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I've always had the impression that we don't live in a meritocracy but rather a mendacracy, where the biggest liars and cheats rise to the top.

• amelius 4y ago
  Until they get caught.
  • CamperBob2 4y ago
    That doesn't even matter anymore. See George Santos, R-NY.
    • natch 4y ago
      Or for that matter, see: /\w+(?: \w+)+ R-[ACDFGIK-PS-W][ACDEH-LNORSTVXYZ]/
      • natch 4y ago
        This intentionally does not match some states that currently do not have R- representation, but by coincidence of letter combinations lets some others through. Fixing this is left as an exercise to the reader.
• kodah 4y ago
  When I was in charge of hiring I dealt with this every day. A huge swath of software engineers lie about their skills, involvement in projects, and just general accomplishments. These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    how did you find candidates? what were your internal (non-public) criteria ?
    • kodah 4y ago
      From what I remember the recruiters would surf linked in and post on job sites. For context, that was a pretty average product company in the Fintech space.
      • thatguy0900 4y ago
        I can imagine people with strong sense of ethics not really wanting to work in fintech
        • kodah 4y ago
          Just my opinion, but if you work in software you likely have significantly diluted morals and ethics. We work in a highly extractionist industry. For that reason, I doubt that was the issue. After all, Google and Facebook still get lots of job seeker traffic.
          • thatguy0900 4y ago
            And I'm sure all of those Google and Facebook workers are also using heavily inflated resumes
          • farco12 4y ago
            Maybe your opinion, but I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion. Software is a critical part of people's daily lives and the successful functioning of modern society. Some, but certainly not all, software developers actually work on systems designed to improve some aspect of the human experience and not on systems designed to continuously extract money or attention from their users.
            • kodah 4y ago
              Those things aren't mutually exclusive imo. You can be helpful and extractive. A good example is implementing automation that replaces a job and not advocating for retraining for the people impacted or implementing procedures that encourage human oversight. Another is creating targeted tracking systems. Advertisements are generally viewed as a positive for the business world and a net negative for humanity. Working on the more inane parts of these systems doesn't make you less culpable.
  • lapcat 4y ago
    I find it a bit curious that this reply focuses on software engineers, who are not at the top: "When I was in charge of hiring". [EDIT:] Let me put my reply into some further perspective: 1) It's well known that job advertisements blatantly lie about the job description and requirements. The standard advice software engineers give to each other is to apply to jobs even though you don't meet all of the requirements, because the requirements often turn out to be optional, more of a unicorn wish list. 2) Ask yourself, which companies and which jobs specifically do lying software engineers apply to? Do those companies perhaps have a culture rewarding this behavior? And could honest software engineers be averse to applying there, instead seeking places or means of employment that are more amenable to their personal ethics?
    • robocat 4y ago
      I think your reply is insinuating that kodah writes job adverts that egregiously lie, which is not replying in good faith. You could write about common bad industry practices without implying that kodah is participating in those practices. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • lapcat 4y ago
        > You could write about common bad industry practices without implying that kodah is participating in those practices. I literally did that: "It's well known" "The standard advice software engineers give to each other". Is anonymous "kodah" well known? No. Do software engineers give each other standard advice about getting hired by kodah? No. Also, I talked about "companies" plural, not kodah's company singular. The only one who insinuated about kodah, and about me, is you. You ought to read the guidelines yourself with respect to my comment and your own reply. The intended implication of my previous comment was that the behavior of software engineers in our industry is driven largely by how companies are run, by their management practices, how their hiring works, how their promotions work, etc. The engineers themselves are not really in the driver's seat, they're in the passenger's seats, and the incentives for current and potential employees are often perverse.
    • kodah 4y ago
  • georgeecollins 4y ago
    >> These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises. Right, because the person for whom the goal is to get a great job / promotion, will leap through the hoops required. Another type of person might care more about what they are working on, or their professional goals or their values and less about playing the game.
  • devmor 4y ago
    I find that amusing because the people I've worked with who understood their job the least were also the type to constantly shill sites like leetcode. Obsessed with how they stack up compared to others... Perhaps coming from a place of insecurity.
