That actually was the best point in the whole thread. "Won programming contest and was hired by Google" is not the same sample set as "won a programming contes

That actually was the best point in the whole thread. "Won programming contest and was hired by Google" is not the same sample set as "won a programming contest". Once you add "and was hired by Google", all sorts of sampling bias is added. To make it a really valid comparison, you'd need to track "won a programming contest and was not hired by Google" and "won a programming contest and never applied to Google".