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Prestige in US Today

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"It seems that while these firms do sell concrete consulting services to their customers, what they are mostly selling is a prestigious aura around that advice."

It's actually the network: CEO A is in trouble, investor B says "you need help, get help or we will get you out". A asks B "who can help", B says "Firm C know how to help you - know the managing partner there and he fixes stuff like this all the time".

This is code for "give C work or you will get sacked."

B will receive information and assistance from C, possibly a job himself in the future.

A will receive 12 - 36 more months of employment as CEO while she/he implements the change program proposed by C. A will get $4m -> $45m of pay for this. The change program will have a random impact, because there is no evidence that any of them are efficacious or applicable in any context - so they are randomly applied and even if they can help sometimes they don't mostly.

But, if you are smart you go along with this and don't argue because you absolutely will be forced out if you do. A, B and C all have more power than you, and they all have incentives in the millions of $ to do this.

"The change program will have a random impact"

The book Rip-Off: The Scandalous Inside Story of the Management Consulting Money Machine by David Craig mentions one firm of management consultants (called The Butchers - he doesn't give names of consultancies for obvious reasons) who apparently only ever make one recommendation: lay off a quarter of your staff. Regardless of what the problems of the client are or even if they have any problems.

This makes the job of the management consultants easier - they know what the answer is, they just need to gather some plausible sounding data to support it (or make it up).

The amazing thing is that this, from the viewpoint of an executive, will actually work for a few years - numbers will look great and the company will survive long enough for the executives to move on based on their track record of being "turn around" experts at their last company.

That's bold, a usual recommendation is 10%.

The book is from 2005 and is based on the authors experiences from a career in consulting so that could be from the 1980s.

Somehow I don't think the details have changed and I've actually witnessed people in a meeting room in a shared office building doing the brown paper trick fairly recently!

brown paper trick?

It's a way of doing process mapping:

https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/dmg/tools-and-techniq...

However, what is neat is how management consultants can use this as a sales weapon - that books describes it how to use it that way.

That makes your decisions look mediocre, you want to look bold.

Confident, decisive and bold.

Edit: I know from experience that in a lot of sales situations a pitch that is delivered confidently, decisively (with no "It depends") and boldly will pretty much always beat a technically better pitch delivered less boldly.

Maybe it's better than tailored advice. These guys probably get hired in cases where downsizing is the desired answer.

The way big, obvious decisions get made gets a lot of scrutiny. They're litigated, literally and otherwise. It's pretty hard to go into major layoffs without a "no choice" mentality. The advice might create an air of certainty, help with labour courts, settle dissent in management, etc. It might play an "explored-all-alternatives" role, etc.

It's the type of thing we never hear a full throated defense of, because these things don't ever work without some level of ambiguity.

The book is fairly even handed in general about management consulting - but it does emphasise that the "Butchers" strategy can often be good for executives but bad for shareholders.

I've read of this other view that the true value of management consulting is hiring an outside group of people to tell you what you want to hear so the executives can justify their decisions to the shareholders / board / whatever.

I guess from this perspective it makes sense that such a firm operates that way. If a company wants to layoff people but is worried about PR or whatever they can hire this firm who they know is going to tell them to layoff people

There's a bias there. You often hire consulting firms to do specific things.

If you're hiring PWC to do a Fit For Growth Transformation, that means you believe you need layoffs. The symptoms of are usually obvious: you're burning money, and you'll run out soon. They can be less obvious: You lose contracts based on cost, because your overhead is hire. You don't hire the PWC/FFG team if you believe you're poised for actual growth or need help hiring to move into new markets.

You can get their book. It says point-blank that FFG generally involves a 25% layoff. This isn't some big secret or inside story. It's just what they do.

