4 karma · joined June 21, 2016
Unfortunately hiring seems to be a very difficult problem and I can imagine that many key features are hidden and can't be obtained since the candidate can't be put into a controlled experiment that should allow us to obtain deep information that is usually hidden, perhaps a way to gain more information and wealth is to communicate with your users and clients in such a way that what is now hidden can be measured and new features can be obtained. That is you need to think about a model for your users, and that model must use features related to mental and human capabilities.
The beta distribution: In the free book "think stats Probability and Statistics for Programmers" there is a chapter about how the beta distribution can be used as a prior to model an unknown probability and how Bayes' Theorem allow us to update that prior with a posterior distribution that is also a Beta distribution, that important property is called the self-prior property of the beta. Since the two parameters of the beta in that intuitive explanation are just the number of experiments (battings) and the number of successes (runs) that example constitutes a very intuitive and clear way to explain what is Bayesian Statistics. I think that you would enjoy the think stats book, it is aimed for programmers and it tries hard to enhance intuition.
I also enjoyed how you describe the atmosphere in your office, it seems that you work in a lovely place in which statistics is a well respected tool and people try to explore and innovate in a fun way without excessive pain. Nice post, I enjoyed it.