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Comment by Declanomous | Hacker News Reader

As much crap as people give the civil servants in the US, I feel like our government does a pretty reasonable job at finding competent employees. I'm from Chicago, so I definitely know how false that statement can be, but most other places in the world seem a lot more about who your parents were and who you know.

I mean, the social stratification of the public/private school thing is somewhat baffling to me, as someone who attended school in one of the best community-run school districts in the US.

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In Britain we have state schools, private schools and most expensive of all the old 'public schools', with a name almost designed to confuse. Most of them are ancient, and look a bit like Hogwarts. The real power of the schools is the 'old boys network'. When you need help getting into university, or beginning a career, there will be an old boy of your school you can write to for help. It seems daft in 2017, but ex public school boys still seem to dominate public life. What still surprises me is the willingness of brits to 'doff their caps' at them like they are still Lord of the manor. I see it daily where there is still a feeling that they are somehow better, because they had an expensive education.

This is one of the huge things that holds Britain back. So many 'businessmen' in the UK were in fact set up in business by their father, or family. They then run their business with a sense of entitlement, and not a hint of maybe sharing equity with founders. Private Equity is dominated in the same way. If you want to meet a VC in Britain, you would do much better if you had the right old school tie. Access to capital for ordinary people with a good idea seems impossible, unless it is via some kind of research funding. It is the same thing that makes UK business so male dominated.

It will carry on too, until Brits stop believing in the Downton Abbey model of British identity. I thought the article was really good too. Thanks for sharing

While there's a lot wrong with that, replacing it with the hysterical corporate politics of the U.S. wouldn't make for much of an improvement imo

Anecdote != data, mate. Counter examples: I went to Abingdon School which is in the town called Abingdon (Oxfordshire). Before that I went to a school called Wolborough Hill School which was perched on top of Wolborough Hill, in Newton Abbot, Devon. Both are (were in the case of Wolborough which passed away some time ago) fee-paying schools.

My dad was a soldier (as was my mum but she was told to leave on marrying dad - things were different back then). Me and my brother went through five schools/kindergartens by the age of 10 (three in West Germany, one in Manc (MCR)). By that age we were pretty good at looking under cars for devices because dad was an ATO and taught us - a handy skill for a family going to a restaurant or whatever: you never knew when you car was going to explode.

Dad didn't hand over the family business to me and my brother because the RAOC (Rag And Oil Company) is now part of another org these days - RLC (Really Large Corps) and besides I'm a nerd and a sysadmin and my brother is loosely HR. We are both grateful for the start in life that both he and mum and a contribution that the army gave us in life - whether it made us better or worse people is debatable. We had less schools is definite.

OK, my job title is MD these days but you doff your hat and I'll kick you in the nuts (and take you out for a beer until the swelling subsides.)

Cheers

Jon

PS You failed to initial capitalise "Brit" - I am better than you 8)

Triggered, much?

I've never met a public school boy that didn't have an "excuse" along these lines, and a mockney accent to "mate" and "cheers" me with. I always find this response baffling.

About 6% go though private schools in the U.K.

You serve a role. All the MDs I worked under in London were also public school boys. No-one who didn't go will find your exceptionalism interesting. We will all listen to your story and "mate" you back while cringing inside. Just accept your privilege, and own it (it's worth quite a lot).

Nameless resumes are a good way to counter the inefficiencies of a system not based on merit.

You either have to strip the potential for character to influence resumes or accept that bias and nepotism will exist.

How does a nameless resume help if you haven't removed schools, class, year of graduation, grades and all the other signifiers correlated with free-time and networks.

And that's smoothing over the little problems of the jobs not being open for competition in the first place, not being item for competition once they've been appointed, and that no one has yet to come up with an agreed upon definition for what meritocracy even is...

Yeah we really have a problem in recognising this centuries-long case of Stockholm Syndrome we suffer from.

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