The advertised value-add of PWC/FFG isn't to tell you that you need a layoff (you knew that already). The value-add is understanding how to structure that layoff. An ideal outcome of a layoff is that you've cut the corporate fat: people doing useless things with no value add. You've removed a big chunk of the corporate bureaucracy. You have faster, simpler, more agile business processes. When you want to do something, you don't need a 3-month approval from Jim in legal, Alice in finance, and Yoav in branding, since Jim, Alice, and Yoav no longer work there. On the other hand, parts of your business which contribute business value are left untouched.

Does it work? I don't know. But most executives go through this occasionally. As an executive, you're an expert on your own business. PWC/FFG has done layoffs over and over and over again. They've seen what can go right and what can go wrong. You're paying for that experience.

I suspect that if the company is that inefficient and badly run it's not the rank and file that are the problem but the people around the boardroom table.

Or middle management. Most of the fat trimmed could be MM.

That implies that senior managers can't work out who in their own organisation is performing or not. Which rather questions their competence as senior managers?

Or they need to launder their knowledge through an outside party to maintain social cohesion post-purge.

Most of this isn't about high-performing individuals so much as about organizational structures:

1) Organizations build up capabilities over time they don't need. For example, there might be a purchasing department with a complex approval process. Getting rid of that process can cut costs and improve efficiency.

2) There might be opportunities for outsourcing nonessential internal roles into organizations who specialize in those, and can do them at better quality and lower cost.

3) There might be efficiency gains by combining or breaking up units which grew up organically.

... and so on.

Once you come up with a good structure, there's a question about how to transition:

1) Good people tend to leave during layoffs, which is the opposite of what you want. How do you protect critical units?

2) People who leave don't necessarily want to train their replacements.

3) Some people just don't want change.

... and so on. You want to minimize morale hit. A lot of that is in the details of how transitions are handled. In some sense, in a best-case, if you're, for example, outsourcing IT to a company which specializes in IT, your top IT employees will seamlessly transition to that company. Your lower-tier IT employees will have some path out which leaves them minimally disgruntled about being laid off, but no opportunity to do damage on the way out.

Think about it. You're a competent, qualified executive who grew a 10 person company to 10,000 people. It's no longer competitive, and you realize you need 7,500 people to compete.

Would you know how to do that? Or would you like to work with someone who has done it 50 times before, day-in-day-out, and seen things go right and wrong?

That's the selling point. How much value does it add? I've seen it go both ways.

To me most of those things sound like stuff that a competent management team should be able to handle themselves - I've worked for fairly large multinational companies who didn't need management consultants to handle basics like that.

Yes, and no. Management teams have different specialties. You can't be an expert at everything. A big part of doing management well is understanding what to do yourself, what to delegate internally, and what to outsource.

There are plenty of companies which didn't do so well when the management team went from a domain-specific background (e.g. having an electronic engineering run an IC firm) to people with an MBA background.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and many other founders were exceptionally competent managers, but at the time, they had never run a major firm before. Everyone has their first major restructuring at some point.

Believe it or not, a big part of FFG is trimming out middle management. One of the goals is to decrease number of layers. They describe a process by which layers accumulate over time, often unnecessarily.

My (limited) experience is that with most organizations, the fault is neither with the rank-and-file, nor with the boardroom table, but either with the organizational design / incentive structures, or with the corporate culture.

Tech is a bit different, since things move fast. Less organizational cruft has time to accrue, so I'd agree boardroom table is the predominant problem. But most companies don't move that fast.

Why does this comment have such a complaining vibe? It’s B’s money, B can hire whatever combination of A and C they want to get the work done.

It's not B's money, B is managing other peoples money, B is a pension fund.

I think there's actually another side to prestige and wealthy up-bringing. You sort of inherently act differently if you were bought up rich. Its hard to describe exactly but you tend to be more (blindly) self-confident and just behave a bit differently compared if you were brought up in a lower class family. Having worked in banking I've seen this myself (although anecdotal experience always tends to be biased in itself). Some of the more brilliant entry recruits/interns but from low income families just tend to have trouble fitting in and sometimes end up not getting a return offer. It's unfair and kind of sucks but I don't really see a solution for it either.

