Here are all the poor incentive systems in tech companies:
1. Technical sourcers look for keywords in resumes - they are already biased towards prestige such as top schools or past employers. Root Cause: Recruiters are incentivized to meet a hiring number. They don't want to take chances. They just want to meet their quarterly quota. Poor incentive system. No ownership among anyone in management to improve this.
2. Hiring process looks for leetcode ability - biased towards people who have time to practice these problems. These problems are completely unrelated to the actual work. Hiring managers have no incentive to do any better. Heck, managers are not skilled enough to do any better. Poor incentives. No ownership of this among hiring managers.
3. Performance reviews based on poor definition of performance - biased towards whatever garbage management is measuring, often secretly. Management is not skilled enough to understand projects, so they rely on proxies such as lines of code, number of commits. Engineers know these are poor proxies.
Companies try to take biases out of this process by inserting hiring committees - who use these same properties to identify a new hire, or make a promotion decision. All they did was add a layer of bureaucracy by removing the power of hire/promo away from the actual manager.
Ultimately, this industry is so delusional that they forget to ask simple questions such as "Is this person the hire we need? Will they be able to contribute? Do they have the potential to contribute?"
And for performance reviews, asking questions such as, "Are our projects going to yield the right outcomes for the company? Have we staffed people into working towards these outcomes? Are they on track to achieving these outcomes? If they achieve it, can they be promoted for performing well?"
That's all there is. But it requires good "leadership" that I have found to be missing in tech companies.