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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

In a financial services firm I worked for, I had to help this intern (maybe 19, 20 years old). She was well dressed, well spoken etc, but didn't seem too keen on doing any actual work.

Later I found out that she was the kid of a VP who also worked there. Must be nice to have well-connected parents

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At least they were just an intern. Look up the Tyson foods CFO. He was just arrested for public intoxication and breaking and entering when he blacked out and wondered into a strangers home and fell asleep in their bed. I saw his mug shot and thought he looked awfully young to be the CFO of a publicly traded, fortune 500 multi-national. He's just 32.

Sure enough, his last name is Tyson. Daddy is chairman of the board. He went to Harvard undergrad and Standford MBA (got in purely on merit, I'm sure). Then it looks like he worked all of 2 years in investment banking somewhere before ascending to the throne of leadership.

It's like they barely even tried to make it look like a meritocracy. Where is the fiduciary responsibility? Seems like an easy shareholder lawsuit.

Stanford, Harvard business schools admit students not based on merit but on pedigree. Just by looking at some one's resume, we can say whether he/she gets admitted to HBS, Stanford GBS. These top b-schools want kids of multi billionaires, kids of famous politicians (both US and abroad), kids who are working at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc. Usually, plebes are told to apply to these business schools, who just want more applicants, so that the admit rate can be 2%.

I am more amazed that the lineage was not made painfully aware to you from the start. I have previously seen a VP's kid receive a white glove "job" experience where multiple busy people were expected to keep him engaged. Hardly the stereotypical "have the intern shovel manure"[0] kind of situation I would prefer of marginally useful temp workers.

[0] by this I mean, any drudgery work that falls by the wayside. Not demeaning, just not necessarily exciting

I work at a FANG and the approach to interns is just the opposite.

Give them something interesting that could make for a great VP demo that you’d want to work on if you had the time to do, but are too busy working on actual deliverables.

Interns also get to meet the exec teams and usually the CEO. It’s a great place to be!

I once worked in a financial firm with an intern who did nothing else besides pick his nose. No joke, that's the only thing he did. He made no attempt to do actual work or help our team and no attempt to hide his nose picking.

His father was a senior executive and so he knew he would get a seat on the equity trading desk no matter what, so he didn't care about us. I hated that guy, and I hated him even more because I knew his career would be way more successful than mine would ever be.

The finance industry (and surely other industries) have this concept of "pedigree" that values some people more than others. It's bad for the organizations because poorly qualified nose-pickers get promoted as they coast by in life, while others who are working hard to improve themselves and add value will either get passed over or used as pawns.

Objectively it would be nice to have someone help you get ahead like that. But I often wonder to myself, if your parents are well connected and get you job, does it ever bother those people that it's not who they are that got them hired but rather who their parents are. I'd love to say I wouldn't take help from my family if they were super influential but I honestly don't know.

If they're not doing the work then I doubt they care about what got them hired. Ultimately each person should be judged on their own merits, I wouldn't hold a relation against someone if they still do their job.

Another question to ask... Is the person where they are because of their parents or in spite of them?

If a less qualified, young candidate walks into a higher position, and happens to have well connected parents. Yeah, I am going to default that they got the position because of their parents.

If the children of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc happen to materialize on an elevated position right out of college, are we to assume that they got their purely out of spite? Maybe they truly are brilliant and deserve the position, but they will always have had a leg up on the competition.

Your company will hire two people out of a candidate pool of 1,000. You're told that Well-connected Walter is one of those 1,000 and is guaranteed a job. Your hiring team is going to go through and interview the remaining 999 and find you the top candidate. After a month of interviewing, you are presented with your two new hires: Well-connected Walter and Meritocracy Mary. What are the chances that these two are actually the best two hires, rather than the best hire and a mediocre hire?

… then there was that Indonesian prince I had in a class I taught who seemed to be a pretty nice guy.

The TV show "Hacks" captures this syndrome quite well.

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