Agree with you qualitatively about the need to get out of one's comfort zone, avoid "local maxima", and never consider oneself an expert. However: But at comp

Agree with you qualitatively about the need to get out of one's comfort zone, avoid "local maxima", and never consider oneself an expert. However: But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. There's so much noise, context, and (as you acknowledge) subjectivity in how performers are evaluated that a statement like "We hire only the top .25%" can't possibly have any meaning. Top 5% might be about as far as you can push it. But even at that level, at best it's just a metaphor. And by itself, it doesn't provide us with any tools to reliably determine membership in that category. Other than, of course, the tried-and-true method of throwing out a series of hoops for people to jump through over the phone, on your live coding portal, and at the whiteboard (ignoring all the built-in selection biases in this process: from whether candidates had had that very problem fed to them in another interview somewhere; to whether they spent 3 weeks to 3 months doing nothing but prepping for your hoops, day and night; to the simple matter of whether they're having a good day that day). And then stack-rank: "See, only 5% of email applicants made it through our phone screen and take home test (which we had to re-design midway through because we realized we weren't stating the requirements properly, but whatever). Then we brought in 10 or so of those for interviews, until basically we got tired of interviewing and decided we had to hire someone. Ergo, we only hire the top .5%."