[pb7]

Very average? How do you figure that? If you're paying top dollar, which Lyft did for most of its existence, you're going to picking from a pool of the top few percent. Even 1% of all software developers is many times more than Lyft's headcount.

I'm curious, who do you think is hiring the 10th percentile engineers? What are those people doing?

[nradov]

That's not how it works in the real world. There are a bunch of other companies also targeting the top few percent. Mathematically it isn't possible for them all to succeed in that goal regardless of their hiring process or compensation levels. If you actually talk to those engineers it's clear that beyond ability to solve "leetcode" type problems they are mostly pretty average.