  • nobodyandproud 4y ago
    > When I was in charge of hiring I dealt with this every day. A huge swath of software engineers lie about their skills, involvement in projects, and just general accomplishments. These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises. How did you filter for the lies/bs? Did you drill them to see if they actually knew the topics at hand?
    • kodah 4y ago
      In my interviews I got my portion of the interview over quickly, a basic test of programming skills. After that, let them talk and just start mapping the dots on their resume to what they say. If it sounds too far from what's on their resume then just ask. Interestingly, most people are happy to tell you the truth if you don't make them feel bad while calling it out.
• shanebellone 4y ago
  "mendacracy" Did you make this word up? I can't seem to find it anywhere.
  • hiddencost 4y ago
    It may be a neologism, but it's a fun one. See the etymology of "mendacious".
    • shanebellone 4y ago
      Whoever you are, thank you for teaching me two new words today. I've never seen or heard of neologism or mendacious. Today is shaping up to be a good day. :)
      • brookst 4y ago
        Not the person you’re replying to, but glad you inmutaplexed something new!
    • hodgesrm 4y ago
      Mendacracy does have a funny feel because there's an "a" where my brain wants to see an "o" instead. Most of the Greek prefixes had an "o" e.g., aristos. Can anyone think of a counter-example?
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Most of the Greek prefixes had an "o" e.g., aristos Most Greek prefixes don't have an o. Instead, the o is used to connect the consonant at the end of the prefix to the consonant at the beginning of the root. Where the prefix ends in a vowel, that vowel is used directly. Compare anabasis, catabasis, analyze, paralyze, metamorphosis, polygon, etc etc etc. None of this works here, because "mendax" is not a Greek word. (Which doesn't help "mendacracy" - the epenthetic vowel in Latin is i.) The Greek word for liar is ψεύστης pseustes; you probably want pseustocracy ("rule by liars") or perhaps pseudocracy ("rule by lies", but seems more likely to be interpreted as "false rule"). It's not clear where the rest of the root of "mendax" is supposed to have gone in "mendacracy"; if you really wanted to jam it onto the -crat ending, you should end up with "mendacicrat".
• ceejayoz 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
• lordnacho 4y ago
  When I was young I really believed in meritocracy. I mean I knew there were royals who didn't have to work, but I thought by and large if you put in effort people will see it. Then as I worked for a few years it became apparent this isn't close to being true. I ran into a huge number of people who reached the top by various forms of lying, whether it was little lies like taking credit for others' work or bigger lies like scam websites, or even bigger ones like crime. It's actually interesting how people will just tell you these things if you are even a bit friendly with them.
  • hgomersall 4y ago
    You definitely need to be good at lying, so on some level we have a meritocracy.
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Ironically it would seem to be a very effective form of meritocracy, as liars compete to out-dupe each other.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    so you have been to Palo Alto !
  • marcinzm 4y ago
    I agree but this brings up to me a broader question of what is a meritocracy. It is usually defined around wealth or social class. If someone lacking both cheats their way to the top through their own efforts and talent then to me that counts as a meritocracy.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    I went through a similar shift, and is softened a lot of my more libertarian views when younger. I realized that the circumstances of your birth have such a huge impact on your life that it's really like there's two entirely different games being played. Or another way to look at it is the more fortunate the circumstances of your birth, the more times you can fail before you succeed. I also realized how much institutional quality matters for the structure of society as a whole on a generational scale.
• stuckinhell 4y ago
  It's certainly feels like that more and more.
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• derbOac 4y ago
  It's really Goodhart's law, but operating on the bases of a system. Corruption acts to benefit, not to cost, so it tends to target upward. My sense is the more out of the ordinary you get, the less likely what you're seeing is reflecting normal merit process. That's usually interpreted to mean unusual levels of merit, but I think it also means what you're seeing is not genuine merit. What tends to be lost in these stories is what you're not hearing. For every fake study, there's probably many more things going on with many more people. There was some paper posted the last couple of days about estimating rates of corruption in financial firms. It would be interesting to apply similar methods to academics.