Successful people are very often full of shit - since perception is hugely important in any human endeavor, the people who have attained success must have mastered bullshitting (incl. faking confidence) along the way. Then, like any other life skill, they pass it onto their children. I see this mechanism in my father and in myself.

You pegged it mate!

I always knew I was full of shit, and often received gentle and not so gentle reminders about it. But I didn't realize how much more full of shit was my father until a few years ago. It's a hard life.

Well you have to be full of the exact right kind of BS, with lightly understated confidence, and mostly certainty about what your social-peers proper place in society is.

true.. it irks me to no end to watch self-confident idiots spout endless bullshit that amount to zero value to the company (which usually means actually getting an objective accomplished). It's not actually 'what' they're saying that seems intriguing to people, but more about 'how' they're saying it, typically bordering on arrogance. To many lower-level employees, perhaps suffering from their own imposter syndrome, generally assume that there must be something to it, even if what they hear is objectively wrong or lacking any material substance. These people seem to have learned that they can act and speak in a particular way, they can attain positions of authority, without having to actually do anything. They're immediately put into command positions with staff to execute their useless (and usually selfish) agenda. This is usually confirmed by those in positions higher than them, who have attained those positions in largely the same way. Management consulting is probably the most egregious case I've seen first-hand. You know, where a bunch of 22-year olds from 'good schools' in nice suits come into your company and dictate 'strategy' at $3-4K US per day. Most of these people didn't have a clue, and readily admitted it. Yet there they were..wasting tons of money. I couldn't understand it until I realized that their very presence there was simply a function of the broad confirmation bias that existed at the highest levels of the company.

This is my experience with more sr members at multiple "faang" as well, there is a lot of cheating especially at more senior "engineering" levels, a lot of these people realistically wouldn't cut it as tech support.

I don't understand how these people sleep at night.

I've heard this put an alternative way: it's not that posh people have unwarranted self-confidence, it's that everyone else has excess self-doubt. We've been broken in by our schooling.

Don't know if there's any truth to that, but it's an interesting way of looking at it.

I think both are true. There is too much confidence among the "posh". Folks like current POTUS are exactly the type of people who get to where they are almost entirely by being confident. Notice that confidence (and being old money rich) is the only fundemental qualification here...

I studied in Europe's Universities and met and befriend a lot of smart people coming from lower classes families.

The number one problem with them is they being "penny wise, dollar fools". They had been trained all their lives in saving money, so they continue doing it even when it does not makes sense.

For example I had one friend that spent a week trying to save $100. I had to take him apart and give him a talk: Listen, your company is paying for you 9000 euros a month, it is beyond stupid what you are doing. He understood that rationally pretty well, but emotionally he has been trained all his life into this behavior, and it was hard changing habits.

You could also see the opposite behavior. "New rich" people wasting money because they don't know what to do with it.

Educated people inherit lots of knowledge from other educated people like their parents or just the books that you have in your house from the smartest people that have existed in the world.

When I was a kid I just read from books that were in my house because it was normal, all my family did it. So it was a shock to know that most people were so naive about so many topics.

Why would you be bothered by him doing whatever with his own finances? It does not sound like he was harming himself much by trying to save those 100?

Opportunity cost.

Here, two cartoons of SMBC on this concept:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-12-29

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-04-20

We don't know what the 100 was for. If it was for a networking opportunity (dinner out, some white shoe party, etc), it was a poor decision. If it was for a bunch of Hermes ties that look no different from a Thomas Pink, than that was a good decision.

> For example I had one friend that spent a week trying to save $100. I had to take him apart and give him a talk: Listen, your company is paying for you 9000 euros a month, it is beyond stupid what you are doing.

I'm making more than 9000 euros a month and can also spend considerable amount of time to avoid spending $100. It's called avoiding lifestyle inflation.

