It's a garbage premise entirely due to the fact that people - eg job applicants - can be so drastically different one to the next (whether amazing or horrible).

It's a garbage premise entirely due to the fact that people - eg job applicants - can be so drastically different one to the next (whether amazing or horrible). The secretary problem fails to bake that in, because it can't handle it inherently (you have to actually interview people to know that). It doesn't actually work in reality. There's no probability theory that is going to function properly so as to be very useful in such a context, because the best candidate in the world can just as easily show up on the tenth interview as the first or third. Your first three job applicants can be horrible, and the next three can be amazing. People that buy into the false nature of the secretary problem / optimal stopping theory (that it's actually useful in reality), are falling for the premise that eg several roulette spins in the past directly impact the odds of the present spin. It's a bad premise to utilize for exactly the same reason: the quality of your last candidate doesn't have any strict relationship to the quality of your next candidate. Optimal stopping theory is only useful for highly indecisive people that can't figure out what they want, so they fall back to handing off their decision-making to something else.