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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird conflating of tech companies and universities. At the beginning:

Exclusive meritocracy exists at the super-elite universities and at the industries that draw the bulk of their employees from them — Wall Street, Big Law, medicine and tech.

Okay, I can believe that both tech companies and universities have an "exclusive meritocracy" attitude. But later:

In the exclusive meritocracy, prestige is defined by how many people you can reject.

No, that doesn't sound right at all. Nobody cares what percent of applicants Amazon or Google rejects. They get a lot more prestige from their market cap, and from the huge amount of people using their products.

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There's definitely an obsession with exclusivity in tech companies. For one, the various literature around interviewing and job applications (Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? Cracking the Coding Interview, etc.) Also, the particular focus on the FAANG or Big N companies. While Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google are undeniably good places to work at, there's a whole bunch of excellent companies with comparable salaries and benefits, but aren't known for their mystical interviewing. Think about how much cachet phrases like "Ex-Google" or "Ex-Facebook" have.

As a FANG employee, I'd love to move to a smaller company with comparable salary and benefits. Can you please recommend a few in the SV?

Not sure about SV, but there are some very well paid jobs in finance/tech in NYC and London and eg Singapore at smaller companies as well.

(I used to work for Google at some point. The perks are nice, the compensation is generous but not at the top of the market.)

> In the exclusive meritocracy, prestige is defined by how many people you can reject.

This is borderline doublespeak. Is not about how many you reject, Its about finding the best. Obviously you will have to reject the not-best, for that particular task.

The way this is phrased reveals it as an obvious and clumsy attempt at social engineering.

Edit: The best is defined as the optimum person to complete the required task. The "best" is found by measuring his aptitude (tests, etc.).

> This is borderline doublespeak. Is not about how many you reject, Its about finding the best.

University rejection rates are actually used in college rankings. The more you reject, the higher your ranking.

US News just recently removed this as a factor in their most recent rankings, so maybe this measure is on its way out. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/09/12/us-news-...

How is “the best” defined? Who defines who is “the best”?

How do we know that hiring “the best” is a valid concept to begin with if it’s quite arbitrarily defined?

I think there is more behind those two words than you are willing to admit. Appealing to hiring only “the best” appeals to our common sense, appeals to simplicity, a simplicity that simply does not exist at all. There is more to it than it just being “the best”.

And I’m not talking about out there conspiracies and evil intent. I do not think that plays any meaningful role, and it does not have to for “the best” being more complex than you think.

> There is more to it than it just being “the best”.

No, there is no more to it. It's a trivial concept. If you think otherwise, then explain.

How do you know/measure who is the best and what justifications do you have for doing it that way?

You(and probably everyone else) have an intuitive understanding of what being the best means and that’s alright, but it’s important to question our underlying assumptions.

It's more complicated. To find the best, you have to convince them to apply, which means doing things to improve your rankings. So, colleges will try to get more students to apply, even if they have no chance, to try to lower the percentage of applicants they accept.

If it works, this is sort of a "fake it until you make it" strategy.

But as a result, many colleges have lower acceptance rates and students have to apply to more schools to make sure they get in somewhere.

> The best is defined as the optimum person to complete the required task.

What about long-term potential? Someone may solve the current task well, but will they grow in skill in order to take on larger challenges? Someone who can grow in this way may be better to keep on the same project because they will also have historical context while scaling with the project.

> The "best" is found by measuring his aptitude (tests, etc.).

Measurements for "aptitude", especially tests, are easily gamed and don't in any way guarantee actual competency.

> tests, are easily gamed and don't in any way guarantee actual competency.

Dude...

“The best” is crudely and arbitrarily defined.

If this is social engineering I’m fine with it. The real social engineering is the intentional social stratification that has been cemented over the last 50 years among ethnic (redlining, blockbusting), cultural and economic lines.

> Nobody cares what percent of applicants Amazon or Google rejects.

Dunno about Amazon but people have pitched Google as “more selective than Harvard” before. I’m sure people internally love taking about how selective they are too.

No one does this inside. People outside do it more.

>No, that doesn't sound right at all. Nobody cares what percent of applicants Amazon or Google rejects. They get a lot more prestige from their market cap, and from the huge amount of people using their products.

Nobody if you mean end users. Developers certainly do apply prestige to those companies based on how strictly they hire...

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