Main Paineframe posted:

It's great if your family is well-off enough to have those kinds of connections or you went to an Ivy League, but the size of your useful network is pretty much directly proportionate to your income, so it tends to lead to jobs being snatched away from the lower class to be given to the wealthy. Also, the personal connection tends to lead to the person getting more generous pay than someone of their experience might otherwise be getting in that position.

Main Paineframe posted:

Poorer people are less likely to know someone at a decent company with the authority to inform hiring/firing decisions, especially early in their career. When you grew up in a lovely neighborhood and went to a lovely college, you've got a much less useful network because most of the people you know are working shitjobs like mopping floors. When you don't have much opportunity, odds are good none of the people you know have much opportunity either. Hell, almost the entire value of fancy colleges like Harvard is in having the opportunity to network with the upper class.

mugrim posted:

But it's 100% true? Networking is inherently about gaining access to people in your field, and for many people that is a huge barrier for a variety of reasons including race and gender. Like, the requirement of 'networking' is literally one of the most important reasons to have affirmative action. The more white, male, and straight you are the better access you have to management.

Obdicut posted:

This is a bad thing, because it reinforces that whole 'levels' thing. Obviously, nowhere is going to be able to do a perfectly objective measure of merit, but there's a lot of legitimate reason to call in-networks that promote because of who your daddy is or what prep school you went to are harmful, both to the organization they're part of and society as a whole.

Obdicut posted:

Really, saying 'this ignores reality' isn't a very good substitute for an argument.

Professional networking often propagates exclusion of people from lower classes and the non-dominant race. Even though the reality is that a lot of people get jobs through their networks, it doesn't follow that this is therefore fine. There is a big difference between being vouched for as "Yes, I know him, he did a wonderful job and he'll be a great employee," and "Yes, I know him, we were in the same frat, he's our kind of people." The latter is, indeed, bad, and is also common. The previous isn't in and of itself bad, but it can be in that it excludes people who didn't get the chances to prove themselves in the first place. For example, getting internships (the real ones, not the 'make 'em do the photocopying' type) can be a significant foot in the door, can help with grad school applications, etc., precisely because someone can then legitimately vouch for you. But if the way that the internships are awarded is itself tainted by the second kind of 'networking', then a lot of people never got the chance to prove themselves.

The two types of networking are highly intertwined and hard to tease out, precisely because of this.

quote:

Also if you limit your definition of networking to people you actually worked with side by side, you're probably doing it wrong in real life. Most people network with friends, people they know from tertiary experiences that they met in work situations, etc.

By definition, if you worked with them, they're already in your network. Networking is about meeting new people.

VitalSigns posted:

VitalSigns posted:

That would be a ridiculous position to take, which is why I never took that strawman position. Aptitude tests certainly correlate to job performance, but to the extent that they are influenced by other factors, they tend to entrench privilege and disqualify minorities over and above the inequities that already exist.

Direct examples of that have already been posted, which is why I take such exception to on-the-left's almost religious insistence that any racial skew in test results must be revealing the underlying merit, and that anyone worried about bias is just strangling business with political correctness. Look:

VitalSigns posted:

I haven't posted a single anecdote Are you just imagining posts I've made that you would like to take down?

VitalSigns posted:

Hey if he wants to discuss how he would correct for those disparities I would love that, but so far all I've seen from on-the-left is him using our broken educational system as an excuse for why white men really deserve the jobs and promotions along with whining about how every suggestion put forward to remedy this is unfair to the beneficiaries of our purely meritocratic job market.