Everyone Hires the Best

If you’ve been in the technology sector for any length of time you’re probably familiar with the generic recruiter pitches and stamped-out corporate job postings which seem to be in endless supply. Every company and recruiter is hiring the best and wants autonomous self-starters that will make a big impact while bringing their passion for X to their work. It’s tempting to apply; who doesn’t want to work on a high-performing team with smart people.

Evidently, everyone is and has been hiring the best for years, which is quite the feat. If this is true the technology sector must be incredibly lucky to have such a large volume of above-average people fuelling this hiring trend. Talent must be overflowing the technologist hiring-pool and threatening to drown hiring managers.

Determining where a particular field lies in terms of overall talent is challenging and there appears to be little research on the matter¹, but allow me to speculate a bit to provide some context.

Firstly, the technology sector displays a large-scale Dunning-Kruger effect with many individuals believing their knowledge of technology extends to completely unrelated fields. This doesn’t imply these individuals are below-average within the technology sector, but a failure to estimate one’s own ability does make illusory superiority seem likely. Secondly, comparison of GPA by programme shouldn’t provide acceptable evidence for ranking fields by intelligence due to variation in grading, testing, and topic scope. From this speculation, my conjecture is the technology sector has a normal distribution similar to other industries.

If my conjecture is false, then companies should be hiring the best and have the capability to replicate that hiring procedure for every person they employ: to only hire the best implies a reliable ordering applied to any set of candidates. This isn’t the reality of technology sector interviews — employee and candidate time is wasted by three or more on-site interviews, each an hour-long, following ninety minute, or more, screening challenges, all with technical questions rarely relating to the day-to-day work expected of the role.

There is no reliable ordering applied at any company; if there was, feedback would be commonly given and easy to provide. The reality of interviewing is that you should expect no feedback, and the feedback you do receive in the rare case is worthless. The interview process is unorganized, has no objective rubric to grade against, involves many employees of differing expertise and biases, and has no control group — it is effectively random. There is no hope for meaningful feedback or hiring the best from this kind of process.

The Law of Large Numbers dictates that the result of performing an experiment many times eventually converges to the arithmetic mean. With this interview process practised across the technology sector, it has been put through many trials across a wide variety of candidates and interviewers, particularly at large technology corporations, and should therefore converge on the arithmetic mean.

Everyone hires the average, but markets their employees as above-average to entice applicants. Don’t believe recruiters and corporations claiming to hire the best or the smartest people — those people may have more experience working at larger scale, but they are not objectively better. Whether it’s through common-sense highlighting the implausibility of everyone hiring the best or via mathematics and the Law of Large Numbers, this kind of lie told by recruiters and corporations needs to be squashed.

Don’t take a job because you think it’s prestigious to work at a certain company; it’s the same as every other job, just larger. Don’t take a job because a recruiter says you can work with the best. Find a company that you can be proud to work for; a job you enjoy that aligns with your ethics and makes you happy.