B+

The Top 89th percentile.

Not too shabby – right?

Oh – but how wrong you would be to agree!

It’s not too bad if we’re talking about IQ. The 89th percentile on the curve would be someone who scores a 119 on an IQ test.

If you earn $16,100 per year, you are making more than 88 percent of the people in the world. Hmmmmm . . . that’s not that good. (See tool for where you rank.)

But the absolute worst example of someone above the 88th percentile comes to us from Rentacoder’s rating system.

One of the bids we received to code a projects comes from this profile:

This person tried 1 job once before, didn’t complete it, and got a 1 (horrible) out of 10 rating from feedback.

Think about that.

Now consider that this person is ranked #26,539 out of 236,569 coders at Rent-a-coder.

He did one (and only one) job and got the lowest rating possible for that job. “I know; Let’s put him in the top 88th percentile!”

My question is: what the FUCK do you have to do to score LOWER than the top 88th percentile? 2 unfinished jobs with a rating of 1 (horrible)!?!

What if you just replied to the job postings in Swahili? What does that get you? in the top 60th percentile?

Shit . . . you could probably molest the children of whoever posts a job and still be in the top 50%!

Clearly their Ranking system is fucked.

When you think about it, though, search engines rank pretty much the same way. The top 10 positions in a given SERP will garner 88.7% of all clicks. Positions 11-1000 in the SERPs account for only 11.3% of clicks (breakdown).

Amazingly, that’s exactly where this coder ranked in percentiles: higher than 88.78 percent of his peers.

Coincidence?!?!?

Well yeah. But, you gotta admit, it’s a pretty fucking cool one.