Meritocracy or Popularity Contest?
Why are AI labs paying mediocre employees millions?
I recently saw two posts on hackernews. Both were about AI labs. One was on the making of Claude Code, the other on how Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring philosophers.
What stood out about both articles was how unmeritocratic top AI labs seemed. First, Claude Code. Have you noticed it’s slow? Maybe it uses a lot of memory or battery? That might be because the 7 figure salary geniuses at Anthropic decided to build a rendering image to display text
Brilliant! But I know a software engineer or three that make 1/10 or less of the total compensation of an Anthropic dev who could do better. So how did these guys at Anthropic get hired?
It got me thinking: we live in more of a popularity contest, layered on top of a basic socialism, than in a meritocracy. The popularity contest produces a hierarchy, and is often deceitfully referred to as a meritocracy, but it does not actually sort on merit. As a consequence, you get buggy vibecoded Claude Code, made by engineers making over $1 million per year. Better engineers clearly exist, and can prove they exist, but hirers ignore the signs and keep hiring bad engineers.
What do they hire on? Popularity signals. In tech these are going to a handful of universities, working at a startup funded by a handful of VC firms, working at a handful of big tech companies. Going to these places only correlates with merit or IQ weakly to moderately. I’m guessing overall merit and IQ correlate at around 0.85 if you control for years of experience, while popularity signals correlate with either merit or IQ around 0.50.
As a consequence, we expect people with elite, 3SD popularity signals and positions to have merit or IQs around 1.2 SDs, with a lot of spread. That comes out to about 123 IQ, which is what a lot of people at Google, Stanford, ${Unicorn}, or Anthropic seem to be.
The second article was about AI firms hiring philosophers to write philosophy essays about AI, allegedly paying them up to $10 million total.
Needless to say, they are overpaying. I could find at least a few undergrads at the local university that could write equivalent essays, but they could never “win” this position. Why? Well it’s not because they lack merit.
This article isn’t about AI labs by the way. The same reasoning applies to finance firms and their demand for “pedigree”, top universities and their insane entrance requirements, other tech firms, law firms, consulting positions, corporate executive positions, all of that.