> Your mental gymnastics are Olympic level. Yes, when companies are hiring they do in fact choose the best candidate.

You don't hire "the best person in the world" (absolute advantage), you hire the best person who accepts the job offer, or else noone. Anyone with something better to do won't take the job. Senior engineers don't take junior positions.

Though of course it's not always the best person anyway - family businesses hire family or their friend's cousin, and interns aren't expected to be good at "their jobs" but instead to be good over time.

If you're hiring someone specifically because they're good at one task, might as well get a contractor anyway. Nevertheless, US unemployment rate is about as good as it's ever been. So I suspect this fear is left over from the 2008 recession…

> Are you familiar with the fact that things improve with time? And that technology ratchets forward, not backward.

Yes, that's why it's good. Productivity enhancements and automation increases are associated with increased employment, because if you don't have them your entire country loses work to other countries.

So the thing to be concerned about would be losing them.