In the U.S. Nepotism Is Key to Economic Success
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
When I'm hiring, I often want to hire someone I *know* to be qualified. The most rational process is:
- If I know you, and you're qualified, I'll hire you (over potentially more qualified candidates, where I don't have the same quality of information)
- If I don't know, but a friend whom I trust does, again, I'll hire you (over potentially more qualified candidates, where I don't have the same quality of information)
- If no one in my network is qualified, I go with resume+interview. This process gives very poor-quality information.
What friends (and references) avoids are genuinely bad hires. In most cases, I'll take a candidate I *know* to be good over one who is *probably* better, but where there's a chance of a bad hire.
This re-entrenches social and power structures, but it is also rational and not corrupt.
I have hired people as well, any capable engineer is able to prove its worth in a couple technical interviews at most. And no, I'm not talking about "inverting the tree" and similar bs, give them a real-life problem that your business usually encounters, let them do their thing, observe, ask questions.
I worked for a company that was building wireless infrastructure for a big region, the engineers we hired like this were great and stayed for years, some of them had no real education or a chaperone, still, they performed and that's all we cared about.
Your method seems just lazy, honestly.
There is so much more to being a good employee than just the ability to demonstrate technical aptitude. How do they handle a crisis, how well do they cooperate with other employees, how's their work ethic, how diplomatic is their communication? The aspect of the engineers you hired which you chose to highlight was that they stayed for years - how did them solving a technical problem give you insight into their long term personal life plans?
I've seen countless brilliant engineers who I would never in a million years hire. I'd much rather teach a good employee how to be a good engineer than teach a good engineer how to be a good employee.
He basically went off and did his own thing, mostly unrelated to what the rest of the organization wanted or needed. He disregarded corporate policy, including in ways which might have exposed us to liability. For example, we deal with highly-sensitive, regulated personal information. He copied files onto his own laptop, where he also downloaded and ran warez he found on sketchy web sites. That was the tip of a very deep iceberg.
I think I spent more than half of my management time on issues related to him.
He left for a different team within the org, and later, left the organization. He's now at a FAANG, analysing sensitive personal information.
I'm not surprised he passed their interview process. There might even be a good spot for him there, but NOT dealing with sensitive, personal information.
It's similar to hiring CEOs with big pay packages. You hire the guy who was at the helm of a company that double its revenue. You know the CEO may or may not have actually be responsible for the growth, but hey, if that's the only data you have, you go with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEe_QTNPffU&t=13s
Note: The article may be a flawed interpretation of the paper cited - possible clickbait
It absolutely is detrimental and unethical when scaled.
Solving this problem doesn't consist of yelling at management to do something different (if they do, they'll be less competitive, and a less ethical competitor will win).
It does consist of re-aligning incentives, whether through regulation or otherwise, so there is a level, ethical playing field for everyone.
Socioeconomic mobility in the US is a joke. It lags behind nations like Portugal, Estonia, Czech Republic, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia but that reality doesn't stop folks from insisting that people just need to work hard to get ahead. That is a very nice idea and in an ideal world people who work hard enough tugging on their bootstraps would find success more often than not, but that's sure not the world we live in.
But today, home ownership is out of reach for a lot of younger people. And a lot of older people are finding that retirement isn't an option. Ditching the kids can help a bit--a lot of people wait longer to start families or don't start them at all.
So, when we say "sure, you may not be able to be rich yourself", what is it exactly that we mean we can't have?
And the story of a shoe shine boy working his way up to head of a brokerage doesn't exist anymore since university degrees act as gate keepers.
I guess IT, if someone had the free time (requires positive cash flow), they could program their way to glory. But even then, I am not sure how they would compete against Softbank style VC-funded startups with 0% cost of capital.
