4 ms·

People tend to hire people like themselves, who think and talk like they do. So once a few middle managers get in, they start to hire other middle managers. Th

People tend to hire people like themselves, who think and talk like they do. So once a few middle managers get in, they start to hire other middle managers. They act like a secret club. They speak the same language, went to the same schools, have the same friends, hang around each other, know each other better than people not in the club. They tend to hire and promote other that are similar to them, more than simply basing it on merit.

mkramlich 16y ago
There's some truth to what you say but I don't think it's completely for insidious/non-meritocratic reasons. I'm far along enough in my career that I can say that I think what's happening is that it's very very hard to hire somebody through the old "post job, take tons of resumes, filter, interview" method because there's so much crap, and so much noise, and so much risk of getting false positives and false negatives, etc., that eventually you realize it is much much easier and more reliable to hire people you've already worked with at a previous company in the past. You can vouch for them as a known quantity. Ideally, a bigger proportion of hiring would happen like this. But there's always new folks entering the field who won't have somebody to vouch for them, plus, not everybody who you would vouch for is available or interested, so you sometimes to have to go the posting-resume-interview route and cross your fingers. So it's almost the opposite of what you said, though with the same goal! You should want to hire based solely on merit -- but if you have to fill a job opening and your choice comes down to filling it with a total stranger whose resume claims he has 20 years of experience in "J2EE/JBOSS/Jscript" versus filling it with a guy you know firsthand had delivered a major threading-related fix to a previous employer's Java codebase the wiser and more meritocratic choice is probably to go with the second guy. And it's not because he knows a secret handshake. :)
- megablast 16y ago
  I didn't mean to imply it was insidious, just natural. Just as those of your friends who have the same interests as you, you generally see more often than those who do not.
philwelch 16y ago
But wait, can't the hackers do the same thing?

mkramlich 16y ago

There's some truth to what you say but I don't think it's completely for insidious/non-meritocratic reasons. I'm far along enough in my career that I can say that I think what's happening is that it's very very hard to hire somebody through the old "post job, take tons of resumes, filter, interview" method because there's so much crap, and so much noise, and so much risk of getting false positives and false negatives, etc., that eventually you realize it is much much easier and more reliable to hire people you've already worked with at a previous company in the past. You can vouch for them as a known quantity. Ideally, a bigger proportion of hiring would happen like this. But there's always new folks entering the field who won't have somebody to vouch for them, plus, not everybody who you would vouch for is available or interested, so you sometimes to have to go the posting-resume-interview route and cross your fingers. So it's almost the opposite of what you said, though with the same goal! You should want to hire based solely on merit -- but if you have to fill a job opening and your choice comes down to filling it with a total stranger whose resume claims he has 20 years of experience in "J2EE/JBOSS/Jscript" versus filling it with a guy you know firsthand had delivered a major threading-related fix to a previous employer's Java codebase the wiser and more meritocratic choice is probably to go with the second guy. And it's not because he knows a secret handshake. :)

megablast 16y ago
I didn't mean to imply it was insidious, just natural. Just as those of your friends who have the same interests as you, you generally see more often than those who do not.

philwelch 16y ago

But wait, can't the hackers do the same thing?