That is certainly the correct approach but most companies I have worked for, or interviewed with, claimed to only hire the best talent. Then reality hits and one of two things happen:

1. They hire only super talent but do not define what talent is. The result is a compatibility contest to the unspecified technical experience or desired style of the interviewer.

2. They settle just to fill a seat. They look at what’s popular to developers and then hire the 60% segment in the middle of a bell curve. This is problematic because once you get there by definition you are not allowed to be the best without ignoring internal processes/tech and alienating your peers.

MEI only works if there are qualified definitions of those terms and all hiring and rewards are limited against those definitions. Other industries solve for that with a combination of licensing and/or industry based metrics.

I have never seen unbiased MEI in practice either myself or from people I have talked to. It could exist, but if it does it is beyond exceptionally rare.

But those biased aspects are part of merit.

I was once part of a team interviewing a manager. A person slated to be my boss. I was also up for the role, so I had an incentive to not "love" the people I was interviewing.

When we met one candidate, I told the hiring manager to hire the candidate. I withdrew and he got hired. He and I were equally qualified on paper. But he had merit I didn't. I wanted to work with him. Compatibility is part of merit. It's a huge part.

You make some abstract conclusions about merit without defining what that word means to you or how it is applied. That makes your comment really half a comment that is just words void of a logical connection to anything.

Whether compatibility is a part of merit depends upon your highly specific definition of that term. This context of compatibility is especially problematic. Merit typically refers to one or more accomplishments or experiences whose sum accounts for a qualifier, which refers to actions in the past. Perceived compatibility at interview time refers to assumed future social cohesion.

1. This is a demonstration of tense mismatch. It compares past known things to future desires. It is rational to hope for some unrealized conclusion in the future, but it is illogical to use that hope as a basis of comparison.

2. In most cases interviewers know they want compatibility, but they have not defined what specifically constitutes compatibility. So, even if the first point were logical it still doesn't matter because its unclear what comparison is being drawn.

This is precisely why many hiring companies numerically ignore hiring for talent all together and instead focus only upon statistical mean segments above some stated minimum qualifiers. Everybody wants to pretend they hire for talent, because it sounds attractive, but the numbers and practices say the opposite.

If you want, in reality, for social compatibility to actually matter that needs to be defined as specifically as possible. I promise you that whatever series of definitions you or anybody else comes up with will ultimately differ from concepts of merit significantly, because excellence, the goal of merit, and sameness, the goal of compatibility, are diametrically opposed.

Agree. MEI vaguely defined and not objectively measurable, so it serves as a rationalization rather than hiring criteria.

Should have always been like this, through merit. Just like how companies like Coinbase have also done.

Is that how you would build a football team? Hire 11 strikers/forwards, etc. because they all have merit?

Team building takes more than just looking for talent, there needs to be diversity of opinion, experience and culture to build the strongest teams.

A statement based on MEI looks particularly one dimensional to me.

What? If you look at a football team, there are different skills, but diverse opinion and culture? The experience bit is more Noob vs Pro.

If you're hiring a team of dev's you hire front-end, back-end, designers. But you hire those with skill. Proven history of performance. And oddly you also hire away from diverse opinion. Everyone on a team should be on the same side.

It was a metaphor, not a literal comparison. And you do want diverse opinion to avoid groupthink.