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Comment by hikingsimulator | Hacker News Reader

One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.

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An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5?

Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.

Because that's the number conferences that are generally considered to be better than the rest. Just like the "top 4" computer science schools in the US are unambiguously Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. You can ask, why not 5? Because then you start getting into questions about whether you want to include UCLA or UIUC or Caltech and it's significantly more complicated.

And... it's totally arbitrary.

Top people come from non-top schools, and lots of non-top people from from "top" schools. And some top people come from no school at all.

Of course, but there are still four schools which are clearly the "top" ones. The same is true for academic conferences, or big tech, or intelligence agencies.

Top is just marketing. In Big Tech it's market cap or something, but it's not proof of anything and may be just marketing. Google is a search advertising monopoly pretending to be a "tech" company (per Thiel), but is a "top" company to work for. Ok.

And intelligence agencies are government mandated, not marketing made. Or at least I haven't heard any marketing from the NSA saying how selective they are in admissions (as if that means anything).

Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.

So you need some arbitrary filtering to give you breathing room for your objective heuristics?

For some reason that seems slightly non-optimal.

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