Great write-up by Erik Bernhardsson, CTO of Better, here: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the....
The naive conclusion would be that height has nothing to do with basketball ability. The real answer is that markets are efficient and are already correcting one important feature against other predictors. Steph Curry wouldn't even be in the NBA if had the shooting ability of Gheorghe Mureșan.
This can have interesting outcomes. For instance, when Triplebyte published their blog post about which environments get the most hires⁰, it revealed the areas they haven't yet entirely accounted for in their quest to increase matching performance.
0: https://triplebyte.com/blog/technical-interview-performance-...
The statement might as well be "tourist has bad job performance". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich) And that isn't surprising given how much he has to train everyday to stay on top. He even turned down offers from Google/Facebook just to continue qualifying for the big annual competitions like Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup.
For a more in-depth account on how the top people train, you can check out this guy's advice on how to get two gold medals in IOI: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/69100 and his training schedule: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/69100?#comment-535272
Or this guy, who won IOI this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Cc4Yk2xe4&feature=youtu.be...
- Convincing them to spend great effort into changing their data collection and labelling practices.
- Explaining why a particular technique was used and why it is correct.
- Explaining why they can't expect magic from 'big data'.
- Making models that are robust and easily maintained, vs fragile spaghetti.
But I don't think being good at kaggle implies being bad at data science soft skills. Technical skills are probably weakly correlated -- that's my prior, it would be good to see a study.
I did find a paper examining the performance of TopCoder participants: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09755-0
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...
Like it efficiently chooses all hockeyplayers with birthdays in January to March? [0]
The real answer is people hire based on their biases and organisational restrictions more than they hire on objective metrics - and we have plenty of evidence for that.
> An interesting paper [1] claims a negative correlation between sales performance and management performance for sales people promoted into managers. The conclusion is that “firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance”. While this paper isn't about hiring, it's the exact same theory here: the x-axis would be something like “expected future management ability” and the y-axis “sales performance”.