One thing I have noticed is how prevalent the hustle culture has become among Millennials. LinkedIn is a hotbed of narcissism, and Twitter has a ton of self-proclaimed business superstars who have made money by having companies entirely dependent on using foreign labor and providing shitty service for customers. It's quite appalling how often you hear fellow Millennials go on and on boasting about their own "successes" or try to sell themselves without an ounce of honesty.
The hustle of creating "passive income" means that we are going to see a lot of sociopaths becoming landlords and doing the bare-minimum for those who rent from them, and the quality of services will continue to decline across all companies as there is no value in providing a good service, merely making money. The decline of quality we have seen from the boomer generation onward (yes, that includes you, Generation X, you aren't exempt from being self-destructive narcissists like your parents and your children) is going to ramp up significantly.
Some people will say, "blame the system, not the person," but for god's sake, eventually someone has to stand up and refuse to operate as basically a scam artist. For as many supposed "leftists" there are among Millennials, they sure have no qualms about taking the worst aspects of human greed and using that as their core business model.
Am I over-exaggerating here?
Networking is what matters because regulators, certification, academics, and HR have all entirely failed to do their jobs, and everyone is lying.
Companies simply can't believe anything they see, and even if you have the correct mertiocratic qualifications, your psychological conditions may prevent you from working effectively in the environment or with the team.
As a result, the level of work required to suss out a good candidate whom you can employ for 3-5 years is neigh-on-impossible.
Therefore, what most places value is trust. If a person that they trust, says that you can be trusted; that's worth it's weight in gold because they don't have to work nearly as hard to analyze you, judge you, watch you, even after you're hired for the next 90 days.
It's no joke, I've seen the data. Referral hires have the best track record because the person referring them already knows whether or not they'll actually meet the real qualifications of working at a place every day with a set of people.
We built a materialistic, low-trust, fraudulent credential, economy and as a result trust has become the single most valuable asset that a person can have.
I don't disagree with you for the most part, especially the part of about fraudulent credentials (hello woke degree mills!). I just have first and second hand accounts of "trust" meaning "in the club" in reality, and that part shields them from having to actually be competent. Companies never seem to complain about the well connected fuck ups they employ, so when the well connected part is taken out of the equation it's difficult to sympathize with their concerns.
The problem is they're not really interested in selecting for good candidates outside the networking process because that takes real work on the part of the hiring manager. My mom told me a story about how her company hired a finance major for a rudimentary accounting job. The guy was retard who couldn't figure out basic credits and debits and their takeaway was that they needed to stop interviewing non-accounting majors for jobs like that instead of, you know, taking basic steps to filter out retards. For anyone reading that isn't aware: All majors in the school of business (accounting, finance, marketing, etc.) take the same "business core" as part of their major that teaches basic stuff like that. A finance major with an IQ above 85 would have been able to figure out that job.
This is a bit of rant, but it's born out of frustration with employers who whine about how hard finding good people is when they use their inability to find a networker as a pretext to hire the cool bullshit artist since he'll be fun to be around at least. It's all that not dissimilar from women who whine about not being able find men with ABC when they're selecting for men with XYZ.
I agree that that is the pathological version of this. Fundamentally, because trust is more valuable than competency at this point, laterally being in a boys club and schmoozing around with people is more valuable than a 4 year degree in mathematics (3.5 years of which is gender studies and critical race theory). Within that, con-men (literally: confidence men) will find such environments perfect to operate in. In the worst case, the entire social structure is run by the predators (con-men), and so it becomes impossible to ascend without fraud. This has happened many times already.
We're not really disagreeing, I'm pointing out the back-end explanation of what went wrong.
This is all part of the same competency crisis, though. The HR departments that recruit are operating under all the exact same ideologies as any Leftist. They will refuse to hire non-retards based on skin color unless they have no other choice. The hiring managers will also be retards as well. It's retards hiring retards, and the company (in abstraction) can't figure out why nothing is working. They don't realize the horrible truth that every component part is broken.
So, they rely on the networking process. But if they don't know how to network properly and filter people out correctly (which is a whole different skill set in and of itself), they will also not be able to filter out retards or predators.
It's not wrong. There is a feminization of society and institutions that has broken social structures based on masculine concepts and frameworks.
I dislike handing out blackpills, but... depending on the type of job you're talking about, it gets even worse.
Most government jobs, you'll find really quickly, have no meritocracy whatsoever. It's pure nepotism above a certain level of authority. You might find a diamond in the rough every so often(and said guys tend to be REALLY fucking good at their jobs), but most often it's all about how many dicks you've sucked to get where you are.
Of course, there's a flip side to that - because they've sucked so many dicks to get where they are, they expect everyone else to kneel down and fellate them. And when you don't, they get really pissed off. Ask me how I know!
Thankfully, I've only ever had to deal with this from the outside looking in, but it's hilarious watching how they break when you refuse to bow down to thier little kingdom. Sadly, you can only do this in certain situations. I doubt people would appreciate, for instance, me pointing out how service went straight to shit when they started hiring on a bunch of black women to fill the positions for all the white men who were retiring...
Let's be real, we've built a low trust society.
Let's be even more real: the American populace has been actively ignoring that our government hasn't built anything and instead let the country fall into disrepair.
You wouldn't look at a falling down, foreclosed house in Detroit and say "ah they built a shitty house."
I live in NY State -- and one of the biggest things I have learned is that blue states are AMAZINGLY worse off than Red states.
Basic infrastructure isn't failing, it has failed. I am talking about traffic lights that never turn green, or turn green towards a parking lot for 45 seconds at 3am. Potholes that never get filled. Police that never show up when you call 911 (had a guy in the middle of the street stopping cars and screaming at people).
Why would anyone have any trust for anything when basic services are broken beyond repair?
Yes, entirely.
The solution isn't to browbeat them, it's to put them out of business.
That would be possible of companies weren't being protected by inflation and regulation.
Stress business enough, and you know what they do? Fire those 2 negative contributors no matter who's friend they are. That's why deflation and contraction are important.
Honestly, I've come to the conclusion that what you do matters less than who you work with.
Actually look for businesses and people that seem to have high-integrity and would be a good people to work with. The skills you learn along the way are w/e. And yeah, smaller can be mostly better. My "trust" argument works both ways. Interview them as much as they interview you.
You could always take a potential pay cut and go more local, but you'll also need to take more leadership, training, and organizational roles to help them build up to where they need to be.
So, for example. Let's say I'm going to quit my job as someone who has a supervisor role for an IT Help Desk. My primary concern is not pay, it's going to be the integrity of the people. I might see who has some of the best reviewed service desks. Look through the company on glass door and see if anyone mentions whether IT was good or bad. If I get a response back from their HR, I'm going to want to press them on those credentials more than anything else. If I'm in the interview, I'm going to ask them how would they handle examples of employees that need training, or how they would try to correct or assist with an employee's deficiency. How would they structure opportunities for people to both grow their careers and develop themselves personally. I'd want them to tell me a story of what they think leadership looks like and how it's important.
The only thing these shithole Leftist oligarchs have anything going for them at all, is the giant pile of money they steal from innocent people who don't know how hard they are getting raped. Smaller companies with a better reputation for quality and professionalism is where you should focus on working and developing a career.