Sure, but you can avoid lifestyle inflation while still knowing your worth. At €9,000 / month (> €50 / hr), 2+ hours spent trying to save €100 just isn't the best use of your time.

That's not really how it works though, it's a monthly salary and you aren't actually paid more if you spend more time doing work. If anything the contrary works: if I've spent an hour taking a dump at work, then I've just been paid 50 euros for taking a shit

I can't get overtime at my work. Which means that, the time beyond the 40 hours per week when I working, is worth $0.

> You sort of inherently act differently if you were bought up rich. Its hard to describe exactly but you tend to be more (blindly) self-confident and just behave a bit differently compared if you were brought up in a lower class family.

What you describe here is the concept of symbolic capital most famously examined by Pierre Bourdieu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_capital

Bees do that to their queens the N-th degree. Humans might be lower, but it's still there

For example, employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations.

I don't think this is true, at least in the tech industry. Based on my time involved in recruiting at Google and Facebook, the elite tech employers are quite happy to hire candidates who have an unusual resume, as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place. For example, someone who worked at a low-status job for four years out of college, then worked at a hot startup for one year. Or someone with no college degree who spent time working in "low-status" tech roles but has one popular GitHub project.

You have to go through the standard "tech interview" grinder, but it's very possible to succeed at that without having a high-status resume. Indeed, the great benefit of having such an onerous interview process is that it provides an opportunity for people with unimpressive resumes to stand out as an impressive candidate.

I’m sure Harvard and Yale say the same thing when accepting applicants to their university. I think the thing to consider is how prestige gives an applicant a considerable amount of more sway in an interview process. Also, I worked with a person that moved on to working at Google after working in our project and that individual was considered to be a very poor programmer unfortunately.

> as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place

This could be characterized as "little patience".

Are Google and Facebook prestigious employers?

Separately, do software developers routinely interact with customers in the same way that entry level consulting firm employees do?

I don't know what the definition of "prestigious" is, but Google and Facebook employees earn more money (gross and per hour) and have a better quality of life (at home and at work) than consulting firm employees.

Is money prestige? A first year Google employee has a higher salary than the Pope. Does he have more prestige?

The purpose of comparing compensation (and compensation per hour, and mortality/morbidity risk, and volatility of future income) between two people is to evaluate their standard and security of living.

Therefore, I don't understand the purpose of comparing the nominal pay of someone that might earn modest cash income, but has untold assets and personnel at their disposal.

Prestige: Holy See, Bishop of Rome, Saint Peter’s Rock, old Emperor of Holy Roman Empire. Contacts of world leaders and decision makers at disposal. Doing pretty good but not as prestigious as the Pope: the tech working class.

Not much of a "working class" in places like Microsoft, Intel or Google where half of your comp is the extremely good WLB.

Come on, it's an open secret that a significant minority at these companies do the minimum amount of work possible to keep their jobs. Usual this minimum amount of work is around the realm of one or two hours.

Salary is a poor proxy for financial power. The Pope has access to centuries of catholic church wealth and all the doors that open for you. Working class people are not in the same league.

Within a given class of people, access to money is a decent proxy but it doesn't scale across groups.

Yes, in the sense that once you've worked there it's seen as proof that you're an "elite". Having a FAANG on your resume opens a lot of doors, in the same way that an Ivy League diploma does.

The biases are encoded by the recruiters at these companies. I worked at one for five years, and the recruiters often refused to look at candidates who didn't come from top schools (whatever the fuck those are).

I also remember trying to hire a really brilliant candidate and when our director heard about her, the only thing he cared about was what school she had gone to. Fortunately for her, she'd gone to Oxford.

A few years later my boss had a big fight with recruiting and hired candidates on the basis of experience and ability. They were some of the most successful candidates we had ever brought in, and would never have been looked at by the standard recruiting loop.

So, ime the same status games play out in tech companies.

