Yeah, that's something I've noticed. I've worked with a few people who were brilliant and really good at something, but that something wasn't writing software. Even the people who are frustratingly bad at their jobs have rarely made me think they're idiots. They're just not very good at the specific thing they're being paid to do.
The set of people who pass the hiring bar at companies like Google are not modelled as the normal distribution of the average person you come across in the grocery store.
Companies like Google are not known for hiring morons.
It is a self-aggrandizing dumb comparison, and should be dismissed as such. It reads as a desperate attempt to rationalize away these layoffs as something that only applies to others.
The quote from George Carlin, a comedian, is about the general population. The quote itself is from "Doin' It Again / Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" a special in 1990 and predates Google.
I always point that out too. And someone always points out that with distributions average and median are the same. That still doesn't make it right. What's worse is it's a quote about intelligence, so you would think it would use the correct word. Maybe that's the joke, it's summer
dumbed down and smug in the knowledge that everyone that hears it thinks "thank god I'm above average!"
