I think that the lesson from baseball is that people spent a long time basing decisions on measurable but irrelevant things like the shape of a player’s bottom,

I think that the lesson from baseball is that people spent a long time basing decisions on measurable but irrelevant things like the shape of a player’s bottom, and they thought they were being clever and reasonable and making good decisions. Lots of software development isn’t solving particularly novel problems but it can be quite varied, and certainly performance can be hard to measure and output can be dependent on things outside of one’s control (eg if an experimental project doesn’t pan out). But I don’t think that should mean that one should give up and judge people based on things that seem reasonable but don’t work (eg apparently algorithms style questions) or actually irrelevant things like (probably) height or (presumably) the shape of someone’s bottom.