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Comment by retrocryptid | Hacker News Reader

Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they had him doing was writing shell scripts to set environment variables for containers as they launched. I don't think he minded -- he was happy to have a job. But I kept seeing a lot of things like this and thinking "damn, what a waste of talent."

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Has there ever been a company that doesn't say they hire "only the best"?

Yes. The police in the US explicitly reject people with high IQs. It has been challenged in court but upheld.

https://www.kake.com/story/32508747/court-oks-barring-high-i...

Your reply assumes that [High IQ] => [Good Police Officer], but the argument in the US is that [High IQ] => [Bad Police Officer[1]].

I don't agree with this personally, but what they are doing is not equivalent to them exclaiming that "We don't hire the best". It would only be equivalent if they were explicitly filtering-out qualities they believe contribute to being the best, such as discipline, strength, and the like.

[1] Due to boredom, etc.

Work for a public utility... lack of talented employees was stated explicit in the interview.

Having worked for a public utility, there is a fair share of mediocre people but worse yet there are people in management positions who are entirely incompetent and can't recognize/don't know what to do with good talent. Funny enough, some of those people ended up working for Amazon.

I once heard it said: government jobs are welfare for the middle class. IMO it's not 100% accurate but it's better than 50%.

They're useful if you're self-employed because you can marry one to get the benefits.

I hope so, since hiring "the best" is not a good strategy, it means you never hire any juniors. ("meritocracy" is also a bad idea and the word was invented for a book about how it doesn't work.)

As for hiring "the worst", I guess there's those companies founded to give ex-convicts honest work.

100% agree with this.

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