Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion.

In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.

Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired.

Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.

Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of business and be out-competed.

What incentive does a school have to reward hard work? The teachers and administrators don't get a bonus if they're school does well. Many don't even get evaluated and firing teachers is very difficult in the US. I knew plenty of teachers that would just phone it in year after year. Everyone knew this, but really couldn't do anything about it. Many do care because its the right thing to do, but it's not built into the system.

> [re schools] If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.

Yeah, I don't know your experience but I was treated unjustly in school. The disciplinarian (yes this was a real thing in my high school) was a tyrant. He would selectively yell at certain kids, humiliate others and apply uneven justice. What could I have done about it? Some parents complained sure but you're pretty much stuck there unless you want to pack your bags and move to a different town. In corporate world you just find another job. It's a lot easier than convincing your parents to move

> Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political

Not all jobs are bullshit jobs. Some jobs actually deliver some kind of value with a feedback loop

Not where I work. They hire people who they think will make them look good, and it's not always by hiring the most productive. They'll deny promotions to their most effective workers out of fear they will leave. They block transfers.

Companies make a show of being meritocratic, but most of their rewards system fall apart under the smallest scrutiny. On average, those who self promote are more likely to get rewarded than those who do the better work. Some companies even formalize this by insisting the managers are not supposed to know who is better, and you have to convince them by writing your semi-annual review yourself.

Lots of managers who want "yes-men" who'll reward those who say "yes" and fail and punish those who correctly say "no".

My company used to pay at the top of the market for certain fields. Leaving the company would mean a pay cut.

Yeah, you would think so. To some extent you are right. But I think corporations are still very inefficient and get away with promoting or hiring less than ideal candidates. Why do they not get out-competed? Because the competition is also flawed in similar ways.

I am a high school English teacher in the US. I have two to four performance reviews every school year (each entailing a pre & post meeting along with an in-class performance evaluation). I have tenure, but the only barrier to firing me between now and next September (barring fireable offenses) is a PIP which is ultimately based on subjective administrative reviews. If my boss doesn’t want me back next year, I won’t be.

Stories about ‘rubber rooms’ in NYC are hardly demonstrative of teaching conditions nationwide.

They don't, but a lot of administrators like showing off scores and stats to their administrator friends from different schools. There definitely is an incentive, even if it's imperfect - optimized for objective stats not subjective learning.

My experience has been that yes, both professors and managers have favourites: they tend to favour those who have positive, unselfish, engaged attitudes. And sure, that is itself selfish: positive, unselfish, engaged people are more pleasant to work with. And I have also found that those who complain the loudest — I include myself in that number, in my lesser moments — are those who are not engaging with the system as it is, rather than the system as they wish it would be.

The real trouble is that in a large enough organisation the system as it is may be so opaque that it really does defy understanding and consequently engagement.

Anyway, rather than assuming bad faith, try assuming good faith. But of course verify it, too!

But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). So some level of meritocracy exists. It is hardly perfect, but it is there.

On the other hand, school-wise I had a very wide range experiences, which kinda taught me that 'people tend to believe what they want to believe', by which I mean that teachers that think you are a good student will let you be a good student.

I am writing this as I am sipping coffee preparing mentally for this year's projects.

From what I've witnessed consulting, this varies greatly by company size. I once heard a Vice President of major bank explain it like this: "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company. At that point, people mostly go to work to play politics. Occasionally, as a side effect of the political maneuvering, work sometimes gets done."

But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference. And yes, if the company is competent, then saving the day will cut through the politics to a remarkable extent.

To some extent, this must also be true at a Fortune 500 company. But there, most of the people will the ability to "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.

From working at a big company, this is accurate.

> But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference.

That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics to do it.

Yeah, politics are kind of built into the human condition. You can't avoid them entirely, and even if you could, I'm not sure it would actually be a good thing. You need to able to convince people, to recognize them and boost them up when they're doing good work, and to get groups onto the same page. And all of this involves "politics" to some extent.

But a company's politics might be relatively healthy, or completely poisonous. Or anything in between. The best organizations are the ones where the overall goal is important, and where ethics are important, and where the politics are mostly positive-to-neutral.

Finally, if you want to save the day, you have to convince someone to take a risk on your plan, and your ability to implement it. After a couple of successes, this can become easier the next time. But there's politics involved in that, too.

But there, most of the people will the ability to "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.

The tech companies are not exceptions. You don't become a "level 11" at Google without playing political hardball. In a big company, the CEOs won't even know who you are, certainly not enough to invest in your career or give you opportunities (such as taking on Netscape in the '90s), unless you're willing to go lawful evil and collect some scalps.

