This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years or so.

That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation.

I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt.

Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it.

That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.

I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature.

"Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.

I don't think the majority of hires at large companies in the past were corrupt. Certainly that hasn't been my experience hiring people at large tech orgs in the present, and the process hasn't changed terribly much really. Given the scarcity of technical ability, we simply can't afford the corruption.

You seem to be discounting the meritocratic process by which people end up graduating from high-ranking schools. Prestigious law firms for instance will only consider graduates from specific institutions, specifically because they act as a filter for talent and ability.

You also seem to be conflating the hiring of people who are culturally similar to corruption. In fact there are many benefits in collaborating in a culturally homogenous environment. Maintaining such an environment in order to reap those benefits has merit too.

I guess it depends on your definition of "corrupt" and where you draw the line between corrupt and not corrupt. Would it be the tech recruiter's fault if there were, for instance, a pipeline problem that sharply limited the diversity of their candidate pool? I don't think so, but that wouldn't change the reality that the pool itself is a reflection of corruption elsewhere in the system. I don't know how you could possibly argue otherwise when black people and women were effectively excluded from many industries until relatively recently.

The "meritocratic process" is laughable. Legacy admissions have always been a critical component of those systems, especially once wealth was no longer an adequate filter; allowing a few newbies through the sieve in order to conceal the real purpose of the ivies—perpetuation of an elite caste—has been the game for a long time. As universities are pressured from the left (getting rid of standardized testing) and right (getting rid of any sort of racial consideration in admissions), legacy will only become more important as an attribute. That a few people beat the odds doesn't at all imply that the system is fair or that that solution is scalable.

"Culture fit" is realistically both important and historically has been a really problematic thing to conflate with or consider alongside "merit." It is a tough problem and I don't have a great answer to it.

I would define "corrupt" as hindering the profitability or stated objectives of the organization[1]. If a team hired to get the job done happens not to be diverse, that doesn't mean the hiring is corrupt. For instance, winning NBA teams don't tend to be very diverse, but I don't see anyone seriously suggesting the NBA draft is corrupt.

By that token, if your company tends to hire a certain sort of person, that is by no means an indication of corruption. I certainly don't see what's inherently corrupt about submitting a job application, going through interviews, and ultimately being hired, mostly by strangers.

When you say you want the solution to be "fair", what do you mean exactly? If a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by Chinese people hires only additional Chinese people, with the intent of maintaining the efficiency of a culturally homogenous environment, is it fair? Does it matter? It certainly isn't corrupt. Doesn't this apply to every business and any culturally discriminatory hiring criteria?

1. This does a pretty good job of describing cronyism https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

These legacy admissions are also the reason most Ivies can afford to do need-blind admissions.

Even granting that the current admissions truly are need-blind (which I think it is reasonable to dispute), the smallest Ivy endowment is still over $4 billion. We’re not talking about a state university using full freight foreign students to subsidize in-state students because they have no other choice.

There’s no reason sticker price tuition at Brown needs to be almost $60k a year, and it is scandalous that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale charge tuition at all.

> I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours

Please read some autobiographies of people from diverse backgrounds trying to break into atypical careers, the topic of imposter syndrome and anxieties about wanting to be taken on one's own merits regularly features.

I don't disagree, but my point was that they shouldn't. Clarence Thomas famously wrote about believing that his own success was tainted by affirmative action, and later he was indeed appointed to the Supreme Court primarily because he was a black conservative. That doesn't mean he was unqualified or less fit for the court than previous appointees, no matter what his own insecurities were, and it also doesn't mean that he or our society would have somehow been better served by Clarence Thomas not being given any of the opportunities affirmative action programs may have afforded him.

The deeper problem is that there isn't really a solution here. The old system wasn't neutral and instead actively discriminated against huge swathes of the population. That the beneficiaries of that system never doubted their worthiness doesn't make the old system better, and any change that impacts them will suffer from the same aspersions about a lack of "merit" that we are seeing now.

> Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions.

What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?

This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.

If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.