You make an interesting macro point. But there's a world of difference between an entry level full-time job and a 1-2 week "audition project".
The phenomenon you're describing is what makes recruiting such an interesting problem. The largest or wealthiest employers can often afford to constrain their candidates to people who have proven themselves in other settings. Which of course leaves a "Moneyball"-type opening to the employers who can figure out how to hire for aptitude instead of experience. Which makes hiring at those savvier employees a high-stakes, high-value process, instead of a tedious formality inflicted across the whole team.
> Which of course leaves a "Moneyball"-type opening to the employers who can figure out how to hire for aptitude instead of experience.
I want to call for tokenadult's canned "within the US, look for a work sample. Outside the US, use an IQ test" post. We figured out _how_ to hire for aptitude a long time ago (subject, of course, to the fact that prediction is never perfect); Malcom McLean apparently filled his new shipping company top-down by who, among the people who worked for his old trucking company, scored highest on an IQ test. But then we decided that that would be illegal in the future?
We know what the solution looks like, but not what its precise measurements are; the person who comes up with a universal, economical, predictively powerful work sample test for software developers is probably going to make a lot of money.
Really a family of such metrics because the moment the first one hits the ground in any earnestly it'll be gamed to death. Nothing ruins a powerful, economical, repeatable indicator for predicting economic activity faster than using it.
The point I was trying to make wasn't about hiring "for experience" but leveraging those who were around them to vouch for their aptitude. This is a distinct difference, and you have to work hard to get people to think in these terms instead of amount of experience. I may be naive in even thinking we're accomplishing this.
Without the public displays of performance that baseball has, there's another level of indirection that you must filter through to try and illustrate a candidates performance.
This makes it something like the "Moneyball of Moneyball of programming".
The phenomenon you're describing is what makes recruiting such an interesting problem. The largest or wealthiest employers can often afford to constrain their candidates to people who have proven themselves in other settings. Which of course leaves a "Moneyball"-type opening to the employers who can figure out how to hire for aptitude instead of experience. Which makes hiring at those savvier employees a high-stakes, high-value process, instead of a tedious formality inflicted across the whole team.