Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here. It is much less misleading to readers if you say that you are nearly certain. For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn’t have. I’m pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.
If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.
Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.
For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn’t have. I’m pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around networks and connections in their hiring, at top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices will tend to evolve by natural selection in the system. I don’t know if you’ve tried to compete with Intel or Samsung or Huawei or Hyundai or Apple or Google, but I can tell you from experience that an astonishing amount of high horsepower resources are devoted to developing and examining metrics for ensuring the most utility from hrigins and promotions possible. If there is a systematic “blind spot,” it is nothing so trivial as the effects of social networks or nepotism, which have been known of as issues for decades or longer, and therefore had the crap studied out of them by competing corporations.
So then, why does it seem we still have social networks and nepotism? The hint I can give you is that Qualcomm’s CEO is the son of its founder. The rumors are that the founder stayed as CEO for years more than he would have liked to because the board kept telling him they would not give the top spot to his won. Finally there came a day in 2006 when the board would and that is when father stepped down in favor of son.
Rampant nepotism, would have been flagrant if the story had been publicized by the company, which it was not. Since that time the company has added about 300 billion in market cap, something like 40%. Earnings and Revenues all tell similar growth stories, the market cap, if a fluke, is not an isolated fluke.
Considering the large number of companies, many public even more private, that have thrived while under family control, I think the case that what is on its face nepotism is actually unproductive is a very hard one to make. I’m sure it is possible to hire a son who doesn’t work out, just as it is possible to tune a ferrari that doesn’t go fast or run an early education system that doesn’t add value or design a CDMA radio system that doesn’t outperform competing TDMA systems.
As more evidence that the nepotism claim may bear more examination in many cases, I continue telling the story of the company I know best. The father had 4 sons, all of whom had jobs at Qualcomm at one time or another. At least one of the sons left the company without ever rising above a mid-level engineering position. The other two who didn’t become CEO are still at the company in middle-high level positions, one is a patent attorney and the other is some sort of business/marketing guy.
My point is if you are going to be iconoclastic, you probably have to go full iconoclast. Don’t ASSUME nepotism as practiced in modern day western republics is antiproductive. I don’t think the evidence will support this.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around networks and connections in their hiring, at top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices will tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around race as a factor in hiring, at the top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
Do you agree with this argument as well? If not, why not?
My point is if you are going to be iconoclastic, you probably have to go full iconoclast. Don’t ASSUME nepotism as practiced in modern day western republics is antiproductive. I don’t think the evidence will support this.
You are right. The incentives of family business can be pretty good, maybe this helps the performance? I do think it isn’t an unreasonable assumption that it results in slightly less competent people get jobs. But then again who will know you better than your relatives?
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around race as a factor in hiring, at the top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
Do you agree with this argument as well? If not, why not?
I agree corporations will tend to do the more economic thing around race. If many otherwise qualified whites won’t work a companies where blacks have anytthing other than the most menial jobs, and the society is 85% white, then the economic thing to do is to keep your job pool high by not hiring blacks into the jobs that would drive whites out of your job pool. The other economic thing to do is to pay blacks a market wage, where the market wage may have been driven down by the oversupply of blacks for the limited job categories they can be hired in to without comproomising access to the much larger white hiring pool.
“Don’t buy stock in companies because companies are a local optimum.” A nice little homage to the OP, don″t you think? Companies in a racist society will optimize their return with the actual society as a condition constraining the optimum. They are litereally not in the business of operating in the world as it should be or might be or you want it to be, they literally are in the business of operating in the world as it is.
I do think it isn’t an unreasonable assumption that it results in slightly less competent people get jobs. But then again who will know you better than your relatives?
We use “maps” that are simplifications of the actual territory. And so using a map which is not so complex as the real world, an oversimplified standard of competence for a particular job which is characterized by an overly simplified job description will often yield candidates who score higher on the oversimplified metrics than do the actually optimum candidates. And what could be more oversimplified that applying the same term of nepotism to a dictator forcing all businesses in his country to do business with his son-in-law when buying cement as we apply to the process of a brilliant CEO championing one of his four sons as the best possible candidate as his successor, while continuously offering the board the choice of keeping the original brilliant CEO in place until they agree with him about his son.
Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here.
