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by Shorel 2014 days ago
It is your job to hire the best candidate, hire the most qualified, not the best at selling himself.

Remember the Dunning–Kruger effect. We are surrounded by confident and wrong people.

2 comments

In practice, candidates who are best at selling themselves are also great at selling ideas to coworkers and maybe even clients.

Confident and wrong people are the ones who will try their ideas out and get it right eventually. Those who are not confident will keep passive learning and planning and get stuck in self-doubt, and hate others for succeeding by just doing things "wrongly".

I think there's a meta DK effect in light of DK effect: those who learn about DK effect and think that it is favorable to them are the ones to whom it doesn't apply favorably to.

Nobody wins with the Dunning Kruger effect, that is the beauty of it. If you rate yourself modestly, maybe you’re actually modest or maybe you’re advanced, there’s no way to know. If you rate yourself highly, you’re not very good at all. And if you rate yourself low, you’re probably being accurate.
> It is your job to hire the best candidate, hire the most qualified, not the best at selling himself.

What’s the practical difference? There isn’t an objective measure of competence in software. An interviewer has to make a decision on potential performance from very little information. Strong communications skills are a huge benefit to a candidate, which includes selling ones self. It is up to the interviewer to direct the conversation and determine if the candidate’s commentary is bullshit.

DK isn’t confidence, but more specifically is confidence contrary to performance.