"We Only Hire the Best" doesn't have to have any truth to it to be of use to companies. Their purpose in hiring is to extract value from candidates. Convincing

"We Only Hire the Best" doesn't have to have any truth to it to be of use to companies. Their purpose in hiring is to extract value from candidates. Convincing people that they'd be amongst the best is all you have to do. The rhetoric comes from existing employees, who may be rationalising their decision to work there. It feels good to be amongst "the best" - I want to be amongst the best! I am sure I'm not the only one with such aspirations. If being 'the best' means over-fitting to the requirements of a company, then the most successful (viz. "best") candidates will optimise for what that company wants. It means by the time they arrive at work they're already largely conditioned into behaving as their new company would like them to. Yes, "the best" is a transparent lie. It doesn't matter though, because it serves the interests of companies who espouse it. DHH is calling a spade a spade here - but I'd hazard that the vast majority of the HN crowd already know. Also, globally, there are lot of extraordinarily shit software people out there. If we define quality by "gets things done and doesn't break things and act in a crappy and deleterious manner", then it is not difficult for "the best" to mean the upper 60% of software people. It is completely reasonable to assume that the companies with this mantra do indeed hire from the top 60%, if only because of how many rubbish people there are.