I've been known to write egregiously long comments, emails, articles, but good good is this article overly long. I was really ready to blow it off when I realiz

I've been known to write egregiously long comments, emails, articles, but good good is this article overly long. I was really ready to blow it off when I realized -- the author is putting her money where her mouth is. She's built a very useful platform that helps connect real people with real job opportunities. Okay. In that case, I can forgive the "cardinal sin" of bad writing. Here's the problem with hiring: organizations. Hiring practices reflect organizational ladders and career progressions. Where you see flaws in the latter, of course it will backpropagate into the former. The problem with a "platonic ideal" for how engineering hiring should work is that it requires a "platonic ideal" for how a company should work. And what is that? How do you avoid politics as you scale up a company? Sure, engineering skills are fungibly valuable, that much is evidenced by the market. But engineering career output, and promotional success -- that part is very circumstantial and specific to the company. And I would argue hiring is part of that process -- hiring is getting promoted from candidate to employee. Every company does it differently. And the dynamics are not platonic but tribal. There's no way around that but to find the tribe you want to be a part of and accept it's a little irrational. I remember wishing and hoping when I was younger for a platonic ideal for engineering hiring and engineering organizations that never came. I grew to understand that the warfield of political economy that the business existed inside of (including and especially non-technical and executive personnel) had so much of a major impact on what engineering even means that to conceive of its retraction or engineering in isolation was a little naive and unrealistic. Is it cynical for me to say that? Is it bad for me to say that?