> someone who worked at a low-status job for four years out of college, then worked at a hot startup for one year. Or someone with no college degree who spent time working in "low-status" tech roles but has one popular GitHub project.

The parts about "hot" startups and popular GitHub projects do sound a lot like prestige to me. Incidentally I have worked for quite some time at a "hot" startup (in Europe) and I can tell you that its "hotness" was in no way justified by tech fundamentals - it was mostly fueled by great sales and marketing. GitHub popularity is also not necessarily related to fundamentals - remember things like the isEven, isOdd etc. packages?

Well, yes, but the point is that tech recruiters are very willing to look at people who have done 3 low-status things, and 1 high-status thing. The article complains about recruiters who insist that resumes reject any sign of low status.

If your resume has nothing interesting on it at all, then it's going to be hard to get an initial phone screen at a tech company, because there are so many resumes just like it.

> I don't think this is true, at least in the tech industry. Based on my time involved in recruiting at Google and Facebook, the elite tech employers are quite happy to hire candidates who have an unusual resume

Oh sure it is. I didn't graduate, I dropped out during a recession, did some time in the military, came back out and taught myself the necessities to code full time. It took years, but along the way through interviews and cohorts I've learned a lot about academics in tech.

Academics love to talk about their universities When people give talks in tech they often share a bit about themselves. I like to talk about things in tech that interest me, what I do in my spare time, and where I'm from. Academics always spend a significant amount of time, and will even visually timeline, where they went to school, how long it took them, what clubs they were in, etc. These are the same kind of people who put x-Googler, x-Lyft, x-Uber all over their Twitter bio. To this degree the author is right, this information is junk but also comes up when I interview people who think that'll appeal to me. Spoiler alert, it doesn't and talking to me about your school inside or outside of an interview is a total waste of my and others time.

What you call an unusual resume is a great rhetorical note. What's unusual to you? I've only heard that term when I interviewed at Facebook for an SRE position. They want people who can write OS level code and be a systems engineer. They, somehow, identified that academics don't usually perform very well in these jobs and look for "unusual resumes". I'd love to know the etymology of this rhetoric but I'd bet it's some bullshit. There are no unusual resumes in tech, just ones you don't understand, and that says more about you than it does me that you think it's unusual.

"Hot startup" is another red flag. I worked at a lot of startups because tech firms either low balled me or would give me algorithm problems that I was still learning that I'd go on to, again, never use. The "hot startup" is a myth. All startups are hot because the friction of flying through the atmosphere while trying attach rockets to this dismally close to the ground vehicle will always be high. If you don't see your startup as hot, then it's not a start up, it's just a small business. To me, work is work. I want to know about the salt of what you did there.

The fact that we keep referring to tech interviews with this language like "grinder" is a giant red flag. I don't think I need to spend extra energy expounding on this, it sucks. I'd love to see a day where instead of allowing academics to gatekeep we instead put the onus on them to teach within these companies rather than exclude. The people who advocate these high standards are rarely helping others get to them, it's a game of self-interest.

The fact that you can couple "low status" and "no college degree" is the final nail in the coffin of this little thread. I'm not low status for not having a degree or cutting my teeth at more traditional businesses. I did so because people like you spent time developing tests so that all that learning I had to do took place in my off time or OJT at those traditional businesses. You did that, and your "low status" comment explains exactly why.

A couple of my own stories, just from my current job:

- I was trying to help some colleagues solve a statistical problem when I was an SRE. It could more or less be solved by looking at the data in the form of a distribution. When I showed people how this worked on a graph and how we could implement it in code I was repeatedly asked where I got my masters. When I reminded them I'm a dropout they almost didn't believe me. They thought it was a joke. It was a really weird thing for me to see people laugh at.

