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Comment by pinewurst | Hacker News Reader

Also remember that Shaw’s main metric for “elite” is one’s SAT scores, regardless of one’s age, skills, or experience. It’s sort of amazing that Bezos didn’t continue this at Amazon.

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I still remember having to answer what my SAT scores for my DESCo job in 1997. It was odd, but I have to say that I loved working at DESCo and even our 10th percentile strongest colleagues would likely have been considered strong at most places. It is far and away the place where I had the most uniformly strong colleagues. Our receptionist, office manager, and lead recruiter (for a small satellite office) all had PhDs from very well-regarded universities. It was crazy.

I am happy to hear you enjoyed working there, but personally I consider it a failure of recruiting to hire PhDs for reception and office management. I can see a vague case for the lead recruiter to have one if they're recruiting PhDs, I guess, but even that seems like overkill.

It's a branding strategy. The psychology of Veblen goods is fascinating. See example below.

"Things changed in the 1960s, with McKinsey leading the way. In 1965 and 1966, the firm placed help-wanted ads in The New York Times and Time magazine, with the goal of generating applications that it could then reject, to establish its own eliteness."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins...

If you need ads to attract applicants in the first place then you're the opposite of elite. Your lobby should be stocked 24/7 with hungry applicants without you even having a brand presence. That's elite.

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