This is true in the entertainment industry, but it's because consumers want to buy what everyone else is buying. Not because there's a huge difference in performance. In fact, it's the opposite. There are many equally attractive/talented performers who can do the job just as well. It's very competitive, success is rare and fleeting even when it does come.
This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.
This is untrue for the simple reason that your friends’ employers wouldn’t allow it. Hiring practices based on personal references opens the door to discrimination lawsuits, so every HR department creates objective interview processes that remove such advantages.
I disagree strongly. Personal referrals are one of the most effective ways to get a job, and also one of the most effective ways to increase hiring quality. At the very least a personal reference will fast track you into an interview stage ahead of most other cold applications.
There are edge cases where a personal reference is valuable. If you’re inexperienced, it can get you an interview. Or it can get you a job at a small company without a real HR department.
But outside of that, a hiring decision made based on a personal relationship is considered cronyism. It isn’t always illegal, but most HR departments go out of their way to prevent it.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is terrible career advice in general. It can be incredibly seductive because it promises people an advantage over competition. But it’s wrong. It’s a waste of time and in my experience, the people who follow it tend to interview poorly because they come off as arrogant and complacent.
What you're saying here sounds, to me, like the sort of thing someone who's only worked in a very narrow and constrained corporate environment would think.
Of course, if that sort of environment is all that one's interested in, then it's possibly entirely true.
It just isn't, at all, for someone like me who's not existed in that sort of environment for over twwnty years... .
Its easy to slip this past HR. The hiring manager picks the interview panel and sets expectations about the skills they should look for. These are targeted at what you already know the candidate is good at. They pass the committee due to great feedback.
I don't think not-your-friend counts as a protected class quite yet. But considering how outraged people get when they interview for a job but the offer goes to someone's buddy, maybe it will be outlawed sooner or later.
I wondered what is this “community-based” mental health care that the author advocates for, and how is it different from psychiatry. Are psychiatrists not part of the community? It turns out it refers to “dream-work, breathwork, herbalism, and meditation.”
in what way did it turn out to refer to those things? Community-based health care seems to me like a way of saying that mental health is connected closely to the community you are a part of, and that this community therefore can play a big part of keeping your mind healthy.
Which, I think, sounds very reasonable. If your work environment is toxic, the way to get better is to improve the work community, or find another community to be part of.
The goal of the union is to improve wages, benefits and working conditions. If Apple addresses those concerns to the extent that union membership is a worse deal, then the union has won.
I think people advocating for increased funding for mental health services have started to define all social problems in terms of their impact on mental health, e.g. prejudice as a traumatic experience, the stresses of poverty, etc.
Increased funding for mental health services seems like a poor solution.
What’s being implied here is that the endowments of these elite institutions were created through historical crimes, but activists won’t make an issue of that if the universities support diverse hiring initiatives.
Designers hate Adobe. This acquisition caused a huge collective meltdown on Twitter, and people are saying Figma is dead now. Many people were hoping Figma would kill Adobe.
