The post opens with a false dichotomy. In general my experience has been that we hired someone that management selected because they'd "done it" before (always

The post opens with a false dichotomy. In general my experience has been that we hired someone that management selected because they'd "done it" before (always in very different contexts), they ramped up to our project, and it worked out pretty well. I don't think it's necessarily the best selection process, but selecting for prior experience is not a very serious problem in hiring imo.