Also as someone who worked for the big tech SV companies, there is nothing meritocratic there anymore. On average, out of 20 engineers, 2 meaningfully contribute to the company, 10 produce nothing for years and don't get fired, and eight are good at politics but not in coding and therefore get promoted.
There is a reason why Musk fired more than 50% of Twitter engineers and the product was unharmed.
In addition, majority of the executives in SV are extremely narrow minded and prefer quick money that comes from green scams to serious R&D investments.
This opens the door to entirely different critiques of supposed meritocracy^ but *not* from a DEI direction. Some ongoing, non-race-centric cognitive bias that says employee head count is a badge of honor for a company or something. I dunno, just made that one up, but it's plausible.
^it's sometimes hard to tell if people are against so-called meritocracy or actual meritocracy
I thought the number was close to 80%. Since then, he may have hired some back and hired more contractors than employees.
How many people are needed to maintain a website with a few enhancements? The number cannot be close to 8,000.
I have not worked at any SV company, but I have interacted with several—very few meet the hype.
Once a company loses its start-up mindset, it becomes no different from any non-SV or non-tech organization. Managers start collecting people, as the more people you have, the more power you have in the organization and, in most cases, better projects and promotions.
Also, in most cases, bureaucracy takes over as the organization grows. Everything takes a long time to happen as it has to go through more layers before implementation.
Just as Morgan Housel observed that history repeats itself in financial contexts due to the consistency of human nature, the same principle applies to organizations across all sectors and geographical locations. The fundamental aspects of human behavior—ambition, creativity, and the tendency towards political maneuvering—remain constant. Consequently, as organizations grow, they often face similar challenges and patterns, regardless of their industry or origin. This universality of human nature ensures that the cycle of innovation, bureaucratization, and potential stagnation is a common thread in the evolution of most enterprises.
Great post and I will share this with friends who want to know about the tech right. I think you got the nail on the head.
I gotta push back on Trump's "promise" on the all in podcast, which was indeed something he said, but not worth the bits it's encoded in:
> But hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks aired, his campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked back the former president’s comments, saying in a statement that...the policy would apply only to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.”
While they both fit the meritocracy scheme, there's a huge difference between giving green cards out to all grads and "only the most skilled grads", which could mean anything from selecting a large % of the top students from all institutions to limiting the policy to CS PhD grads from the top five departments.
I don't think it's quite that simple. To some extent lack of moral guilt is a luxury that people are willing to purchase and the fact that the Valley is quite wealthy (especially if they ever finally fix the fucking housing) also inclines them to make that purchase with their votes.
Sure, maybe they shouldn't feel guilty. However, I remember when I was working in Silicon Valley how many people felt very strongly about not working on face recognition or military tech -- even though (as I pointed out at the time) if they didn't and pressed their companies not to do it then it meant that it would just be developed by people who weren't as concerned about minimizing abuses as they were. And indeed, that's exactly what we saw with Clearview.
And if things had been tough or there was a military crisis I'm sure these individuals would have accepted that kind of work. Indeed, for the most part they weren't even arguing that no one should do these things. But not having to think about their possible role in some abuse or risk feeling bad is a luxury and they were doing well enough they wanted to purchase it.
And a huge amount of DEI is really just people purchasing a lack of guilt. It's throwing a bit of cash -- in the form of inefficiency -- at the problem so they don't have to feel guilty.
Yes there is the pull of meritocracy but I also feel there is the attraction of throwing some of your money at the rest of the population so you can feel less guilty about it and I'm not sure it will cleanly break one way or another.
This idea that people are purchasing a lack of guilt just expresses to others than one is thinking in some selfish economic way, seeking absolution as a free pass to get richer.
People aren't actually being as calculating as those who study economics claim they are. It's a fundamental clash in world views, such that even the person who wants to NOT let rich, allegedly secretly guilty people off the hook look *themselves* like some conniving Scrooge McDuck who sees everything as a ledger.
