[seaknoll]

From the website -

> Out of the people I had hired at my last startup:

> 12% of hires where exceptional hires (I would instantly hire again)

> 42% of Hire were good hires. (I wouldn’t hire again but they did a fine job)

> 29% of hires were bad hires. (They didn’t do a good job and were eventually let go)

> 17% of hires were very bad hires (They had a negative effect on the company culture and other staff)

These seem like extremely poor numbers. I haven't hired a ton of people but all of them have been excellent, though some that I was peripherally involved in hiring have been just good. I'm curious what other people feel that their ratio is.

[shaggyfrog]

> (I wouldn’t hire again but they did a fine job)

This alone makes no sense to me. It's a contradiction.

So I assume the website/author thinks they're a kind of mega-hustler 1000x developer or something.

[chinchilla2020]

Most likely. Also the extremely specific numbers provided.

[version_five]

This could roughly be saying half of hires are below average, and the distribution is bell shaped (or triangular to a first approximation). For many jobs, below average can be equivalent to bad.

If you have money to spend, or can wait to hire, you can beat the averages. I've hired a fair amount and done well too, but only by refusing to hire anyone if there are not suitable candidates that applied, which can burn a lot of political capital (your boss sees you've spend x time and money and had y applicant and z interviews and you refuse to hire anyone).

Good, cheap, available, pick two.

[sokoloff]

Employees aren’t scratch tickets. The on-boarding, training, engineering culture and practices all contribute strongly to whether the prospective employee will turn out to be excellent or not. (I leave it to your judgment to guess how a place where 42% “were good hires, did a fine job, but I wouldn’t hire them again” falls on that spectrum.)

[peterthehacker]

Yeah, it sounds so bad that it’s probably made up. It implies that the company has 46% turnover or firing rate (29+17), but average turnover for tech companies is 10%-15% [0].

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/news/is-everyone-replaceable-a...

[zitterbewegung]

The percentiles seem to fit the Pareto distribution exactly. People seem to use it to describe intelligence or performance at a task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution?wprov=sfti...