| > if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections? Two reasons: 1) There is no such thing as a true meritocracy (we can generalize this to the claim that there is no such thing as absolute efficiency, which is what a true meritocracy would ostensibly be a manifestation of in employment). 2) Human beings have limited attention and productivity bandwidth which typically (though not always) becomes less than the sum of its parts in groups. The second point is what's really important here (and it has a causal relationship with the first observation). If you have 100 candidates applying for a position, you literally do not have time to adequately review each and every candidate in a reasonable amount of time while maintaining productivity in your professional capacity. Theoretically we shouldn't use referrals. But in practice it's a good heuristic because it models a web of trust: if person A trusts person B's abilities, they might also trust person B's ability to judge person C's abilities. Obviously this can't be formalized well enough to be extremely rigorous, which is why it doesn't always work. It's probably not even the most optimal solution! You could develop sophisticated organizational processes to scale up the candidate review process without leveraging trust in other parties as much. But people default to it because it works often enough and because it's intuitively an attractive idea. That combination tends to be viral for human interaction, even if it's technically suboptimal. |