This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to find good people, and the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on personal recommendations. It's not that people wouldn't take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of uncertainty, they can't absorb the risk of the stranger not being qualified. So they will always prefer someone they know is qualified over someone who they don't know is qualified but might be better.
The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who know they've learned something.
It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don't communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it's better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.
> the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence
I'd really rather go with "the more society discovers that we don't know how to obtain objective measures of excellence". We really don't have good tests that can fit in the interview slot for a lot of software engineering jobs.
You can say this over and over again, but that doesn't make it true. It is just a wish of how you want reality to be, and the US is sufficiently wealthy that people can indulge in these delusions and still put food on the table. For a while - there is a lot of wealth and human capital to destroy before things start to break down. These types of delusions are what makes it harder for newer people to enter fields and so inhibits human capital formation. Getting rid of grades in schools or giving different races different grades, getting rid of standardized tests, etc, this all destroys information and human capital. It also makes the nation less competitive when it competes against the (majority) of the world which does not suffer from these delusions and is more interested in acquiring human capital than destroying it for the sake of some equality myth.
You wrote a lot about the issue in general without actually addressing the claim. We don't have an objective measure while interviewing software engineers. Any too specific test will fail on some good hire during an interview. On the other hand generic tests need to adjust as you interview so they're subjective.
The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who know they've learned something.
It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don't communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it's better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.