> > A great engineer would be worth $1M > Where does this number come from? In 2017, Apple's revenues were $229B. Apple had 123,000 employees. This means th

> > A great engineer would be worth $1M > Where does this number come from? In 2017, Apple's revenues were $229B. Apple had 123,000 employees. This means the average employee at Apple pulled in $1.86M, not in salary, but in value to the company. Check out Paul Graham's wit and wisdom with regard to only seeing the positives of interviewing en masse. http://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html http://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html Every check has a cost. > The bottom end here is not a small but positive win, it’s an enormous loss. You used the term "not-so-great", not "bad". You're not going to spot all the bad ones. And you can fire bad hires, limiting your downside. Consider two possibilities: •Hiring managers genuinely do select the top talent, which means that now the only people they have left to interview aren't qualified to hold the jobs, and thus they're wasting their time. •Hiring managers don't know everything, try to make the best decisions, but often hire poor performers, and this means that their role in hiring is not as some kind of highly skilled "nerd whisperer" who can divine good candidates from bad candidates, but merely a utilitarian cog in the corporate machine, that tends to overestimate both its skill and its importance. If this were medicine, it would be institutional quackery.