I wiped my LinkedIn profile recently. It now says:

I don’t reveal history without a reason, so my past jobs summary is blank.

I’m a New York-based software engineer who specializes in functional programming, machine learning, and language design.

This might not be the best move for my career. I’m mulling over whether I should delete the profile outright, rather than leaving a short note that appears cagey. I have a valid point– it really isn’t the rest of the world’s business what companies I have worked for– but I’m taking an unusual position that leaves me looking like a “tinfoiler”. For that, I’m honestly not, but I do believe in personal privacy. Privacy’s value is insurance against low-probability, high-impact harms. I don’t consider it likely that I’ll ever damage myself by publicly airing past employment history. It’s actually very unlikely. But why take the chance? I am old enough to know that not all people in the world are good, and this fact requires caution in the sharing of information, no matter how innocuous it might seem.

Consistency risk

My personal belief is that more people will damage their careers through respectable avenues such as LinkedIn than on Facebook, the more classic “digital dirt” culprit. For most jobs, no one is going to care what a now-35 software engineer said when he was 19 about getting drunk. Breaking news: all adults were teenagers, and teenagers are sometimes stupid! On the other hand, people could be burned by inconsistencies between two accounts of their career histories. Let’s say that someone’s CV says “March 2003 – February 2009″ while his LinkedIn profile says “March 2003 – November 2008“. Uh-oh. HR catches this discrepancy, flags it, and brings the candidate in for a follow-on interview, and the candidate discloses that he was on severance (and technically employed, but with no responsibilities) for 3 months. There was no lie. It was a benign difference of accounting. Still, the candidate has now disclosed receipt of a severance payment. There’s a story there. Whoops. In a superficial world, that could mean losing the job offer.

This isn’t a made-up story. The dates were different, but I know someone who ended up having to disclose a termination because of an inconsistency of this kind. (LinkedIn, in the case of which I’m aware, wasn’t the culprit.) So consistency risk is real.

Because the white-collar corporate world has so little in the way of actual ethics, the appearance of being ethical is extremely important. Even minor inconsistencies admit a kind of scrutiny that no one wishes to tolerate. This career oversharing that a lot of young people are participating in is something I find quite dangerous. Not everything that can damage a person’s reputation is a drunk picture. Most threats and mistakes are more subtle than that, and consistency risk is a big deal.

Replicating a broken system

My ideological issue, however, with LinkedIn isn’t the risk that’s involved. I’ll readily concede that those risks are very mild for the vast majority of people. The benefits of using such a service quite possibly outweigh them. The bigger problem I have with it is that it exists to replicate broken ways of doing things.

In 2013, the employment market is extremely inefficient in almost all domains, whether we’re talking about full-time jobs, consulting gigs, or startup funding. It’s a system so broken that no one trusts it, and when people distrust front-door channels or find them clogged and unusable, they retreat to back-door elitism and nepotism. Too much trust is given to word-of-mouth references (that are slow to travel, unreliable, and often an artifact of a legal settlement) and low-quality signals such as educational degrees, prestige of prior employers, and durations of employment. Local influences have a pernicious effect, the result of which is unaffordable real estate in virtually any location where a career can be built. Highly-qualified people struggle to find jobs– especially their first engagements– while companies complain of a dearth of appropriate talent. They’re both right, in a way. This is a matching problem related to the “curse of dimensionality“. We have a broken system that no one seems to know how to fix.

LinkedIn, at least in this incarnation, is an online implementation of the old-style, inefficient way of doing things. If you want an impressive profile, you have to troll for, trade, and if you’ve had a bad separation, use the legal system to demand in a settlement, recommendations and endorsements. You list the companies where you worked, job titles, and dates of employment, even if you honestly fucking hate some of those companies. We’ve used the Internet to give wings to an antiquated set of mechanics for evaluating other people, when we should be trying to do something better.

