[kaashif]

You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.

It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.

[NewsaHackO]

Yes, I didn't look at the replies until late, but you are correct. The invariant of the situation is that there are a large number of people who want 1-2 positions, and there are not enough resources in the company to interview and evaluate them all in person. My point is that when you remove measures like a performance on a project from play, and are forced to whittle down a group of applicants to an interviewable-sized group, people will start to pick increasingly "unfair" ways to do so. No one wants to risk hiring a person for a position who simply cannot perform at the level necessary for the job. If they don't have a project to separate the people who can perform versus the people who can't, then they have to use other markers to say why one person has a better chance of performing well than another, of which previous employer/alumni and references from trusted sources are by far the easiest ones.

[esseph]

> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.

> If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

It may or may not be. It depends on the quality of the signal itself, its reliability, repeatability, and if that signal blinds you from other indicators or maybe even leads you astray.

Having a signal doesn't mean it's particularly useful. Example: like triggering an alert on a VMs cpu utilization. It's certainly a signal but rarely is it good for anything or actionable.

[dijit]

>> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

> No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.

Really, I read it as if it's a bad thing, but a true thing.

Like they're reinforcing my point, that if you have 10,000 qualified candidates and capacity to review 500- grepping for Havard becomes an "easy" way to filter.

Treating people with nuance and balance is not easy to do at scale, you have to bias along some axis, and nearly every axis I can think of is a shitty one- because of course there are fantastic people outside of those axis'

[esseph]

> Like they're reinforcing my point, that if you have 10,000 qualified candidates and capacity to review 500- grepping for Havard becomes an "easy" way to filter.

The best engineers I have ever worked with mostly didn't either finish college or even go in the first place. Entirely self taught.