- I used to work on Kubernetes and I went to a conference that was centric to such. I met up with some colleagues. They all drink, I don't, and they did what drinking dudes do. They got honest. It was mostly harmless stuff, but at some point people were talking about college. I clearly didn't have anything to share. College wasn't really a great time for me plus there's the obvious part that I didn't even finish. I informed them when someone probed me, likely trying to include me in the conversation, and when they found out they responded, "You don't look like a drop out". I laughed, but just examine the audacity of such a statement.

These people aren't bad, but recognizing the misalignment here will absolutely let us turn big corners in tech.

This probably comes off kinda salty, but I'm not. I made it, I work in big tech and I have lots of fun. I spend my time teaching people and trying to empower engineers as they come up the ranks. Some day I imagine big tech won't want me anymore and I'll retire. Hopefully then I can spend my days working in open source or small device work. Maybe it'll just be wood working though ;)

There are no unusual resumes in tech, just ones you don't understand, and that says more about you than it does me that you think it's unusual.

That's silly. There are plenty of unusual resumes. For example, someone whose mobile app got millions of downloads while he was still in high school. Someone who is a chess grandmaster. Someone who has no college degree, but is the top-rated answerer of Stack Overflow questions in a popular category. It's not like there are thousands of resumes out there just like this, and I just haven't seen them due to my biased experience.

> Someone who has no college degree, but is the top-rated answerer of Stack Overflow questions in a popular category

Heh, wow. The way you assume Stack Overflow and college education are related is astounding and again presents a rife representation of the way you perceive the world. This is exactly what's wrong.

> It's not like there are thousands of resumes out there just like this, and I just haven't seen them due to my biased experience.

Sure there are.

Much of the ilegible logic behind institutional machinery is cultural. Whether you characterize it as prestige, pedigry or whatever... it's probably a gross oversimplification of what's going on.

A corporation is a cultural institution as well as an economic institution, and the cultural side is strong when it comes to these kinds of firms.

A lot of the work (or "work") that these consultancies do relates to board/investors and management's cultural machinery. Being "external, for example, is a defining characteristic. Their reports and suggestions allow management to do stuff that they're having cultural difficulties doing.

In any case, I'd posit two points. Point one is that class plays a major role in these firms, from recruitment to the culture of the firm to the value of the services they provide. This is not surprising considering that their job revolves around confidence from elite individuals. Point two is that humans still respond to class. We all know it, but have a hard time with the moral implications. We excuse. We deny. We point and scream. We create grande theories, new terms and types.

Class-based social structures are deeply rooted in the Anglo-Saxon culture. In early modern times (1500-1700), it was a rigid system where each class was defined by a typical occupation and a level of political influence.

Social stratification exists in all cultures, but the notion that class defines your occupation, social circles, cultural manners is a very "Anglophile" thing.

As an irishman, I am deeply offended :)

The British class system is undoubtedly rooted in English history, and I'm sure there are plenty of deeper roots too. That class system was/is obviously deeply impactful here. That's why nationalism, republicanism are so intertwined with anti-classism in our modern politics.

But in some sense, roots are arbitrary . The cultural memes and tendencies it manifests aren't the important part. Cultures, power structures and everything else aren't uniquely english, I'm loathe to admit ;) Occupation, social circles & cultural memes are pretty central to class equivalent parts of modern culture.

FWIW, the early modern period isn't generally considered anglo-saxon, at least politically or linguistically. It does does have an ethnonym connotation in all post anglos saxon periods, including the present.

I've heard that the Anglo-Saxons (British) actually made the current caste system in India. Anyone has more information about this ?

Complete bollocks. The genetic evidence is that most jatis (the ethnic groups that are constitutive of the broader caste groups) have been endogamous for over a 1,000 years. It’s completely normal in India for people from the same village to be as genetically distant from each other as a Sardinian and a Swede.

DNA evidence show "these groups have stayed genetically separate while living side by side for thousands of years"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/health/india-south-asia-c...

