I am always amazed by this assumption that firms hire "the better candidate", absent DEI initiatives or such.
In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves.
Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill.
It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.
That really depends on the industry. If your idea of tech is web apps and mobile apps, then yeah, most candidates would do the job.
If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.
But the reality is that the vast majority of tech jobs are in the first category. There are far more people building web sites than kernel network stack hackers.
Specifically in software, hiring is still not particularly objective, despite a decade+ of trying now. We still aren’t good at making truly objective interviews - it’s really hard, I’ve been involved in hiring at many companies and it’s just not an exact science.
Ironically, the most objective hiring practices are the most hated(including by me) - lowest-common-denominator leetcode style formulaic questions with defined answers with little interpretation required by the interviewer
In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves.
Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill.
It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.