[sokoloff]

I think past performance of a human is generally pretty strong as an indicator.

It's rare (though possible) for someone to turn from a lazy, self-entitled dilettante into a hard-working ace coder. It's rare for someone to turn from an excellent coach and mentor into an insufferable bastard.

[SeanAppleby]

> It's rare (though possible) for someone to turn from a lazy, self-entitled dilettante into a hard-working ace coder.

Is it though? In my experience people are good at building things that they care about and bad at building things they don't care about.

If someone has been trapped working on sisyphean bullshit projects I would expect them to do much better on something they cared about, and the initial sorting of people into what they work on is often largely indiscriminate when it comes to what they care about, so I would expect there to be a significant percentage of people underperforming at their current job who would excel elsewhere.

I know at least personally, my job performance has fluctuated wildly depending on whether or not I cared about what I was supposed to do.

If you managed to incentivize me enough to get me to leave what I'm doing well now to go do something that I thought was rent seeking and deeply meaningless, I would most likely perform very poorly, and I've already had the opposite happen where I performed mediocrely in a boring area and then performed incomparably better when I got into doing things I cared about.