The Ladder of Prestige
Or: What does the peacock teach about microservices?
Why do people take an online course from MIT and then add it to their LinkedIn, subtly implying but not (falsely) stating they are an MIT grad? It’s because MIT is prestigious, and people want to rub some of that sweet gooey prestige onto themselves.
Understanding what prestige is and how it works will be immensely valuable for your career. In particular, I argue you should try to climb the Ladder of Prestige. That is, to associate yourself with increasingly more prestigious institutions.
What is Prestige
Prestige is the admiration something gets for perceived quality. If you understand physics and personally know a great physicist, you might say they are a genius. If you just see Asian Scientist Guy pontificating on TV about the fabric of space time, you can merely conclude he is prestigious.
I mean that prestige is fuzzy, subjective, and granted by association. Michio Kaku is prestigious because someone put him on TV, not because of the spacetime thing, which no one understands anyway.
It’s hard to measure competence, but easy to measure prestige
A tiny number of people do understand spacetime, and prestige is the way our social species channels their niche understanding into productive social status. That is, the 2% of us who know what spacetime is can accurately judge Kaku’s rant, and then tell the rest of us whether we should think he is a productive member of society or a charlatan1.
The same is true at work. The Senior Architect has opinions on microservices, and it’s hard to judge them on their merit, so we need the two people on the team who know what is going on to tell us what to think about Mr. Architect. Without that, we would need to use even noisier signals of competence than prestige, like the Architect’s tone of voice, vocabulary, or eloquence.
Ideally, we should measure value added at work and distribute opportunities and spoils accordingly, but that is just too hard. That’s why we use the next best thing - prestige2.
Cultivate your prestige
Some people might think prestige is unfair. Why does the mid guy from MIT get opportunities handed on a platter while the genius kid from Podunk State has to grind it out for years?
Forget about fairness. Not only is prestige inevitable3, but it also maximizes the social return on rare talent. By using the few talented to recognize the talent of others, and then amplifying their opinions through signals of prestige, opportunities are efficiently allocated while minimizing the effort spent in evaluation.
By understanding prestige you can cultivate your own. There are many ways to do that, but we will focus on one. You should carefully choose the institutions you associate with.
Climb the ladder of prestige
Some people are lucky. They are born to wealthy smart parents, get into Harvard at 17, get internships at Uber and Meta by their senior year and get hired to OpenAI right out of college. For the rest of us life is a grind, so we need to be tenacious.
As we discussed before, most people don’t recognize talent, but prestige, so you must not only work to increase your skills over time, but also your prestige4. At any given point you should consider whether the company you are at is the most prestigious one you can get into. If not, there must be a big advantage to counter it. A little more money, or a bit better work life balance won’t cut it.
By joining the most prestigious company you can, and being at least moderately successful there, your reputation gets a big boost. You’ll notice that instead of having to chase jobs, recruiters will come after you.
That is true on a continuum from the most mediocre company all the way up the FAANG darling of the moment. So, you should not only try to get into Google, but if you can’t, the company that has the best reputation in your mid-size city. Each company can be a step on the ladder of prestige. Even Google nowadays can be a step towards Open AI, or whatever the hot new start-up is.
Recognizing Prestige
You must recognize the most prestigious institutions in order to join it. Fortunately, that is easy. Unlike competence, which is elusive, prestige is based on social consensus, so just ask the man on the street: what’s the best company nowadays? A simple Google search can reveal it with high confidence in any given industry, or you can just ask your peers.
It’s comfortable at the top
Like most things there are diminishing returns to prestige. Once you reach a world-renowned institution, it’s questionable to torture yourself just to get a bit more.
By then you will have won the prestige game, and you can use the spoils to play more meaningful games, like having a positive impact on the world or achieving mastery.
You might even dedicate yourself to the ultimate goal: writing blog posts with life advice for others.
In conclusion
The unequal way prestige is distributed is not unfair. It’s a simple effective way a social species can allocate social status and opportunities to the talented. You need to accept it and play the game. When you win, you can then use the prize to work on something nobler.
It follows that prestige can be fake. For example, the learned minority who are supposedly accurately measuring quality can instead be coordinating to raise the status of a charlatan. Prestige can be fake even without any bad faith. For example, a person like Kim Kardashian might be famous just because she is famous, and since famous people are usually prestigious, we think she must be prestigious too.
Since prestige can be fake, you should always measure competence instead of prestige if possible.
That fully explains why companies prefer the MIT grad for a programming role. They could intead apply a test, but that’s too hard. It takes effort and skill to properly apply a programming test, but it’s trivially easy to check if someone went to MIT. It also protects the status of prestigious people. Have you noticed how some programmers think it’s humiliating to subject themselves to a test? They are protecting their turf against less prestigious but maybe more competent rivals.
Humans as a social species rely on each other for survival, but at the same time can’t in general accurately evaluate each other. Prestige is the evolved response for this problem. It takes the wide distribution of talent, which is a result of evolution by natural selection, and channels it towards the good of the group.
Since talent breeds prestige, becoming more skilled also makes you more prestigious. That is relatively obvious, so this essay focuses on what you can do more than that. How to play the game so that the part of prestige that is dissociated from talent also grows, so that you get the most success you can for the talent you have.