> With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should al

> With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should also be similar. You're right that the actual population of all job applicants over time is equally qualified to the employed developers. However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job. In that sample, incompetent developers are much more likely to be present because a competent developer only sends out <15 applications before getting a job while the incompetent ones can send out hundreds. At any given moment, a competent developer is more likely to be employed than an incompetent one. Hence the incompetent ones are constantly generating job applications at a much higher rate than their actual presence in the population would suggest. For the record, this isn't merely theoretical. The last time I was looking for a job, I was able to get an offer from the second company I applied to. Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50 places before getting a single offer. If you were to pull a random sample of our applications, his would be way over-represented. > think Google came out a while ago and said that their initial hires had no correlation to the really successful people in the company after...5(?)... years. Sure, but Google still spends a lot of time and money on interviewing because anyone they hire has to be better than the average applicant. They get huge numbers of job applicants, the majority of whom are grossly unqualified. > The interviewing process is known to be broken, so trying to extrapolate to say that the job-seekers are less good at these metrics than the employed is erroneous. There are lots of problems with the interview process, but I'm really including anyone who managed to get to an interview (past the phone screen) in the "competent" category. There are seriously huge number of job applicants who can't program a basic loop without extensive help.