[jaggederest]

> If a company turns away many developers who would be excellent hires but consistently meets its product/engineering goals and hires more good developers than bad developers overall, their recruiting process certainly has a positive signal. It's obviously inefficient, but it couldn't be meaningless.

Actually, that result would be precisely what you would expect from a process that fails to disprove the null hypothesis, and is therefore meaningless. You'd see them hiring essentially a random sample of engineers with the same distribution as the whole population.

I leave it to someone better at statistics than I am to figure out what an actually effective hiring process looks like, but I think the correlation between "is a relatable person" and hiring is much higher than "is a good engineer".

[dsacco]

> Actually, that result would be precisely what you would expect from a process that fails to disprove the null hypothesis, and is therefore meaningless. You'd see them hiring essentially a random sample of engineers with the same distribution as the whole population.

This implies that the capability distribution at Google is approximately equal to the capability distribution of the entire set of eligible developers. I don't personally think that's true, and in any case even if it is true it's not obvious.