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It sounds to me like you are mixing the concepts of trust, accountability, tribalism and pathological cronyism. Personal vouching for other people generally is
by fsloth 9y ago
It sounds to me like you are mixing the concepts of trust, accountability, tribalism and pathological cronyism.
Personal vouching for other people generally is the best guarantee for performance in absence of better criteria.
Trust is not a bad thing.
Trust does not alone degrade accountability. But you need to have a second accountability mechanism in place. Trust, but observe is the classical zen guidance into holding accountability within a group.
Then the group dynamics kick in - tribalism and pathological cronyism.
Exclusive clubs are a typical organization principle in the human species and they increase efficiency within the group by increasing trust and improving the quality of communication through larger shared background. Tribalism alone is not a problem to members within the group.
To agents external to the specific group tribalism may manifest in many negative ways, of course, but it is totally context sensitive if it's a problem or not in the general sense. Many elite organizations, for example, exhibit highly tribal behavior.
Then we get to the black sheep of the lot, pathological cronyism. I think we all can agree without further explanations why it's bad, but, the prerequisites for the pathological cronyism are many of the same kind as needed for the positive patterns exhibited in human socities, including trust and tribalism.
The thing that keeps everything from collapsing into a self-satisfied old boys network is accountability.
But using trust - instead of, say, bureaucracy - as one of the key ingredients of a company culture sounds to me totally great.
- olliej 9y agoNo you’re missing the point. It isn’t “trust is bad” it is that trust necessarily excludes people from different backgrounds. If a bunch of your engineers (or whatever) went to Stanford, they people they trust are also much more likely to be from Stanford, because those are the people that they know. The same holds for any university. Then as time goes by the organisation becomes increasingly dominated by Stanford(or whichever) because the follow on hires also recommend people that they know — eg Stanford and the likes. Now you have ensured that if someone cannot - for any reason - get into one of the feeder supplies, typically because going to those colleges requires a huge amount of money, or they’re super prestigious (the fancy UCs say) which have strong correlation to wealth (if you’re poor you can’t support the costs involved in getting a successful application). So now you end up where large groups of people, for reasons outside of their control, and irrespective of talent, cannot get a job at your company. At no point does anyone say “I don’t trust X”, it is simply the requirement that you have to /know/ someone to get a job there. Even if people are not trying to be assholes it is required nepotism. Even if you’re trying not to be biased, your hiring pool has already shrunk to match the backgrounds of your existing engineers. If you want you could probably make a dumbass simulation of this, and I suspect if you start with X colours it will devolve to a small number fairly quickly.
- fsloth 9y agoI don't really understand the argument that employers should recruit absolutely fairly. Humans are always biased. If there was some AI based solution that would deal jobs absolutely fairly it would negate this, but there isn't, so the only alternative to smart human based hiring is dumb bureaucracy based one. The large scale discriminatory criteria of gender, race and age should be accounted for but beyond those constraining who you should vouch for sound extremely constraining. I understand the argument, and I think the effect you suggest is plausible - I'm not just convinced it's such an effect that could or should be accounted for (mainly because I have no idea what process beyond blind bureaucracy could do this).