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> If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only to children of the upper-middle class or above.

Once X is widely known as a path to wealth, entry level positions get flooded with applications (e.g. a junior posting at my company could easily receive 1000 resumes) beyond what they are capable of judging on an individual basis. Once companies hit this point, they start looking for heuristics to cut down on the amount of searching they need to do. "Gatekeeping" is these heuristics.

Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Why? Because those schools do a good job of filtering out bad candidates, and offer up enough good ones to fully meet the hiring needs of the company, figuring any generational geniuses they miss will make a name for themselves some other way and can be hired later.

So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

I used to get kinda miffed that super popular restaurants like Border Cafe in Harvard Square do not take reservations, so you basically have to wait an hour or two to get a spot. But from their point of view it makes perfect sense. Why would they go through the trouble if they fill their tables at 100% with a line around the block to boot? That's how I think of the hiring pipelines as well.

p.s. Yes this is out of date somewhat but I promise Border Cafe was a hopping place 20 years ago :-)

Reservations are worse. You have cancellations, and fragmentation if any party leaves early. This can more than make the difference between a restaurant being profitable or not.

Although I’m not sure this can be extended by analogy to only hiring from “top” schools. Beyond, they don’t don’t need to do something so they don’t.

And Casa Mexico 20 years before then :-)

Pu pu hotpot, anyone?

My place!!

You heard it shut down right?

>As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

This is funny to me, because in most debates about the function and efficacy of public schools, I'm assured by the other side that money isn't the issue.

It's not the state money. It's all the private money the parents dump on top. The tutoring, the extracurricular, the sports, the summer camp, etc, etc, etc, all the shit that teaches them the norms of white collar society so they can fit in enough to do ok in college and beyond.

They're partly right. The US has some aggressively stupid educational policy such as teaching reading via 3 cueing (which I won't go into here), but they've also fallen for a bit of accounting trick.

Most obviously, schools being funded via property tax in most states means rich districts tend to receive more money than schools in poorer districts. Less obvious is that because the US doesn't offer many services generally those that are offered are often routed through the schools and attributed to the education budget e.g. many kinds of therapists and aides are part of school budgets in the US but are part budget under various health department budgets in other countries and thus those countries' total spend on students is undercounted.

Similarly, countries that invest in making sure there are enough social services to ensure a good life for even the bottom 20% of society need to spend a lot less fixing the problems that arise from growing up with a bad home life and get more bang for their buck.

>So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes. if they are smarter it is bc of direct filtering by SAT at the admissions stage and indirect genetic confounds, not because elite institutions actually teach useful things better.

> the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes

As someone who taught kids like this I can't agree. I taught hundreds of kids real math, writing, and programming skills that I now use in my professional life as a highly paid software engineer. Some of those kids have reconnected with me as adults to tell me I made a difference in their lives and credit my teaching (which their parents paid thousands for) as a very meaningful part of their success.

The problem is that the UMC status signalling game is heavily correlated with success in the real world.

Especially in law, where the status signalling game is a prerequisite in a very serious sense for doing the job, attracting wealthy clients.

If you hire someone from a working class background you basically need to teach them that on the job. Even in engineering it happens.

status signalling games are correlated with success in the real world almost by definition, but that does not mean they are useful to society or that we should tolerate ever greater shares of resources ploughed into them. it is a zero sum game!

What are the KPI's of the people doing the recruiting strategy for these organizations?

They're incentivized to hire people who will fit in, and perform well. After a certain level of competency, from any school, this is no longer a distinguishing feature. So they double down on the culture fit, and the easiest way to eliminate risk is to hire from a pool of people who have already demonstrated that culture.

I has a very illuminating chat once with a hiring consultant developing the onboarding/induction process and activity package for graduate engineers starting at a global oil&gas company (different industry, but the same level of gatekeeping).

When taking the grads through these activities, she was struck by the fact they all looked and sounded nearly identical(even with obligatory racial diversity). She later found out that the two managers in charge of graduate program were hiring exclusively from the two engineering schools they themselves had attended, and that they were running into a terrible time retaining graduates after the program had finished, as they usually stepped off into more boutique consultancies or went to work on passion projects as money was never the motivator.

The recommendation from her consultancy was to broaden their hiring practices, and that drawing exclusively upper crust engineers who just saw the role as a stepping stone was going to hurt them in the long run, whereas they'd get much better loyalty from middle class graduates.

>Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested.

Yes, and this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I used to work with a recruiting department at a large upper-end law firm. They only took new associates from the top 10 universities. This was 35 years ago. So there's nothing new under the sun.

Gatekeeping effectively boils down to using a heuristic to make a decision (good or bad).

Once a heuristic is known, people who want $thing will optimize for $arbitrary_heuristic. Those with more resources will use them to optimize better. Toss in natural human network effects (eg, giving a friend advice), and those with resources will tend to dominate.

You need active countervailing forces to avoid that natural tendency.

The systemic issue in my experience is the extraordinary flood of poor-to-mediocre candidates you get for entry-level roles...