If you say so. Lucky for me I am conversing with someone more rational than most who isn’t likely to be tripped up by my accidental rudeness, especially when he can see what I meant anyway. But good to know as I certainly lose more of the audience than I’d like in most of my posts, and I will benefit from creating a list of trigger phrases to avoid.
Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here. It is much less misleading to readers if you say that you are nearly certain. For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn’t have. I’m pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.
If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.
Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around networks and connections in their hiring, at top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices will tend to evolve by natural selection in the system. I don’t know if you’ve tried to compete with Intel or Samsung or Huawei or Hyundai or Apple or Google, but I can tell you from experience that an astonishing amount of high horsepower resources are devoted to developing and examining metrics for ensuring the most utility from hrigins and promotions possible. If there is a systematic “blind spot,” it is nothing so trivial as the effects of social networks or nepotism, which have been known of as issues for decades or longer, and therefore had the crap studied out of them by competing corporations.
So then, why does it seem we still have social networks and nepotism? The hint I can give you is that Qualcomm’s CEO is the son of its founder. The rumors are that the founder stayed as CEO for years more than he would have liked to because the board kept telling him they would not give the top spot to his won. Finally there came a day in 2006 when the board would and that is when father stepped down in favor of son.
Rampant nepotism, would have been flagrant if the story had been publicized by the company, which it was not. Since that time the company has added about 300 billion in market cap, something like 40%. Earnings and Revenues all tell similar growth stories, the market cap, if a fluke, is not an isolated fluke.
Considering the large number of companies, many public even more private, that have thrived while under family control, I think the case that what is on its face nepotism is actually unproductive is a very hard one to make. I’m sure it is possible to hire a son who doesn’t work out, just as it is possible to tune a ferrari that doesn’t go fast or run an early education system that doesn’t add value or design a CDMA radio system that doesn’t outperform competing TDMA systems.
As more evidence that the nepotism claim may bear more examination in many cases, I continue telling the story of the company I know best. The father had 4 sons, all of whom had jobs at Qualcomm at one time or another. At least one of the sons left the company without ever rising above a mid-level engineering position. The other two who didn’t become CEO are still at the company in middle-high level positions, one is a patent attorney and the other is some sort of business/marketing guy.
My point is if you are going to be iconoclastic, you probably have to go full iconoclast. Don’t ASSUME nepotism as practiced in modern day western republics is antiproductive. I don’t think the evidence will support this.
EVEN IF most companies do inefficient things around race as a factor in hiring, at the top or lower positions, we have so many corps competing that best practices tend to evolve by natural selection in the system.
Do you agree with this argument as well? If not, why not?
You are right. The incentives of family business can be pretty good, maybe this helps the performance? I do think it isn’t an unreasonable assumption that it results in slightly less competent people get jobs. But then again who will know you better than your relatives?
I agree corporations will tend to do the more economic thing around race. If many otherwise qualified whites won’t work a companies where blacks have anytthing other than the most menial jobs, and the society is 85% white, then the economic thing to do is to keep your job pool high by not hiring blacks into the jobs that would drive whites out of your job pool. The other economic thing to do is to pay blacks a market wage, where the market wage may have been driven down by the oversupply of blacks for the limited job categories they can be hired in to without comproomising access to the much larger white hiring pool.
“Don’t buy stock in companies because companies are a local optimum.” A nice little homage to the OP, don″t you think? Companies in a racist society will optimize their return with the actual society as a condition constraining the optimum. They are litereally not in the business of operating in the world as it should be or might be or you want it to be, they literally are in the business of operating in the world as it is.
We use “maps” that are simplifications of the actual territory. And so using a map which is not so complex as the real world, an oversimplified standard of competence for a particular job which is characterized by an overly simplified job description will often yield candidates who score higher on the oversimplified metrics than do the actually optimum candidates. And what could be more oversimplified that applying the same term of nepotism to a dictator forcing all businesses in his country to do business with his son-in-law when buying cement as we apply to the process of a brilliant CEO championing one of his four sons as the best possible candidate as his successor, while continuously offering the board the choice of keeping the original brilliant CEO in place until they agree with him about his son.
If you say so. Lucky for me I am conversing with someone more rational than most who isn’t likely to be tripped up by my accidental rudeness, especially when he can see what I meant anyway. But good to know as I certainly lose more of the audience than I’d like in most of my posts, and I will benefit from creating a list of trigger phrases to avoid.