None of this is intended as a slight against LinkedIn itself. It’s a good product, and I’m sure they’re a great company. I just have an ideological dislike– and I realize that I hold a minority opinion– for the archaic and inefficient way we match people to jobs. It doesn’t even work anymore, seeing as most resumes are read for a few seconds then discarded.

Resumes are broken in an especially irritating way, because they often require people to retain a lasting association with an organization that may have behaved in a tasteless way. I have, most would say, a “good” resume. It’s better than what 98 percent of people my age have: reputable companies, increasing scope of responsibility. Yet, it’s a document through which I associate my name with a variety of organizations. Some of these I like, and some I despise. There is one for which I would prefer for the world never to know that I was associated with it. Of course, if I’m asked, “Tell me about your experience at <X>” in a job interview, for certain execrable values of X, social protocol forbids me from telling the truth.

I’ll play by the rules, when I’m job searching. I’ll send a resume, because it’s part of the process. Currently, however, I’m not searching. This leaves me with little interest in building an online “brand” in a regime vested in the old, archaic protocols. Trolling for endorsements, in my free time, when I’m employed? Are you kidding me?

The legitimacy problem

Why do I so hate these “old, archaic protocols”? It’s not that I have a problem, personally. I have a good resume, strong accomplishments for someone of my age, and I can easily get solid recommendations. I have no need to have a personal gripe here. What bothers me is something else, something philosophical that doesn’t anger a person until she thinks of it in the right way. It’s this: any current matching system between employers and employees has to answer questions regarding legitimacy, and the existing one gets some core bits seriously wrong.

What are the most important features of a person’s resume? For this exercise, let’s assume that we’re talking about a typical white-collar office worker, at least 5 years out of school. Then I would say that “work experience” trumps education, even if that person has a Harvard Ph.D. What constitutes “work experience”? There’s some degree of “buzzword compliance”, but that factor I’m willing to treat as noise. Sometimes, that aspect will go in a candidate’s favor, and sometimes it won’t, but I don’t see it conferring a systemic advantage. I’m also going to say that workplace accomplishments mean very little. Why? Because an unverifiable line on a resume (“built awesome top-secret system you’ve never heard of”) is going to be assumed, by most evaluators, to be inflated and possibly dishonest. So the only bits of a resume that will be taken seriously are the objectively verifiable ones. This leaves:

• Company prestige. That’s the big one, but it’s also ridiculously meaningless, because prestigious companies hire idiots all the time. 
• Job titles. This is the trusted metric of professional accomplishment. If you weren’t promoted for it, it didn’t happen.
• Length of tenure. This one’s nonlinear, because short tenures are embarrassing, but long stints without promotions are equally bad.
• Gaps in employment. Related to the above, large gaps in job history make a candidate unattractive.
• Salary history, if a person is stupid enough to reveal it.
• Recommendations, preferably from management.

There are other things that matter, such as overlap between stated skills and what a particular company needs, but when it comes to “grading” people, look no farther than the above. Those factors determine where a person’s social status starts in the negotiation. Social status isn’t, of course, the only thing that companies care about in hiring… but it’s always advantageous to have it in one’s favor.

What’s disgusting and wrong about this regime is that all of these accolades come from a morally illegitimate source: corporate management. That’s where job titles, for example, come from. They come from a caste of high priests called “managers” who are anointed by a higher caste called “executives” who derive their legitimacy from a pseudo-democracy of shareholders who (while their financial needs and rights deserve respect) honestly haven’t a clue how to run a company. Now, I wouldn’t advise people to let most corporate executives around their kids, because I’ve known enough in my life to know that most of them aren’t good people. So why are we assigning legitimacy to evaluations coming from such an unreliable and often corrupt source? It makes no sense. It’s a slave mentality.

First scratch at a solution

I don’t think resumes scale. They provide low-signal data, and that fails us in a world where there are just so many of the damn things around that a sub-1% acceptance rate is inevitable. I’m not faulting companies for discarding most resumes that they get. What else would they be expected to do? Most resumes come from unqualified candidates who bulk-mail them. Now that it’s free to send a resume anywhere in the world, a lot of people (and recruiters) spam, and that clogs the channels for everyone. The truth, I think, is that we need to do away with resumes– at least of the current form– altogether.

