I'm under the impression that CTFs are where the top security talent is harboured and discovered, though I have no data about it.
There's a lot of clever people that really do not care for competitive recreation. You can be a serious scholar without also being an enthusiastic puzzlemaster
So CTF is just another form of cohort filtering masquerading as competence selection; a modern version of going for beers and golfing with a candidate and then wondering why you have a bunch of beer drinking golfers working for you
And that's why it's not there.
Just about any filter, even the most arbitrary one will work some of the time.
To go back to the previous analogy, plenty of competent people like beer and golfing and plenty don't. It's about trying to recognize what's culturally myopic and extricating those signals.
The parent comment said: "The best engineers and people I know with PhDs in computer security who can't reveal their employer really don't give a toss about games."
As a person who is a member of the very group you are speaking about, I find this statement to be completely non-factual.
Do CTFs identify the very best security minds? No. They are fun hobbies. But you didn't say that CTFs aren't useful for finding the very best hires. Instead you said that the very best hires do not enjoy CTFs at all. This is just straight up wrong. Both in academic and industrial circles.
Saying I personally know smart people who don't play games doesn't mean I'm claiming all people who play games are stupid.
This is extremely basic logic stuff here. Do you need me to draw you some pictures? I can do that
This is a set intersection. There's something called Venn diagrams that can help you here.
Any recruitment of a feature by a proxy can do at best the intersection of the proxy and the feature set.
That's the small overlapping slice of the diagram.
You can argue how big that intersection is but recruitment by feature, directly, is a better strategy unless the feature matches the proxy in which case it's equivalent.
So just go direct and skip the proxy.
There's a tendency to hire by games of arguable relevance these days as opposed to direct observations of work. The optimizing towards the game is fundamentally dysfunctional for team building and eventually product development.
It's not coincidental that valley tech has become more manipulation, extraction and distraction services than substantive products as a lagging indicator of this trend. (Of course there's macroeconomic forces as well. I mean, obviously, no shit)
I really can't put any more time into this