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I believe tech companies are meritocratic in the hiring process, at least for the tech positions. Those interviews are regarded as notoriously hard, assuming you even pass the screening.
Because it's only a belief. There is no consequence for being wrong, nor does it require any effort beyond thinking it. So there is only upside for holding socially acceptable beliefs and zero personal downside in the short-term for holding wrong ones, even of society is made worse in the long-run.
Startups, yes, because the first 30 people at a company matter. But places like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are just running annuities now. They can stash thousands of useless employees on vanity projects and still issue dividends for the foreseeable future.
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This isn't even remotely true. In fact I'd wager tech is one of the least meritocratic places out there, if by that you simply mean your talent and results correlate with success in the company.
Most of us don't have good arguments for 'anything' we believe. We don't work out a logical syllogism and reason our way to actions through Socratic dialogue on a daily basis. We simply approach a situation with a set of beliefs about things. I don't even think it's true that most people learn from their experience.
i guess the wrongness of my first statement proves the second
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Why do you think that?
I'm not the one you asked but I'll take 'direct observation' for 500 Alex.
Maybe things were different 20 - 30 years ago, but these days all I see and hear coming out of Silicon Valley is grifters and venture capitalists looking to grab a slice of the Next-Big-Thing™ rather than build a business. What sparks of brilliance and merit that do exist are often isolated and by no means representative of the wider class.
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Because in much of tech, development and maintenance is looked at as a cost center, not a profit center. Now in fairness to you, you did only say "tech," you didn't say something like cyber security more specifically. Nevertheless I've found in my own experience that it generalizes. But because of that, the business incentive structure for a lot of tech focused jobs punishes skilled developers and instead caters to being the first to market, with mediocre products that hit the shelves before they're ready.
If you want some basic insight in how aspects of the tech world view this, I'd suggest watching this insightful 10 minute clip. I'd wager cybercrime is more meritocratic than almost anything else you find in tech.
Why do you think it’s worse than in other industries though? I don’t think anyone was comparing tech to cybercrime when you claimed it was one of the least meritocratic places.
Is it less meritocratic than law firms? Newspapers? Hospitals? Academia?
My personal experience has genuinely been that the best people on people on my team tend to have the highest level (software engineer at Google). I would loathe to assume that my experience generalizes across the company (let alone the whole industry), but the mere fact that tech has interviews that are at least sensible proxies for ability automatically puts it way ahead of the curve compared to most industries.
I think you may have misread my previous comment... The original statement was simply about tech, so that's the context I was replying to.
My point about cybercrime is that if somebody wants to segment and break down tech into it's various sectors, I think you'll be hard pressed find a subsection of it that's more meritocratic than the criminal element. Ransomware gangs don't care one bit about arbitrary qualifications or making you jump through hoops. If the axis of a meritocracy are that people are rewarded in proportion to their value, then that's certainly true. Cyber criminals earn their just desserts. All they care about is your talent, performance and reputation as a black hat. If you can deliver, you go to the front of the line. All other considerations are secondary.
When you deviate away from tech and look at the catalog of other industries, you could argue that in other industries a meritocracy is less the exception and more the rule. I could be wrong, but all I can draw from are my own experiences and observations. Perhaps someone else can offer up a different view.
I think interviews are a lousy barometer for evaluating merit, personally. And that's a rule I apply across the board. I don't think they're entirely useless per se, but I'm guarded about over relying on their utility.
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Hopefully without doxxing myself, I work as a contractor for several of the top-5 tech companies (however that is construed it is true). So I'm privy to a lot of their internal communications, culture, etc. And I can tell you that these people are simply falling all over themselves to worship the dark and the lame. The gay, the fake, the trans. It's pathological and it's clearly a very high priority.
Yes, but this is doing a lot of work. A serious skilled employee (i.e. white or asian male) generates enough productivity to support maybe 10-20 others. But this is being utilized. I go to a lot of sales meetings, etc. with the 'big guys' and it turns out that almost everyone in a position to function in other-than-coding-or-facilities is a woman of color, and they (mostly) have no idea what's going on.
I like to ask people questions. E.g. I was once at the Udvar-Hazy museum, where resides the actual Enola Gay, and was fortunate enough to chance upon a veteran who had flown the same model of plane. I asked him one of my favorite questions, which is, "If you could change anything about it, what would you change?" This is, more broadly, a great question to ask of anyone about his industry. But the guy's response was, "The head." Apparently people at one end of the plane had to crawl through a long, cramped, dark, very cold tube to get to the bathroom. Fair enough and good answer; precisely the sort of insight for which I am fishing.
So anyway, given what I do, people very high-up on the corporate ladder like to meet me and have a conversation. Executives, etc. And I like to ask them, "How did you get into this?" Up until about 2017 it was mostly white men with blue eyes and they had interesting answers. Long life histories, fascinating twists and turns, happened to be in the right place at the right time so as to illustrate broader trends and forces. These guys were enthusiastic about describing their journeys and, frankly, grateful to tell someone who clearly wanted to glean what wisdom he could from their examples.
Now it's all girls with names like Roselia and they have no idea how they got where they are. Not only that, but they perceive that they don't belong, and suffer terribly from impostor syndrome, and hate me for asking. So, after a couple years of bad sales, I stopped asking, started emotionally supporting them, and am doing just fine. Except inside.
True, but worshipping various identities is one thing but working with the incompetent is quite another, and in general they don't want to do the latter, which is why their diversity numbers remain what they would consider abysmal. Google had a rather large group of true believers who really thought (and perhaps still do think) that they could somehow find and/or create far more black and (cis)female software engineers. And they failed, over and over again.
I believe that the best argument for HBD is that years after setting progressive diversity goals for themselves, the most powerful, wealthy, data-rich companies still can't meet them. Perhaps we need some kind of kamikazes willing to crash entire departments by hiring large numbers of random brown people to hit the diversity targets (only), but that wouldn't exactly look good for anti-racism enthusiasts.
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Not only do they believe they can make engineering representative of US demographics, they believe that racism within the company is the reason it isn’t already representative.
Never mind that the company sources talent globally and neither India or China can help to deliver black engineers.
I know some guys from India who are black-passing.
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