how to use them, ie limiting to the critical sections only.

Mergesort since he's so keen on separating people to rank them.