Saying they are purchasing lack of guilt isn't meant to describe what it feels like to be them but in practice what happens.
Few people are moral philosophers and most of us are caring people so it's upsetting when our actions seem to involve us in some horrible practice. For instance it's upsetting to think about the fact that people in a sweatshop were treated badly to produce your clothing.
The problem is that often - whether or not this particular case - in our complex world the thing that disassociates you from the bad activity (choosing to buy clothes from a slightly more expensive first world factory) actually make things worse off for the people you are concerned about or don't really help. That's true both if what you do is disassociate yourself or what you do is respond by saying "ohh I feel bad those people have been treated badly I'll support some special benefit from them."
But, at an emotional level, the world is vast and we can't stay sane and torture ourselves about what we can do about every problem so we have a kinda default that when you feel like you aren't touching the issue or are supporting the things that have the facial form of showing concern/help for people you feel bad about.
So it's all well intentioned but you combine that attitude with low probability of impact voting and the ability to pay a little more and get something that doesn't make pay attention to the sad situation of less fortunate others and -- because we are busy, figure someone else thought of it and just tend to avoid doing unpleasant thing -- the overall impact is that rather than actually working out how we can best help people we tend to use money (directly or indirectly via regulation) to put us into a situation where we don't feel guilty about the bad thing.
----
And at an individual level it's not really their fault. In a better society there would be expert institutions who figure out the actually effective interventions you can make to improve the world or feel like you've done the right thing but we are too divided, frustrated and (for some good reasons) distrust those orgs who try to do it. I fear that to achieve that we'd need broader agreement on values.
Unfortunately there is nothing democratic or meritocratic about the current Democrat party. The presidential candidate was selected and not elected. The policies supported by the party resemble policies that both Stalin and Hitler supported and tried to implement.
The party is not going to change in the near future. In fact, it will only get worse.
Also as someone who worked for the big tech SV companies, there is nothing meritocratic there anymore. On average, out of 20 engineers, 2 meaningfully contribute to the company, 10 produce nothing for years and don't get fired, and eight are good at politics but not in coding and therefore get promoted.
There is a reason why Musk fired more than 50% of Twitter engineers and the product was unharmed.
In addition, majority of the executives in SV are extremely narrow minded and prefer quick money that comes from green scams to serious R&D investments.
I definitely agree that the culture in silicon valley incumbents has changed a lot.
This opens the door to entirely different critiques of supposed meritocracy^ but *not* from a DEI direction. Some ongoing, non-race-centric cognitive bias that says employee head count is a badge of honor for a company or something. I dunno, just made that one up, but it's plausible.
^it's sometimes hard to tell if people are against so-called meritocracy or actual meritocracy
I thought the number was close to 80%. Since then, he may have hired some back and hired more contractors than employees.
How many people are needed to maintain a website with a few enhancements? The number cannot be close to 8,000.
I have not worked at any SV company, but I have interacted with several—very few meet the hype.
Once a company loses its start-up mindset, it becomes no different from any non-SV or non-tech organization. Managers start collecting people, as the more people you have, the more power you have in the organization and, in most cases, better projects and promotions.
Also, in most cases, bureaucracy takes over as the organization grows. Everything takes a long time to happen as it has to go through more layers before implementation.
Just as Morgan Housel observed that history repeats itself in financial contexts due to the consistency of human nature, the same principle applies to organizations across all sectors and geographical locations. The fundamental aspects of human behavior—ambition, creativity, and the tendency towards political maneuvering—remain constant. Consequently, as organizations grow, they often face similar challenges and patterns, regardless of their industry or origin. This universality of human nature ensures that the cycle of innovation, bureaucratization, and potential stagnation is a common thread in the evolution of most enterprises.
Great post and I will share this with friends who want to know about the tech right. I think you got the nail on the head.
