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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

I can totally see how this can fly under the radar. "Cults" are common in tech, though not of this type.

I've received job offers where entire functions are all people who had worked together at a previous company and not hired through acquisitions. I've had teams where majority of the team is from the same university or class. More than 50% of the team having a common denominator is common and it usually starts with one person getting hired in a high enough position where their hiring decisions are not scrutinized.

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It's hard to hire. I can imagine that "someone in a high enough position" could have a pretty good competitive advantage being able to hire employees of known and consistent competence without having to slog through resumes and interviews. Once there were a few of this group already working, it would also be easier to close hires with the social pressure. I can imagine that higher ups might be inclined to look the other way about how the individual in question was able to hire so effectively, if anyone could even articulate a compelling argument against it.

Here's how you articulate it: the odds that the best people for the job all came from the same class at the same university are slim to none.

“Best person for the job” is either a meaningless phrase or a myth, depending on how you choose to define best.

In reality, there are many comparably adequate people for getting any job done, and no clairvoyance that lets us know who among them will deliver the best outcome.

So we resort to picking among the comparably adequate candidates by either broadening “best” to include non-task factors like culture harmony, diversity of perspective, gut feeling, etc

That a bunch of adequate people all came from the same class at the same university is actually pretty plausible, and (subject to tradeoffs) those people will probably even work pretty well as a group because of that shared experience.

I’m not saying its the ideal strategy to only hire that way, but just that it’s not nearly so straightforward as you suggest.

The odds that you can better assess "best person for the job" from a resume and a few hours of interviews vs. several years of working together are also slim to none.

In most cases, it’s sufficient to avoid the “people who are a bad fit for the job” rather than needing the “best people for the job”. Deep knowledge acquired via years of working/schooling with them is a much better selector than a half-day of interviewing.

The odds that a company truly needs the best ten instead of "anyone in the top 10%" are equally slim-to-none. A cohort of fraternity brothers may give up the theoretical maximum quality in favor of known competency (& weaknesses) here and now.

It comes from risk aversion. Firing people is painful and expensive. And it's hard to know how good someone actually is just from interviewing.

So if I've worked with someone previously and know they're not lazy or incompetent, that's worth a ton -- even if they're not the absolute best person for the job.

Also, I know people in minority groups who are fantastic at their jobs and have had year-plus job searches.

The "labor shortage" is bullshit. So many good people can't find decent jobs even today, and wages are still hilarious low compared to the outright robbery that capital gets away with.

That being said, I don't think it's necessarily because of conscious racism, sexism, or ageism that companies tend to end up redlined. It has a lot more to do with the fact that managerial decisions are made based on motives that have little to do with business at all. Silicon Valley ageism, for example, doesn't exist because middle-aged men think young people are all geniuses. (Trust me, we don't.) Rather, it exists because the subordinate's job is to make the boss feel young again, to be the Jesse to their Walter White. It has nothing to do with the needs of the business, but it also doesn't get in the way of the business, so it's not likely to be changed.

At one previous company we advertised a job and got five CVs total from it. Anyone who's done hiring knows that the quality of five randomly chosen applicants is not going to be high.

I'm 100% sure that the best person for the job wasn't the referral we ended up hiring, but the real best person was too busy sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop meditating on the meaning of pointers and writing all their code in haiku to send us an application.

You don't get to chose from all the people, you get to choose from the ones your hiring funnel brings in. Sometimes the market is tight and you can't find anyone good.

OTOH not every job needs the best person for the job. Good enough will often be fine.

The medium article omits it, but the per the NY Times all the employees were actually hired by a contractor:

> He said ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team, adding that it was fine for him to “encourage people to apply for those roles.” And he said that in recent years, the team has grown to more than 250 people, including part-time employees.

Cliques (which is what you’re referring to) in tech and corporate environment in general are common and not necessarily a bad thing. For example, a lot of early google engineers came from dec (sanjay, jeff) and ucsb where urs was a professor as well as stanford (both founders and first employee). Seems like it worked out well for them. It only becomes toxic if they develop a hive mind and start to actively bash/drive away “outsiders”

In what way are cults common in tech?

Startups. Full of idols :-P

I'm curious about the definition as well. "Cult" generally has a very specific set of behaviors associated with it as a term, where the GP could easily be describing a close-knit, large friend group.

I believe the parent is referring more to referral/promo networks.

For a positive example, I knew one of my senior managers basically brought 15 people from his previous company, to the point where a comfortable majority of people under him were from the company.

This can be nefarious when the network arises from abusive or unhealthy environments.

Is this really a positive thing? It creates in-groups and decreases diversity. Sure, it makes hiring easier but this is exactly how you end up with old boys clubs.

In this case the result was positive, and it netted the company a very productive team. That type of situation is definitely risky though

this happens a lot in consulting. Someone in leadership leaves for another firm and is tasked to start building. Then they call up all their old aces and bring them over fleshing out Sr positions and then the new guys fill in with their aces and so on. It's a small world in some ways.

While that may be bad, it is rediculous to call that a cult.

Yeah it's pretty hyperbolic

"Cliques" I can see. Techies are often delayed adolescents in many ways.

Indian castes.

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