The major barrier used to be that poor kids didn't have access to computers, but we've got that problem solved now and all but the poorest children can afford a PC and start learning. I wouldn't recommend it, but you can lean python entirely on a cell phone! It's not as easy as it used to be to turn tech skills into cash though. Back then companies weren't so picky about degrees if you had skills and there wasn't nearly as much competition since a lot of folks didn't have much experience with computers and weren't interested in learning about them. I'd still recommend IT for people looking to get their foot in the door, but the days where you could make crazy amounts of money knowing just HTML and a bit of JS are long gone. IT doesn't pay great these days and even programmers aren't earning as much as they used to.
Facebook started out in colleges - maybe college education provided to the poor via scholarships made them mingle with the rich, that is why you see the association? To see this and conclude nepotism as the cause is a bit stretched...
You don't need to be hired by wealthy friends to benefit from knowing them. Knowing how high paying jobs work and how to get them isn't universal knowledge. Knowing how to save and invest isn't universal. There are lots of mechanisms to explain the observation without resorting to nepotism.
Everyone has know for forever that it is not what you know, it's who you know. This has probably been done this way for forever. Back in the ancient Roman times, back in Sumeria I'm sure.
This article is pretty worthless. It states the obvious. Except they are wrong about the definition of nepotism which is bothering me to no end.
I have held many positions where people around me and under me had WAY more skill, and I mean WAY more skills in the technical thing that they were doing.
However, people who talk about meritocracy usually are sour apple-ing about other people who "brown nose" and "play office politics." It's really in that genre that this is what things that piss people off are about. The thing is, is that it takes a long time, at least for me, to understand how office politics work. I had to work long and hard at it, it did not come natural for me. There are a lot of techniques that I learned. I had to change my thought patterns.
But, here's the thing, I was pretty good at getting things done by being a "brown noser" and "playing office politics." Because part of office politics, for me, is not just politicing upwards, but sideways and downwards, too. But I 100% admitted it to everyone, that they were all better than me...that's why they were hired. My job was just to coordinate everything and get them the resources they need, and their job was to make me look good, and my job was to make them look good politically. No one really minded that I was not the sharpest tool in the shed, because I didn't say I was. But I DID say that I was very good at other things that they were not good at.
But yes, pick your business associates and mentors VERY carefully. Don't just walk into a job and make friends with the first people that happen to talk to you. No. Anyways, you never want to make "friends" with anyone at work. You should have no friends at a workplace. You have associates, but you are polite and respectful towards all. Make friends outside of work. This approach has never failed me. I shoot up organizations because I figure out who the powerful people are and slowly work into developing relationships with them, even if they are many levels above me...I figure out the line of approach. Who are their close associates? And those associate's associates. Work your way into the power structure. Yeah, you have to be sharp and have skills, but the CEO of GM is not screwing on hubcaps every day - the technical skills are not needed at that level. Usually.
For example my high income friends talk about salary, so I know what similarly qualified people can make, and I know when to keep pushing in salary negotiations.
High income friends are examples of real achievable career paths. You can see what they did, then have a high probability of replicating their success.
High income friends are also good sources of knowledgeable feedback on what you're doing wrong. For example a friend of mine was struggling to get a job after university so I looked at his CV and it didn't mention his university, or grade. I made him put it on the front of the CV. The first company that saw the new CV gave him an interview.
Finally people make friends with people like themselves. If you care about money then you'll make friends with people who also care about money. The correlation between having high income friends and earning a lot of money could easily be a confounding variable.
That said I really doubt that this a US specific problem - I suspect that the US specific headline is more a byproduct of where they were sampling than (and thus had data to support) than anything else. Of course that’s all anecdotal (if we had the data to support my opinion we could put it in the headline :) )
E.g. when hiring or choosing who to admit to an academic program, drop reference letters: they’re largely proof of whether you know wealthy people or not.
Or blind the application process: don’t let screeners see the names of applicants because that can reveal a lot of info.
When an orchestra’s auditions didn’t let décision makers see the applicants, it’s gender ratio changed a lot:
https://www.google.com/search?q=toronto+orchestra+hiring+bli...