I personally really hate college-gating admissions and would rather legally forbid that kind of discrimination (as far as, not allowing college to be on a resume). But it's impossible to deny that it helps solve a real filtering problem tech companies face.

It may have at one point, but Goodhart's Law is always looming in the background, waiting to fuck with any filter you care to come up with. In the last few generations, the shift to college being viewed (and subsidized) as an effectively-required vocational training program has diminished the quality of education in degree programs expected to turn out workers while pushing a lot of people through who would not otherwise have been interested in higher education. It's no longer a very effective filter for quality applicants

Could the solution to this be some type of exam/testing process similar to a bar exam that lawyers are obliged to pass before becoming a lawyer?

By this I mean an applicant funded testing (not educating) process operated by a respected institution that can be used as a heuristic for competency.

That was TripleByte's whole idea. They recently pivoted though :(

scale. big companies set up basically mechanical processes that remove or reduce variance from human decision making, not just in recruiting but also their software dev, marketing, factory assembly lines, this is how scale works. a side effect of increased process is you can no longer achieve outlier results but the average result is predictable. and predictable results (predictable revenue) is precisely what big companies want.

I think this is actually a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company, including customers who have to integrate the heavy level of process into their usage, employees who have to deal with all the process but don't personally reap much of its benefits, competitors who are edged out by economies of scale more significantly than other competitive edges, and reactionary regulation to harms caused by all this that tend to create both more entry barriers for competitors and more process. Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone who isn't already wealthy enough to angel-invest (And probably those who are too, ultimately, although this does not bear out in the short term)

economies of scale are why we are rich, imagine if you had to grow your own vegetables

Most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard. As for "why we are rich", who is the "we" in that sentence? You? Me? Some aggregate across millions - maybe even billions - of people that's meaningless to most of them?

Dumb anecdote not replicated in the real world.

It's entirely possible that many people satisfy the claim "most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard".

But we can safely read advael's claim as stating "I don't eat very many vegetables", not "I produce enough food to feed myself".

I'm lucky to have a decently large yard in a decently arable part of the world. The garden in my home produces enough fresh vegetables for my (moderate) needs, but it certainly doesn't produce all the food I eat.

You're right, since you grow your own vegetables the entire global economy doesn't make any sense and is stupid.

You chose the example, not me. Also, my contention isn't that the global economy doesn't make sense, of course it makes sense, otherwise it wouldn't be there. What I'm saying is that prioritizing economies of scale is good for the bottom line of companies that do it and generally bad for everyone else on long timescales

I didn't choose any example.

If you just want to tax success highly enough that the end result is the same as failure why not be explicit about it?

I’m sorry, did the parent edit their comment? I don’t see how you get “taxing success” out of this.

They want to punish people and companies for getting good at their jobs to such an extent that there are no rewards for doing something well. The argument is fully analogous to economic growth being bad and by reversal poverty being good.

> a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company

> Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone

That's not a fair reading. You're conflating success with scale, something the parent post explains has a fractal of unwanted externalities.

The only way we have ever discovered of widely making more of anything is scaling processes and organisations that work. If you punish scale you punish success. This is true for manufacturing, agriculture and education and those feed into everything.

Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actually happens is what always happens in such arrangements: When the entity gets powerful enough to ignore or alter the deal, they will, inevitably, whether that deal is taxes, checks and balances, or being subject to any sort of market forces, like there being competition in your market or consumers caring about (and being able to make choices about) the quality of good or service you are selling them. Risk-aversion means that such entities will try to insulate themselves from threats to their power by whatever means they have available, and we have seen time and time again that this includes subverting all the high-minded idealism of both democracy and free market economics.

Taxing "success" doesn't make it failure even with top bracket paying 90% of it back. The hyperbole and melodrama of economic winners complaining about taxes tends to make me unsympathetic. Meanwhile for the median earner, oftentimes admirable work is effectively taxed into stagnation or failure, not by the government per se, but by the upwards money funnels controlled by rent seekers further up the hierarchy, the negative lottery of savings-draining misfortunes, useless mandatory insurance, taxes they actually pay because they don't have access to as many accounting tricks, employers that collude to pay them less than they're worth, and so on.

I don’t see an “upper-middle class” filter in this particular case though. The company college hiring pipelines are often not limited to Ivy League or “top 10” universities. For example my company was looking fOr summer interns, and any college would work. We’ve had an intern on our team from college which was ranked around #80... gave him full time offer btw.

I recommend a book that discusses this topic in detail: Pedigree.

Basically discusses the mechanisms of how connections and wealth affect hiring.

You've found a feature, not a bug. In my view, wealth and power concentration is the point of nations and empires, not the side effect. Keeping all that power within a few like minded hands is how the upper classes keep their heads attached to their shoulders. From there it's turtles all the way down.

> What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping?

UMC wants these jobs reserved for its children.

Btw, what's wrong with that? If the job itself doesn't require any particular skill or competence but is very rewarding, why should they not reserve it for themselves?

There still exists jobs that can't be filled through these networks and they are open to anyone.