I gotta push back on Trump's "promise" on the all in podcast, which was indeed something he said, but not worth the bits it's encoded in:
> But hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks aired, his campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked back the former president’s comments, saying in a statement that...the policy would apply only to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240701180645/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/us/politics/trump-green-cards-college-graduates.html
While they both fit the meritocracy scheme, there's a huge difference between giving green cards out to all grads and "only the most skilled grads", which could mean anything from selecting a large % of the top students from all institutions to limiting the policy to CS PhD grads from the top five departments.
Yep. I think it's more a sign of pandering than genuinely policy shift
I don't think it's quite that simple. To some extent lack of moral guilt is a luxury that people are willing to purchase and the fact that the Valley is quite wealthy (especially if they ever finally fix the fucking housing) also inclines them to make that purchase with their votes.
Sure, maybe they shouldn't feel guilty. However, I remember when I was working in Silicon Valley how many people felt very strongly about not working on face recognition or military tech -- even though (as I pointed out at the time) if they didn't and pressed their companies not to do it then it meant that it would just be developed by people who weren't as concerned about minimizing abuses as they were. And indeed, that's exactly what we saw with Clearview.
And if things had been tough or there was a military crisis I'm sure these individuals would have accepted that kind of work. Indeed, for the most part they weren't even arguing that no one should do these things. But not having to think about their possible role in some abuse or risk feeling bad is a luxury and they were doing well enough they wanted to purchase it.
And a huge amount of DEI is really just people purchasing a lack of guilt. It's throwing a bit of cash -- in the form of inefficiency -- at the problem so they don't have to feel guilty.
Yes there is the pull of meritocracy but I also feel there is the attraction of throwing some of your money at the rest of the population so you can feel less guilty about it and I'm not sure it will cleanly break one way or another.
This idea that people are purchasing a lack of guilt just expresses to others than one is thinking in some selfish economic way, seeking absolution as a free pass to get richer.
People aren't actually being as calculating as those who study economics claim they are. It's a fundamental clash in world views, such that even the person who wants to NOT let rich, allegedly secretly guilty people off the hook look *themselves* like some conniving Scrooge McDuck who sees everything as a ledger.
Saying they are purchasing lack of guilt isn't meant to describe what it feels like to be them but in practice what happens.
Few people are moral philosophers and most of us are caring people so it's upsetting when our actions seem to involve us in some horrible practice. For instance it's upsetting to think about the fact that people in a sweatshop were treated badly to produce your clothing.
The problem is that often - whether or not this particular case - in our complex world the thing that disassociates you from the bad activity (choosing to buy clothes from a slightly more expensive first world factory) actually make things worse off for the people you are concerned about or don't really help. That's true both if what you do is disassociate yourself or what you do is respond by saying "ohh I feel bad those people have been treated badly I'll support some special benefit from them."
But, at an emotional level, the world is vast and we can't stay sane and torture ourselves about what we can do about every problem so we have a kinda default that when you feel like you aren't touching the issue or are supporting the things that have the facial form of showing concern/help for people you feel bad about.
So it's all well intentioned but you combine that attitude with low probability of impact voting and the ability to pay a little more and get something that doesn't make pay attention to the sad situation of less fortunate others and -- because we are busy, figure someone else thought of it and just tend to avoid doing unpleasant thing -- the overall impact is that rather than actually working out how we can best help people we tend to use money (directly or indirectly via regulation) to put us into a situation where we don't feel guilty about the bad thing.
----
And at an individual level it's not really their fault. In a better society there would be expert institutions who figure out the actually effective interventions you can make to improve the world or feel like you've done the right thing but we are too divided, frustrated and (for some good reasons) distrust those orgs who try to do it. I fear that to achieve that we'd need broader agreement on values.
Unfortunately there is nothing democratic or meritocratic about the current Democrat party. The presidential candidate was selected and not elected. The policies supported by the party resemble policies that both Stalin and Hitler supported and tried to implement.
The party is not going to change in the near future. In fact, it will only get worse.