That’s essentially what has happened in New York and Silicon Valley. You don’t look for jobs by sending cold resumes. You can try it, but it’s usually ineffective, even if you’re one of those “rock star” engineers who is always in demand. Instead, you go to meetups and conferences and meet people in-person. That approach works well, and it’s really the only reliable way to get leads. This is less of an option for someone in Anchorage or Tbilisi, however. What we should be trying to do with technology is to build these “post-resume” search avenues on the Internet– not the same old shit that doesn’t work.

So, all of this said, what are resumes good for? I’ve come to the conclusion that there is one very strong purpose for resumes, and one that justifies not discarding the concept altogether. A resume is a list of things one is willing to be asked about in the context of a job interview. If you put Scala on your resume, you’re making it clear that you’re confident enough in your knowledge of that language to take questions about it, and possibly lose a job offer if you actually don’t know anything about it. I think the “Ask me about <X>” feature of resumes is probably the single saving grace of this otherwise uninformative piece of paper.

If I were to make a naive first scratch at solving this problem, here’s how I’d “futurize” the resume. Companies, titles, and dates all become irrelevant. Leave that clutter off. Likewise, I’d ask that companies drop the requirement nonsense where they put 5 years of experience in a 3-year-old technology as a “must have” bullet point. Since requirement sprawl is “free”, it occurs, and few people actually meet any sufficiently long requirement set to the letter, so that seems to select against people who actually read the requirements. Instead, here’s the lightweight solution: allocate 20 points. (The reason for the number 20 is to impose granularity; fractional points are not allowed.) For example, an engineering candidate might put herself forward like so:

• Machine learning: 6
• Functional programming: 5
• Clojure: 3
• Project management: 3
• R: 2
• Python: 1

These points might seem “meaningless”, because there’s no natural unit for them. but they’re not. What they show, clearly, is that a candidate has a clear interest (and is willing to be grilled for knowledge) in machine learning and functional programming, moderate experience in project management and with Clojure, and a little bit of experience in Python and R. There’s a lot of information there, as long as the allocation of points is done in good faith and, if not, that person won’t pass many interviews. Job requirements would be published in the same way: assign importance to the things according to how much they really matter, and keep the total at 20 points.

Since the points have different meanings on each side– for the employee, they represent fractions of experience; for the company, they represent relative importance– it goes without saying that a person who self-assigns 5 points in a technology isn’t ineligible for a job posting that places an importance of 6 for that technology. Rather, it indicates that there’s a rough match in how much weight each party assigns to that competency. This data could be mined to match employees to job listings for initial interviews and, quite likely, this approach (while imperfect) would perform better than the existing resume-driven regime. What used to involve overwhelmed gatekeepers is now a “simple matter” of unsupervised learning.

There is, of course, an obvious problem with this, which is that some people have more industry experience and “deserve” more points. An out-of-college candidate might only deserve 10 points, while a seasoned veteran should get 40 or 50. I’ll admit that I haven’t come up with a good solution for that. It’s a hard problem, because (a) one wants to avoid ageism, while (b) the objective here is sparseness in presentation, and I can’t think of a quick solution that doesn’t clutter the process up with distracting details. What I will concede is that, while some people clearly deserve more points than others do, there’s no fair way to perform that evaluation at an individual level. The job market is a distributed system with numerous adversarial agents, and any attempt to impose a global social status over it will fail, both practically and morally speaking.

Indeed, if there’s something that I find specifically despicable about the current resume-and-referral-driven job search culture, it’s in the attempt to create a global social status when there’s absolutely no good reason for one to exist.

I’ve written a lot about open allocation, so I think it’s obvious where I stand on the issue. One of the questions that is always brought up in that discussion is: so who answers the phones? The implicit assumption, with which I don’t agree, is that there are certain categories of work that simply will not be performed unless people are coerced into doing it. To counter this, I’m going to answer the question directly. Who does the unpleasant work in an open-allocation company? What characterizes the work that doesn’t get done under open allocation?

