>If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job.
For the vast, vast majority of jobs, this is simply false. You will get an equivalent job elsewhere. But yes, if you're applying to be Prime Minister, this is definitely the case.
>If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don't get the deal.
This is very often false as well, when you look at the metric of whether you'll get work/income, rather than this specific unit of work. There are some industries where you're competing for a few massive winner-takes-all bids, but there are many where this isn't the case. And oftentimes in the former industries, bids are made by consortia and there will be plenty of sub-contracting.
>If you're 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don't get the medal, the fame or the recognition.
This is definitely true in sports, music and some other fields.
I would say, unless you're a founder and are seeking to have massive disruptive impact in some field, this does not apply to anyone who visits HN. Good and great programmers, engineers, researchers and managers will always be well off and have a reasonable amount of recognition/impact, and the exceptional ones will not take such a disproportionately large chunk of the pie to leave the rest in the dust.
Except when performance is directly measured (like a running race) this doesn’t really apply.
You can get a job over someone with higher skills for a raft of reasons. Connections, personality match with the interviewers, experience, you dressed better, communicated better, etc.
You can of course miss out on a job for similar reasons.
The world can’t perfectly evaluate your skill set, and even if you were somehow evaluated purely on skill I think it would be unrealistic to expect even a 5-10% gap to be detectable for programming/design type skills (and nobody is ever really hiring based purely on skill)
For the vast, vast majority of jobs, this is simply false. You will get an equivalent job elsewhere. But yes, if you're applying to be Prime Minister, this is definitely the case.
>If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don't get the deal.
This is very often false as well, when you look at the metric of whether you'll get work/income, rather than this specific unit of work. There are some industries where you're competing for a few massive winner-takes-all bids, but there are many where this isn't the case. And oftentimes in the former industries, bids are made by consortia and there will be plenty of sub-contracting.
>If you're 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don't get the medal, the fame or the recognition.
This is definitely true in sports, music and some other fields.
I would say, unless you're a founder and are seeking to have massive disruptive impact in some field, this does not apply to anyone who visits HN. Good and great programmers, engineers, researchers and managers will always be well off and have a reasonable amount of recognition/impact, and the exceptional ones will not take such a disproportionately large chunk of the pie to leave the rest in the dust.