[wpietri]

I definitely agree on there not being a total ordering. Part of it for me is the mix of strengths thing. But I noticed two other factors:

One is just the small amount of information gleaned. Last time I hired, I ended up spending ~5 hours with each candidate who made it all the way through. But that's 0.1% of how much time I hope to spend with them, and it's them attempting to put their best foot forward. Any score I might give them would have big error bars.

The other is the extent to which ranking candidates is personal and nearly arbitrary. This time we did blinded reviews of code and it amazed me to see how often each reviewer valued different things. We would eventually converge with discussion, but I don't have a lot of faith that the parallel-universe versions of ourselves would be particularly consistent. And that's without reviewers even knowing the identities of the code writers.

The whole "lowered standards" thing strikes me as built upon a fantasy of clarity that is nothing like my actual experience of hiring.