As a concrete example, I've gotten more accolades for silly personal projects that sound impressive, like training a convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU, than for impactful work at my actual job, which was a lot less challenging.
I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy, and I think companies could really get far hiring less than the best people, and just squeezing good quality work out of them (I believe Amazon is known for this).
Obviously OpenAI should not hire subpar people lol, they should keep doing what works for them, just grumbling loudly here.
Seems silly enough to get you somewhere cool. Though the best pass is recommendation. Impress your colleagues so bad, they will recommend you somewhere one day.
than for impactful work at my actual job
Oh you have to fight hard to get one of those. You cant just do what you're told. Ive got a cool story to tell from my time at amazon but I fought heroically to get it (I was younger though).
I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy
Careful what you believe because your belief becomes your reality.
If you want to be great, you cant just act and think like anybody else. Work on yourself and be great. Get the mindset first.
"life has strange ways"