Thread by @patio11

A major point of crossing the culture gap between lower and upper middle class is becoming aware of how power operates (versus how virtue is generally described) and choosing to join it.

This is, not accidentally, part of the rituals necessary to get inside the gates.

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470926855674884096

Not a one time thing either.

Admission to elite universities is by a complicated process about power, not by academic merit, and the universities consider people who think it should be otherwise to be hopelessly naive and at least a little dangerous.

And then the interview circuit really does “If you’re capable of discovering the rules of the game, and then decide to play suboptimally, we would prefer to find a different teammate. If you’re not capable of discovering the rules of the game… indistinguishable for our purposes”

I used to be extremely suspicious that these interviewing practices tested anything relevant in the software industry.

I have gradually warmed to above absolute zero on it.

The sketch of the steel man version is “If you are good at software but bad at being American PMC then you’re going to cause the American PMC structure at our company which exists to create, exercise, and project power quite a bit of unnecessary friction.”

“You might, for example, consider that technical merits counsel it wise to call a Director wrong in a 40 person meeting. That single action will take hours of patient work to untangle, and you’re going to do it again, aren’t you, repeatedly.”

“Of course you *can* call a Director wrong in a meeting, just not like that, but we don’t have enough time to put you through remedial power kindergarten when we have a schedule to keep and KPIs to hit.”