Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one.<p>Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy <i>as</i> meritocrats. Mussolini didn&#x27;t make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion.<p>In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn&#x27;t perfect, and there&#x27;s definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.<p>Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that&#x27;s what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it&#x27;s actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he&#x27;d be fired.<p>Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.