// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly
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Published: 2026-03-20
Updated: 2026-03-22
By: Aditya Athalye
Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software industry interview table. The ZIRP had ended. As of 2026, post-ZIRP reality has properly set in and remains bad ("AI" is a Fig Leaf (Enterprise Edition) for structural damage they self-inflicted, and if you look at Hyperscaler GPU depreciation schedules, they are making it order-of-magnitude worse). Set to that backdrop, here is a hopefully hopeful hiring anecdote where I think we avoided the so-called "Secretary Problem", framed within Optimal Stopping Theory. It can be done. Non-zero-sum hiring ought to be default-mode for any industry, AI or no AI.
… since—gulp, where did time go?—about 2015. This current version befalling your XML/RSS feed is 2024 vintage, and has also befallen others via acts of copy-pasta into gist/slack/zulip/discord. Since nobody has boo'd it yet, and I'm not sorry (yet), it hereby gingerly enjoins the public discourse.
Memory fades fast. So, take what is useful, discard the rest.
"How many applicants do you need before you find the right one? One? Five? The entire community, every time? :laughcry:"
The asker isn't joking. Any proposal to use unfamiliar technology, especially programming languages like Clojure inevitably triggers managerial hand-wringing about the hiring pool.
And what could cause more Managerial Hand Wringing than than trying to hire in a niche of a niche… You see if you can go back to 2014 and find QA people, in Pune/India, willing to learn to read and write Clojure code, to help backend engineers test a rather large SaaS, written in Clojure?
I got to know of the so-called "Secretary Problem" 1 in the ensuing discussion. The problem statement is used to study Optimal Stopping Theory. It sets up a recruiting scenario, and explores how to maximize the odds of selecting the best applicant. It has been a fun rabbit hole to explore.
A key constraint of the secretary problem is Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled.
Once upon a time, my colleague, Mayank, and I violated this unknown-to-us constraint, in our otherwise-conventional tech hiring loop by: