In reality, there are many comparably adequate people for getting any job done, and no clairvoyance that lets us know who among them will deliver the best outcome.
So we resort to picking among the comparably adequate candidates by either broadening “best” to include non-task factors like culture harmony, diversity of perspective, gut feeling, etc
That a bunch of adequate people all came from the same class at the same university is actually pretty plausible, and (subject to tradeoffs) those people will probably even work pretty well as a group because of that shared experience.
I’m not saying its the ideal strategy to only hire that way, but just that it’s not nearly so straightforward as you suggest.
I'm 100% sure that the best person for the job wasn't the referral we ended up hiring, but the real best person was too busy sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop meditating on the meaning of pointers and writing all their code in haiku to send us an application.
You don't get to chose from all the people, you get to choose from the ones your hiring funnel brings in. Sometimes the market is tight and you can't find anyone good.
So if I've worked with someone previously and know they're not lazy or incompetent, that's worth a ton -- even if they're not the absolute best person for the job.
The "labor shortage" is bullshit. So many good people can't find decent jobs even today, and wages are still hilarious low compared to the outright robbery that capital gets away with.
That being said, I don't think it's necessarily because of conscious racism, sexism, or ageism that companies tend to end up redlined. It has a lot more to do with the fact that managerial decisions are made based on motives that have little to do with business at all. Silicon Valley ageism, for example, doesn't exist because middle-aged men think young people are all geniuses. (Trust me, we don't.) Rather, it exists because the subordinate's job is to make the boss feel young again, to be the Jesse to their Walter White. It has nothing to do with the needs of the business, but it also doesn't get in the way of the business, so it's not likely to be changed.
> He said ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team, adding that it was fine for him to “encourage people to apply for those roles.” And he said that in recent years, the team has grown to more than 250 people, including part-time employees.
For a positive example, I knew one of my senior managers basically brought 15 people from his previous company, to the point where a comfortable majority of people under him were from the company.
This can be nefarious when the network arises from abusive or unhealthy environments.
I've received job offers where entire functions are all people who had worked together at a previous company and not hired through acquisitions. I've had teams where majority of the team is from the same university or class. More than 50% of the team having a common denominator is common and it usually starts with one person getting hired in a high enough position where their hiring decisions are not scrutinized.