I think the biggest tragedy of prestige is that many of us use it to automatically assign certain attributes to a person, e.g. if someone is rich then they must be smart or if they have a university degree then they must be intelligent and someone that attends an Ivy league is going to be thought of as more intelligent than someone who attends any other university. I think prestige has began to overshadow too many other important traits people poses like moral values, personal history and accomplishments. It’s a shame it’s the way we seem to gage people now.

"When you're rich, they think you really know." -- Fiddler on the Roof

People have a hard time understanding randomness, so of course they can't distinguish luck from skill. If you ask the average person to put dots on a page randomly, they'll generally create some kind of pattern in order to cover the page thoroughly. If you show someone a random distribution of dots, they'll be convinced there's a pattern. Faces in clouds.

I used to play poker semi-professionally. I wondered why the same people came, day after day, to give me money. Sure, sometimes they'd win. It's the randomness of it that confused them. They'd see skill where there was luck, and luck where there was skill.

I think the problem is a lack of nuance. I think our conscious reasoning tends towards black-and-white predicate logic, but subconsciously, our feelings really do understand the fuzzier Bayesian probability underlying reality.

Thinking that a university degree is 100% certified, stamped proof that someone is intelligent is naive (or perhaps an overly narrow definition of what 'intelligence' is). But so is denying that, all else being equal, a person with a degree is more likely to be more intelligent than someone without until shown otherwise. I don't know by what odds, or by how much, but you must either believe this, or believe that university has no screening or educating effect whatsoever.

Likewise, there are plenty of rich people that inherited wealth, stole wealth, and so on. But for all the others, you either have to conclude that being richer is, at least weakly, correlated with being smarter, or accept that being smarter has no effect on your earning potential. And since earnings are already correlated with value provided to society, you'd have to then conclude that being smart has no value...

Oh wow, I have never seen this sentiment expressed outside weird rationalist circles. This is exactly how things are in my view, plus or minus some systematic biases whose negatives only become huge in great numbers.

Everyone loves a good story, however not everyone has the patience for them at work. Since management consulting often involves making up and telling stories it makes sense that they would select for that in candidates.

Maybe this goes for law firms and investment banks as well — at least to some degree?

Underrated comment of the week.

Story forming is (a) extremely poignant in elite management, management-investor relations and corporate-cultural settings. (b) Business schools actively teach this, and it is a major part of the curriculum. Case studies by The Harvard Business Review, are basically this.

" ... they want recruits to be attractive, energetic, articulate, socially smooth, and have had elite personal connections, jobs, and extracurriculars ..."

Who would not?

i think they mean "as opposed to their other attributes"

So what's the point of the article? "Prestige=bad"?

> So a crucial question is: to what extent is it possible to move our prestige equilibrium to a different and more useful one? Where say it might be prestigious to actually do something useful for the world. Seems a worthy topic of study.

That's what money is for. You want to do something useful? Somebody will pay you. It's like he's saying "We need a system that allocates prestige to people who do useful things" and we literally have that, it's called a market.

The idea here is that the market values things that are not so useful. Maybe there is some way to make the market value useful things more?

That people eat is a human nature, but what people eat is quite cultural. Just as it is desirable to steer the food culture to healthier diet, it seems desirable to steer the prestige culture to more useful marks of prestige, since just like food, what people find prestigious seems cultural. (e.g. teaching is prestigious in East Asia, and it may be better if other cultures also find teaching prestigious.)

Prestige = low quality signal. That’s why it’s called prestige and not excellence.

In theory, this provides a “moneyball” style opportunity for arbitrage, but in reality you probably won’t be able to profit from it because elitism creates a very robust moat protecting the incumbents.

Low quality signal for what?

What would improve, for whom, if they hired better. What would better quality look like? Management consulting has a hard to define "job" in objective terms.

Merit.

Productivity would improve, for everyone, if they hired better. Better quality would look like more profit (or better triple bottom line metrics if you’re that way inclined).

The job of a management consultancy is to improve an organisation’s performance, and in capitalism the key performance indicator is profit.

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