I wanted to reflexively say no, but then I remembered Equifax breach. Now that I think about it, I mostly worked for regional entities, but never really big ones.

In corporate, there's just as much noise, but rather than getting smoothed out over time, it accelerates. In corporate, some guy can turn off your income, even though you're good at your job, because a manager wants to show off that he "can make tough decisions" and impress his own manager--either to get a promotion, or to get into someone's pants. It's random and bad things happen for no good reason, and we're prime to just accept that this is "just business" but we shouldn't have to. We can build better systems, by far, than the ones we've got.

Here is some stellar feedback:

https://google.com/search?q="worst+professor"+https://www.ra...

Literally none of these fine folk have been fired. They have a job for life. For life. I can give you a long list of professors who have been utterly unethical in their dealings, but I could do nothing about it because they have tenure.

Whereas when corporate gets blackballed on their glassdoor, current employees bail, future employees won't bother to apply, word spreads & market justice is swift, stock ticker points down & to the right.

Now tell me who is meritocratic.

Even among teachers, it isn't the case - there is internal politics as in every workplace.

And anything can be asserted. Up is down, black is white, beautiful is ugly. And you'd better go along with it or you're out.

Call it hive-corporatism.

It seems to be a natural social formation.

Have you been near a grad school lately?

I don’t know, I don’t necessarily agree with the message itself, but I certainly agree with the sentiment.

Whoever made this deck is an asshole.

There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about.

Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad.

This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof.

Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless?

Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.

YMMV.

Having to fill in bureaucratic forms and pick your nose on demand with a stick, probably not fun.

Hitchhiking? Long distance sleeper trains? Motorhome? Sounds great to me.

I'd get on a Soviet sleeper train if it just took me from my house back to my house via some rolling countryside with the provodnitsi.

Outlier example, but I mean, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that flying on a private jet wouldn't be fun.

Social media is a huge liability for us on the left, as well as for society at large. Its structure and dynamics serve the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else, but it is associated with its public-facing apparent liberalism, which means that blowback against its failures and heavy-handed actions will diminish our reputation rather than the right's.

Maybe there's an earlier example I can't think of, but I don't think this trend started with Trump. I think this trend really started with Alex Jones. Once it becomes acceptable to ban anybody for ideas, then nobody can be considered safe from the chopping block. That was the freedom of speech test that civilization failed.

> the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else

What property of social media makes it so that people on the right are more skilled at using it?

And how can you tell the difference between "people on the right are more skilled at social media" and "better ideas simply win out"? Which one is true if they both explain reality?

Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon the redundancy) can, in a couple of seconds, search everything a target has ever written and find reasons either to reject him (after he has passed an interview) or reduce his offer on evidence of lower leverage. Social media is a fool's game. In ten years or so, the ultimate flex will be not to partcipate.

Twitter somehow survives in spite of this, because (a) it is an unserious format, a fact that lends some plausible deniability, (b) a fraction of people--arguably perversely, but also arguably nobly--enjoy gambling with their reputations, and (c) there is a defeated, demoralized understanding among the young that, given the destruction of the middle-class labor market, not to play the social media game is just as dangerous (it suggests having something to hide) as to play it. So today's savvy young people might tweet a little bit but mostly lurk, or use alternate accounts to post anything that might get serious.

wait till you find out about hacker news

There may be some survivorship bias here. Even in the 1990s, business-grade programmers (the ones who, quite frankly, aren't inclined to learn difficult subjects) either went into management or did something else, although the timeframe and ageism are more aggressive these days due to the infantilization and humiliation (e.g., Agile Scrum) that engineers face today.

Research-grade programmers were the minority, even then, although this problem is a lot worse today due to the near nonexistence of R&D jobs.

All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.

If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.

PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.

In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.

In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.

And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.

I don't think performance reviews should have a part in firings, and the metrics they use to rank/rate people are generally worthless, but it's actually nice to get feedback from time to time on how you're doing. I've had managers who I never heard from at all and that's not ideal.

If a company is thinking they have to fire someone for performance reasons it's way easier for them to have documentation showing what has been going on and that they'd given the employee time to improve. It's better for the employee too to understand what the expectations are they're not meeting and to have a chance to explain what the causes are. I think most people would prefer that over being told out of the blue that they've been sucking at their job and escorted out the building.

It really depends. I have never felt this way about a performance review. I like being informed about whether my manager and I both agree on what my job is. As an added bonus, the day after a good review is when you are least worried about losing your job and your livelihood. Honestly it seems like your beef is with the lack of social safety nets and not with performance reviews themselves.

The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV.

Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.