First, define “unpleasant”. 

Most people in most jobs dislike going to work, but it’s not clear to me how much of that is an issue of fit as opposed to objectively unpleasant work. The problem comes from two sources. First, companies often determine their project load based on “requirements” whose importance is assessed according to the social status of the person proposing it rather than any reasonable notion of business, aesthetic, or technological value, so that generates a lot of low-yield busywork that people prefer to avoid because it’s not very important. Second, companies and hiring managers tend to be ill-equipped at matching people to their specialties, especially in technology. Hence, you have machine learning experts working on payroll systems. It’s not clear to me, however, that there’s this massive battery of objectively undesirable work on which companies rely. There’s probably someone who’d gladly take on a payroll-system project as an excuse to learn Python.

Additionally, most of what makes work unpleasant isn’t the work itself but the subordinate context: nonsensical requirements, lack of choice in one’s tools, and unfair evaluation systems. This is probably the most important insight that a manager should have about work: most people genuinely want to work. They don’t need to be coerced, and doing that will only reduce their intrinsic incentives in the long run. In that light, open allocation’s mission is to remove the command system that turns work that would otherwise be fulfilling into drudgery. Thus, even if we accept that there’s some quantity of unpleasant work that any company will generate, it’s likely that the amount of it will decrease under open allocation, especially as people are freed to find work that fits their interests and specialty. What’s left is work that no one wants to do: a smaller set of the workload. In most companies, there isn’t much of that work to go around, and it can almost always be automated.

The Four Quadrants

We define work as interesting if there are people who would enjoy doing it or find it fulfilling– some people like answering phones– and unpleasant if it’s drudgery that no one wants to do. We call work essential if it’s critical to a main function of the business– money is lost in large amounts if it’s not completed, or not done well– and discretionary if it’s less important. Exploratory work and support work tend to fall into the “discretionary” set. These two variables split work into four quadrants:

• First Quadrant: Interesting and essential. This is work that is intellectually challenging, reputable in the job market, and important to the company’s success. Example: the machine learning “secret sauce” that powers Netflix’s recommendations or Google’s web search.
• Second Quadrant: Unpleasant but essential. These tasks are often called “hero projects”. Few people enjoy doing them, but they’re critical to the company’s success. Example: maintaining or refactoring a badly-written legacy module on which the firm depends.
• Third Quadrant: Interesting but discretionary. This type of work might become essential to the company in the future, but for now, it’s not in the company’s critical path. Third Quadrant work is important for the long-term creative health of the company and morale, but the company has not been (and should not be) bet on it.  Example: robotics research in a consumer web company.
• Fourth Quadrant: Unpleasant and discretionary. This work isn’t especially desirable, nor is it important to the company. This is toxic sludge to be avoided if possible, because in addition to being unpleasant to perform, it doesn’t look good in a person’s promotion packet. This is the slop work that managers delegate out of a false perception of a pet project’s importance. Example: at least 80 percent of what software engineers are assigned at their day jobs.

The mediocrity that besets large companies over time is a direct consequence of the Fourth Quadrant work that closed allocation generates. When employees’ projects are assigned, without appeal, by managers, the most reliable mechanism for project-value discovery– whether capable workers are willing to entwine their careers with it– is shut down. The result, under closed allocation, is that management does not get this information regarding what projects the employees consider important, and therefore won’t even know what the Fourth Quadrant work is. Can they recover this “market information” by asking their reports? I would say no. If the employees have learned (possibly the hard way) how to survive a subordinate role, they won’t voice the opinion that their assigned project is a dead end, even if they know it to be true.

Closed allocation simply lacks the garbage-collection mechanism that companies need in order to clear away useless projects. Perversely, companies are much more comfortable with cutting people than projects. On the latter, they tend to be “write-only”, removing projects only years after they’ve failed. Most of the time, when companies perform layoffs, they do so without reducing the project load, expecting the survivors to put up with an increased workload. This isn’t sustainable, and the result often is that, instead of reducing scope, the company starts to underperform in an unplanned way: you get necrosis instead of apoptosis.

