There is something to be said for risk aversion, but I often encounter attitudes like the one in this blog post that seem proud they are willing avoid risk at a

There is something to be said for risk aversion, but I often encounter attitudes like the one in this blog post that seem proud they are willing avoid risk at any cost. It's irrational. If every company only wants the best of the best programmers and adopts a "better a false negative than a false positive" attitude to hiring, then it is just economics that programmers who are not obviously first class are being undervalued. Translation: if every company wants programmers with a perfect git profile, you can get a programmer w/o a good git profile at bargain prices. Even when you price in the risk of hiring duds, with such an irrational attraction to top-performers, there is a huge opportunity to profit here. Sure, no one should go seek out unnecessary risks, but I think companies should employ a little more cost benefit analysis. Training people is a risk. Hiring junior programmers is a risk. Hiring programmers from a second tier college is a risk. But risks are opportunities to innovate. If you only want to hire MIT grads with 10,000 GitHub stars, fine, but don't expect to get a competitive advantage from this, because this is by and large what all your competitors are doing. The company that learns to identify and retain new talent or manage the risks of hiring "B-team" programmers will be the one with the competitive advantage.