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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   3270 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Whining about the hiring practices of highly profitable and successful firms in a cutthroat industry because they won't give you the time of day is a very bad look.

It's silly to think the correlation between hiring competence and profit is 1. Or even over .70.

If hiring the right people has little relation to making money, I don't know why you think they'd care about your GPA.

Do you think hiring is the only factor in firm profitability?

One of my closest friends is a CEO of a medium sized tech company, and after years on the job he is convinced that correct hiring is by far the most important part of a well-functioning company. Good people make everything easier, and even just a few troublemakers can drag everything down. According to him, most experienced managers he's talked with agree.

You may claim they are wrong, but I'd be surprised if managers in prestigious, ultra competitive fields think differently.

Do you suppose their hiring could be good but not perfect?

Of course, since the answer to "is x perfect" is almost always "no", for any important irl task. The actually relevant question is "are their hiring practices EV+, especially compared to whatever deepneuralnetwork wants them to do?" to which the answer is also "of course".

You don't seem to grasp how much money is on the line and/or how important even a small statistical edge can be in ultra-competitive fields.

The actually relevant question is "are their hiring practices EV+, especially compared to whatever deepneuralnetwork wants them to do?" to which the answer is also "of course".

There is no reason their practices are more EV+ than my suggestions. I could very well improve their hiring processes, but this hasn't happened due to lack of the sufficient competition which would require this. Their hiring practices are good enough to let them be profitable firms, while still letting me rationally critique them.

No. This isn't coding or even math proofs where you could plausibly be a prodigy working on it by yourself since you're ten. You're fresh out of an okay college. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that you have any idea what you're talking about in respect to hiring compared to companies who have been doing and optimizing this for literal decades. You are the equivalent of a kid watching his first starcraft video and, never having played it, announcing that you're probably better than the best players in the entire world because you have identified something that you think was a mistake. Hell, no, you haven't even watched the video, you've only been told about it second-hand.

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