It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other.
It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talent of the people involved). But in an organization, the need for teamwork and to "row in a common direction" tends to flatten out individual differences, and there're generally two possible classes: "valued contributor" and "holding back the group".
(This is also why large organizations like Google tweak their hiring processes to avoid false positives more than false negatives. One bad hire forces the team down to his level, as they always have to stop and explain things to him, or he'll block them from implementing a cleverer solution that he wouldn't understand. One good hire, however, very rarely raises the level of the team - he needs a lot of patience and very good empathetic & people skills to do so.)
> It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other.
No, that is simply not true. There might be a cutoff over which everyone is "reasonably competent", and perform "acceptably", but there are still huge differences between people.
You immediately say "no" to people that don't reach the "acceptable" bar. But above that, you have hiring quotas, and you try to maximize the value of the people you hire. Hiring someone just above the bar now means you get one less hire later. Someone much better might show up, and often does. And on the other hand if the current candidate is much, much above the bar - you fight to get that person hired, you work on convincing your peers in the hiring process. Because they are worth it. Such people have a much higher chance to be hired.
I've been on both sides of the hiring process many times and worked for many years in tech. To say that above some skill level everyone is the same, "can do it as well as any other" - not in all of my experience.
How large an organization? There are big differences between what a 10-person startup needs and what a 20,000 person mega-corp needs.
(FWIW, I would pay much more attention to individual performance differences if I were hiring for my own startup than I would when interviewing for Google. But I thought the context of this discussion was organizations large enough for gender quotas to matter, i.e. the Microsofts and Googles of this world. If it were my own startup, I'd try to hire from the population I've personally worked with, avoiding this whole discussion anyway. And I have never worked in an organization with a hiring quota - the companies I've worked for will all take you if you meet the hiring bar, and hold cash in reserve so they can scoop up a suitably-qualified employee if one presents herself. For that matter, I've been given offers at several places that were "not hiring", so I'm guessing quotas are just guidelines in many other places as well.)
> And I have never worked in an organization with a hiring quota - the companies I've worked for will all take you if you meet the hiring bar
You must have worked only at places where the amount of acceptable candidates is greatly constrained. Either because the hiring bar was extremely high, or there simply were extremely few candidates out there with the right skills.
In practice I've seen quotas everywhere I've worked. At small startups, at the beginning you often have no money to pay salaries, so you give out equity, and you don't want to be diluted into nothing from day one. It's also crucial to find great talent for the very beginnings of your company and codebase.
For large companies, there are always quotas because otherwise they would grow until they quickly become unprofitable, and of course there is a limit to how fast you can integrate new people into an existing structure. Each division and team has a target size for the next year, and they hire up to that limit.
I have never been in a company, big or small, where we said "hire as many good people as you find! no matter how many! we'll take 'em all!"
I work at Google. The hiring bar is definitely high, but the quotas are also definitely just guidelines. (I was hired during a hiring freeze, for example.)
I've previously worked at 2 startups, founded 1, and also interned at a large and a mid-size company. None of them had quotas. The two startups were very constrained in the number of acceptable candidates, but the internships had a fairly large pool of candidates to choose from, and would make a position for a suitably-qualified candidate if one did not exist.
I think we are saying basically the same thing in other words.
If the hiring bar is very high, it can be set high enough so as to limit the number of people you hire. So you end up hiring only (ones you think are) the very best.
The fact remains that even in such a "quotaless" situation, if you saw 1,000 amazing people you would not hire them all for your 10 person startup. That would be lunacy. In fact you would stop interviewing after hiring a tiny fraction.
The point here is that, contrary to the discussion before, it isn't that there is a "near-infinite" amount of candidates of equal talent. All companies want to hire the best, and the right amount of them within some reasonable range.
So it isn't that you can pick a criterion like "we will hire only left-handed people" without that having an effect, since left-handedness is only about 10% of the population (of all coder skill levels). If you start looking at far fewer candidates, you will miss some of the very best that otherwise you would want to hire.
The startups I've worked at hire everyone who's good. Quotas and headcounts exist at companies like Intel, but VC funded startups can't possibly hire quickly enough to spend all their investment.
Really? I always see funded startups limit their hiring to their investment and because it just isn't practical.
If you are a 10 person startup, there are likely thousands of people in silicon valley who could work for you, and hundreds of thousands who could work remotely. You're not going to hire them all - it would take too long, you would run out of money, and you would have your equity diluted into nothing.
It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talent of the people involved). But in an organization, the need for teamwork and to "row in a common direction" tends to flatten out individual differences, and there're generally two possible classes: "valued contributor" and "holding back the group".
(This is also why large organizations like Google tweak their hiring processes to avoid false positives more than false negatives. One bad hire forces the team down to his level, as they always have to stop and explain things to him, or he'll block them from implementing a cleverer solution that he wouldn't understand. One good hire, however, very rarely raises the level of the team - he needs a lot of patience and very good empathetic & people skills to do so.)