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> Even a person who is not better than anyone at any of the relevant skills can improve a team, because it's opportunity cost that matters.

Fun fact: Amazon won't hire you unless your interview panel believes that you're a better fit than 50% of the people already in that role at Amazon.

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And Amazon should be thankful that they're terrible at interviewing. Else given just the normal churn of employees they'd have very quickly been unable to keep growing.

Except the better-than-average people move on, and the worse-than-average people stick around. So you have to hire above 50% just to keep quality static, and you don't every raise your bar to the point where it's hard to meet it just by hiring this way.

> the better-than-average people move on, and the worse-than-average people stick around.

Is there any evidence for that? The "better-than-average" have to work somewhere, so why should we assume that they change jobs more often? If you are an above-average workplace why should you not be able to retain above-average people?

Amazon will let go of the bad people pretty quickly in my experience

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