So what happens in each quadrant under open allocation? First Quadrant work gets done, and done well. That’s never an issue in any company, because there’s no shortage of good people who want to do it. Third Quadrant work also gets enough attention, likewise, because people enjoy doing it. As for Second Quadrant work, that also gets done, but management often finds that it has to pay for it, in bonuses, title upgrades, or pay raises. Structuring such rewards is a delicate art, since promotions should represent respect but not confer power that might undermine open allocation. However, I believe it can be done. I think the best solution is to have promotions and a “ladder”, but for its main purpose to be informing decisions about pay, and not an excuse to create power relationships that make no sense.

So, First and Third Quadrant work are not a problem under open allocation. That stuff is desirable and allocates itself. Second Quadrant work is done, and well, but expensive. Is this so bad, though? The purpose of these rewards is to compensate people for freely choosing work that would otherwise be averse to their interests and careers. That seems quite fair to me. Isn’t that how we justify CEO compensation? They do risky work, assume lots of responsibilities other people don’t want, and are rewarded for it? At least, that’s the story. Still, a “weakness” of open allocation is that it requires management to pay for work that they could get “for free” in a more coercive system. The counterpoint is that coerced workers are generally not going to perform as well as people with more pleasant motivations. If the work is truly Second Quadrant, it’s worth every damn penny to have it done well.

Thus, I think it’s a fair claim that open allocation wins in the First, Second, and Third Quadrant. What about the Fourth? Well, under open allocation, that stuff doesn’t get done. The company won’t pay for it, and no one is going to volunteer to do it, so it doesn’t happen. The question is: is that a problem?

I won’t argue that Fourth Quadrant work doesn’t have some value, because from the perspective of the business, it does. Fixing bugs in a dying legacy module might make its demise a bit slower. However, I would say that the value of most Fourth Quadrant work is low, and much of it is negative in value on account of the complexity that it imposes, in the same way that half the stuff in a typical apartment is of negative value. Where does it come from, and why does it exist? The source of Fourth Quadrant work is usually a project that begins as a Third Quadrant “pet project”. It’s not critical to the business’s success, but someone influential wants to do it and decides that it’s important. Later on, he manages to get “head count” for it: people who will be assigned to complete the less glamorous work that this pet project generates as it scales; or, in other words, people whose time is being traded, effectively, as a political token. If the project never becomes essential but its owner is active enough in defending it to keep it from ever being killed, it will continue to generate Fourth Quadrant work. That’s where most of this stuff comes from. So what is it used for? Often, companies allocate Third Quadrant work to interns and Fourth Quadrant work to new hires, not wanting to “risk” essential work on new people. The purpose is evaluative: to see if this person is a “team player” by watching his behavior on relatively unimportant, but unattractive, work. It’s the “dues paying” period and it’s horrible, because a bad review can render a year or two of a person’s working life completely wasted.

Under open allocation, the Fourth Quadrant work goes away. No one does any. I think that’s a good thing, because it doesn’t serve much of a purpose. People should be diving into relevant and interesting work as soon as they’re qualified for it. If someone’s not ready to be working on First and Second Quadrant (e.g. essential) work, then have that person in the Third Quadrant until she learns the ropes.

Closed-allocation companies need the Fourth Quadrant work because they hire people but don’t trust them. The ideology of open allocation is: we hired you, so we trust you to do your best to deliver useful work. That doesn’t mean that employees are given unlimited expense accounts on the first day, but it means that they’re trusted with their own time. For a contrast, the ideology of closed allocation is: just because we’re paying you doesn’t mean we trust, like, or respect you; you’re not a real member of the team until we say you are. This brings us to the real “original sin” at the heart of closed allocation: the duplicitous tendency of growing-too-fast software industries to hire before they trust.