> The current system doesn't reward performance in general

The current system rewards performance more than any other system in history. You can go from living in poverty to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars just by doing well at enough tests. Things are stacked against you, true, but that path is still possible today. Is the system worse today than 30-40 years ago? Maybe, it is hard to tell, it is the same system though so you can't blame the system, it is other factors.

Could it reward performance more? Yes! But we have already came extremely far.

Wrong, tests are not the bottleneck, you'll have to present well, play along politics, fake. You could be the best person on earth, if someone doesn't feel you, you're out.

You don't have to do any of that to get a software engineer job. Just do well on tests in school, do well enough that you get accepted into college with a free ride, do well enough in college tests to get an interview, do well enough on the algorithm tests in the interview to get a job. That is all you need. It isn't easy, having money etc helps, but ultimately all you need to do is pass a bunch of tests to get a lot of money.

I did all of these multiple times and got rejected. You're view on life lacks data I'm sorry. The harder I worked, the more I adapted to peoples need, the less I got. A simple friend in the field gets me a job without effort. Society doesn't reward excellency that often, the social structure comes first.

Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying.

"But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!"

No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.

The argument was not about interviews but tests and skills. Which I did.

The "luck/unfair" argument is exactly what I was talking about. You shouldn't need luck to get hired in a system after 7+ years of hard work.

Add to that that I've seen a lot of incompetent people (both in skills, dedication or even diligence) in the field. This renders the excellence argument moot.

The system is filled with low efficiency bits at every scale, HR only call you if they match a tag or a fancy school, the tech interviewer might very well be a young dude knowing moot but not willing to annoy his superior with bad hires. It's mostly tribalism and politics driving the machine. Not objective qualities.

At first I thought you were one of those who spent years not getting their first job, but no you worked in the industry for 7 whole years! Did you get paid much more than McDonalds wage during those years? Then you got rewarded for your performance! You are therefore a perfect example of someone getting rewarded for performance. Rewards aren't perfectly correlated with performance, no, but that doesn't mean that performance doesn't get rewarded.

Sure, it is hard to earn more than you earn now. But you are still earning way more than most, and all that required was to pass a few tests. How can you call that not rewarding performance?

7 years of study.

Also we're not on the same page about reward/excellency. Having a high salary after graduation doesn't mean you're doing good / excellent work. You can, and I've heard a lot of people saying it, coast along being paid for not a lot.

Every company I worked at had terrible software, there was no excellency in them (which backfires toward all society). Another proof to me that the system is not optimizing excellency. It's short term gain spread over a wide network of ignorance (your customer can never assess of your work quality, he has no clue about the domain).

Furthermore, there are many other paths to wealth. Not that any of them are easy, but they allow a variety of different types of people to succeed.

For anyone who thinks it is harder now: Name the specific time period where performance was rewarded more and let the HN commenters pick apart your choice.

The fault is within a decadent culture that has stopped striving for excellence as an ideal and demanding quality as an underlying mental tenet.

The "performance indicators" are often calibrated permissively towards a "very pessimistic perspective taken as realism" which lets ample pools of bestiality in. When this becomes "locally" systemic, it will be a chocker for the individual potential, systemically misfit.

I don't blame the culture in itself. It's a byproduct of itself.. when you live with nothing, excellency == survival and better life, but when capital/marketing makes people live "softer" by doing nothing.. the incentive is removed. At least on the surface.. I don't think people are that happy binging on netflix.

That said I'm curious about how to revive this, before the potential climate collapse especially :)