The trade-off between skills is an illusion

"She is a great programmer, but lacks people skills"
"He is very handsome, but not a very good actor"

Do you ever get the impression there's a trade-off between skills? 🤷‍♂️

🕵‍♂️ Here's one possible explanation for this apparent trade-off:

👉 The people we work with are not random people. They have passed a hiring process that tested them on multiple hard and soft skills and selected only people with a high total value of these skills. ⚠ This selection may result in skills being negatively correlated even if they are independent in the population of all job applicants.

☔ Almost everything we see has been filtered.
🛸 Rarely (if ever) do we see a truly random sample of a population.
📢 And when we don't.... unexpected correlations may come to life! 🧟‍♂️