[jaredtn]

This is Berkson's Paradox. Even if coding competition performance correlates positively with job performance in the general population (which it certainly does, given that most people can't code), selecting for this attribute in the hiring process leads to a negative correlation among those hired.

Great write-up by Erik Bernhardsson, CTO of Better, here: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the....

[dcolkitt]

Simple analogy. There is no correlation between height and salary across NBA players.[1]

The naive conclusion would be that height has nothing to do with basketball ability. The real answer is that markets are efficient and are already correcting one important feature against other predictors. Steph Curry wouldn't even be in the NBA if had the shooting ability of Gheorghe Mureșan.

[1] https://rpubs.com/msluggett/189114

[_qulr]

It should be mentioned that Steph Curry was drafted behind Hasheem Thabeet, Tyreke Evans, Ricky Rubio, and Jonny Flynn, among others.

Hiring is always a crapshoot. Pro sports teams spend a lot more time and money on talent evaluation than tech companies and still get it hilariously wrong all the time.

[birken]

On the flip side, every NBA player who has won league MVP in the lottery era (>1985) was drafted in the first 15 picks. Steph Curry of course has won MVP twice and was drafted behind the 6 players you mention, but then he was drafted next out of every other eligible player. I'd argue that through this lens, NBA teams are really good at "hiring".

Some teams draft for current skill, others draft for absolutely maximum possible potential, others draft for some combination of both. Some teams are willing to risk a "bust" if there is the potential of ultra-elite league-best skill. And considering that no player who has reached the MVP level has fallen further than 15th, I'd say as a whole the NBA teams are doing very well.

[_qulr]

> every NBA player who has won league MVP in the lottery era (>1985) was drafted in the first 15 picks.

I mentioned Steph Curry because the original commenter did, but in general it's very strange to focus on the MVP. That's a small sample and cherry-picking the results, only talking about the successes and overlooking all of the draft busts. There's only 1 MVP in the league every season, and some players have won it multiple times. It was won 5 times by Michael Jordan, who incidentally was drafted 3rd (behind Sam Bowie). Only 21 players have won NBA MVP during that period.

In any case, that MVP record doesn't hold in other sports. For example, NFL MVP Tom Brady was drafted behind 198 other players in 2000.

> NBA teams are really good at "hiring".

Some long-suffering Minnesota Timberwolves fans might say otherwise.

[jl2718]

It’s only a 2-year contract. Curry’s performance for that period appears to be roughly in line with expectations of that draft position.

[rualca]

> Ricky Rubio

Ricky Rubio is famous for playing elite basketball since he was a scrawny 14 year old.

And Ricky Rubio has pretty much the same height as Steph Curry.

[throwaway201103]

The NBA drafts more on potential than current playing skill, making it even more of a crapshoot.

[_qulr]

Big tech companies love to hire on potential too. They often hire freshly minted college grads over experienced engineers.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

I don't think that this is the conclusion I would come to. Height is not something that can be changed, therefore it cannot be used as an adjustable variable to make that market efficient. You can't train to be taller like you can train at coding competitions.

I would say that height is an advantage up to a certain point in basketball, but tall people are not especially rare. Within the market of basketball players, you can find tall people who also have other skills, sometimes you find short people (Steph Curry) who have exceptional skills.

[jaredtn]

Steph Curry is 6'3", in the 98th percentile for height. Wouldn't quite call him short. And there are only ~2,800 7-footers in the world, many of which are in the NBA. So tall players - meaning over 7 feet - are extremely rare.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

Yes I meant short relative to NBA players.

[dasil003]

Also, Steph Curry is not really short, he just looks that way next to NBA centers and forwards, but he's actually 96th percentile in height amount American men.

A better example would be Muggsy Bogues who was a full 12" shorter than Steph Curry and he could dunk.

[bsanr2]

Muggsy re:the NBA has always stood out to me as an example of the failure of a supposedly efficient market due to a massive but unintuitive oversight. It would be one thing if he had just been a middling player, but even with the MASSIVE height disparity between him and the rest of the league, he proved to be a standout player, easily in the top 50% of players historically, and probably much higher. Clearly, there's a role for short men even at the upper echelons of the sport - not just as a curiosity, but as an effective value-add above an average replacement, in part because of his lack of stature. But you almost never see NBA players below 5'9". The players are tall. The coaches are tall. Surely being tall is generally necessary for success in the sport? But then, Muggsy.

Read between the lines. If all the players are tall, and all the coaches are tall, and the game has been played for more than a half century with that assumption... who knows how to train/coach a short player?

[jacobolus]

He also could jump almost a foot and a half higher off the ground than the average NBA player, who in turn can jump almost a foot higher than the average man of the same age.

What proportion of people out there can learn to jump so high, even with extensive training/practice?

[bsanr2]

Hard to know, considering that said extensive training/practice is not as well-known as other basketball-related training, and that the practice of fielding players who would benefit from it is discouraged.

That said, a quick search of "training to dunk 5'6"" on Youtube brings up a number of videos.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

I was comparing his height to his peers in the NBA.

[Retric]

The more accurate conclusion is you get a vastly smaller population to choose from at extreme heights which largely offsets the slight height advantage, when looking at people who make the cut.

[ClumsyPilot]

- "The real answer is that markets are efficient"

Like it efficiently chooses all hockeyplayers with birthdays in January to March? [0]

The real answer is people hire based on their biases and organisational restrictions more than they hire on objective metrics - and we have plenty of evidence for that.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect

[Alex3917]

Why doesn't the NBA just lower the height of baskets by a foot? They would get much better athletes, so surely the games would be more entertaining and the league would make more money, no?

[porknubbins]

Aren’t the advantages of height mostly relative to the opponent, ie when trying to block him or shoot over him? I think 7ft players are already too tall to be able to shoot from an optimum angle.

[klodolph]

Basketball is already a fast, entertaining, high-point game. Why make it faster?

[stosto88]

Simpler analogy you cant be a good chef if you spend 12 hours a day just making bread.

[uyt]

Depending on how they define "winner at programming contests", this might narrow down the population to just a handful of "sport programmers". The same handful of guys win all the contests.

The statement might as well be "tourist has bad job performance". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich) And that isn't surprising given how much he has to train everyday to stay on top. He even turned down offers from Google/Facebook just to continue qualifying for the big annual competitions like Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup.

For a more in-depth account on how the top people train, you can check out this guy's advice on how to get two gold medals in IOI: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/69100 and his training schedule: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/69100?#comment-535272

Or this guy, who won IOI this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Cc4Yk2xe4&feature=youtu.be...

[mcqueenjordan]

Agree that it's Berkson's Paradox.

Just because I see some stronger-worded rebuttals in this thread, I want to point out that just because this is true (it is Berkson's Paradox), that does not mean it cannot be a valuable observation. As the author pointed out, for example, it might mean that this attribute is overweighted in hiring, which is something worth considering.

[sitkack]

That write up is excellent and I found this paragraph particularly interesting.

> An interesting paper [1] claims a negative correlation between sales performance and management performance for sales people promoted into managers. The conclusion is that “firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance”. While this paper isn't about hiring, it's the exact same theory here: the x-axis would be something like “expected future management ability” and the y-axis “sales performance”.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24343.pdf

[adamnemecek]

He’s not the CTO of Spotify, he worked at Spotify and he’s the CEO of a company called Better.

[jaredtn]

Thanks, fixed!

[ma2rten]

Exactly, I'm surprised that Peter Norvig who literally wrote the text book on AI didn't think of this and instead came up with this other explanation.

[ummonk]

Yup exactly.