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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

Regarding 6. sometimes companies, especially start-ups hire those people not for their abilities, but to be able to tell investors they hire top uni educated workforce. They are more for PR than actual work. Sometimes it is frustrating, if they get paid the same as people who actually do work.

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Ugh this has become common in Silicon Valley. “We have a brilliant team of engineers who previously worked at FAANGUberAirBnB”…it’s sickening.

So is what the companies say about their board members and their C suite. I guess it could just be a reflection of facts but I fear this will lead to future startups hiring purely on this sort of credentialisms.

There is nothing wrong with using branding as a heuristic. Everyone does it when they prefer buying one brand over another. People do not have enough time or information to make fully informed decisions about each and every thing, including other people.

There is a lot wrong with credentialism. Branding is fine for products. We already have rampant credentialism based on University pedigree and this appears to extend that to careers.

Human labor is a product too, in this context. Credentialing is a consequence of people having to make decisions with limited resources. There is no reality where it will not exist, in some form or another. It existed before Google/Apple/Facebook, and it will exist after as long as it is advantageous to try and filter what you are buying.

I know why credentialism will arise. Just because it “will exist” doesn’t mean that we accept it.

Why not accept it (and try to improve it)? It seems futile given the basic fact that it is impossible to have perfect information about the decisions you make. Therefore the options are to make decisions completely randomly, or use some Bayesian probability to try to make better bets.

The assertion here is that the effect of these signals on the chances of success are not very large and in fact the systemic prejudices they create against otherwise qualified pool of candidates, and the pressure they create for people to obtain these (arguably meaningless) credentials has a worse overall effect on the labor pool.

So these signals wouldn’t really help you make better bets, and they have bad side effects, which is why we need to bin them.

You made me remember how my boss boasted having top talent (meaning 2 out of 50) of Cambridge and UCL graduates in the company.

"All our quants come from Ivy League schools like MIT" is a similar play in finance.

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