> One can review teachers much like one reviews any other profession.
I'm not sure how you think this is relevant. One can, but they aren't reviewed in any meaningful way. And as anyone who has read through a few Amazon reviews would tell you, relying on "reviews" for anything important is just asking for grief.
> We don't need the NSA to tell us who the best and worst developers are, right?
Most companies would love nothing more than to be able to tell which is which. And we get fizzbuzz and other interview fads every 18 months. It's not even clear that bad developers are bad other than in specific environments... the guy who was shit at the shit job might turn around and be pretty good at another non-shit job, and those who are "good" often have other issues.
But even for developers, there are at least some (bad?) metrics to measure by other than "some percentage of these brats didn't flunk the standardized testing". If my code failed on 40% of computers for no other reason than that the owners of those computers lived in one zip code and not another zip code, I'd probably be a worst developer too.
> That's the thing, neither of those options are acceptable to me.
Which makes it great for me that what you find acceptable has nothing to do with how the world actually works.
> As Raymond Hettinger says (admittedly about easier problems to solve), there must be a better way.
You're a monkey with a Dunbar number of about 250. Maybe on up to 300. There is no utopia for you, not even a "better but not utopia" once you're up past that number locally. So unless the population falls under 3 or 4 million, you're just fucked. You'd have to become a new species, something wildly different than the primate you are.
That's not impossible I don't think. But most of us don't want to become the termite people with you. Not that that's stopping you... the number of sterile worker drones that read my comment here is ironically very high, I think, for me to be writing this. Hell, maybe you could speciate in a few hundred years if there were no other obstacles.
> but rather that they live in a society where those upper echelons aren't present in the first place.
That's easy. The Soviets figured it out decades ago. Have you tried Stalinism?
I'm not sure how you think this is relevant. One can, but they aren't reviewed in any meaningful way. And as anyone who has read through a few Amazon reviews would tell you, relying on "reviews" for anything important is just asking for grief.
> We don't need the NSA to tell us who the best and worst developers are, right?
Most companies would love nothing more than to be able to tell which is which. And we get fizzbuzz and other interview fads every 18 months. It's not even clear that bad developers are bad other than in specific environments... the guy who was shit at the shit job might turn around and be pretty good at another non-shit job, and those who are "good" often have other issues.
But even for developers, there are at least some (bad?) metrics to measure by other than "some percentage of these brats didn't flunk the standardized testing". If my code failed on 40% of computers for no other reason than that the owners of those computers lived in one zip code and not another zip code, I'd probably be a worst developer too.
> That's the thing, neither of those options are acceptable to me.
Which makes it great for me that what you find acceptable has nothing to do with how the world actually works.
> As Raymond Hettinger says (admittedly about easier problems to solve), there must be a better way.
You're a monkey with a Dunbar number of about 250. Maybe on up to 300. There is no utopia for you, not even a "better but not utopia" once you're up past that number locally. So unless the population falls under 3 or 4 million, you're just fucked. You'd have to become a new species, something wildly different than the primate you are.
That's not impossible I don't think. But most of us don't want to become the termite people with you. Not that that's stopping you... the number of sterile worker drones that read my comment here is ironically very high, I think, for me to be writing this. Hell, maybe you could speciate in a few hundred years if there were no other obstacles.
> but rather that they live in a society where those upper echelons aren't present in the first place.
That's easy. The Soviets figured it out decades ago. Have you tried Stalinism?