Can we win the hunger games against the buzz saw of Chinese competition with outdated hiring practices?

Deep Seek CEO revealed his unorthodox hiring practices

We all know that our job market has been broken for the past couple of decades already, especially in the technology sector. As any job-seekers will tell you, it is brutal. As I wrote almost 5 years ago in this article, our widespread outdated hiring practices

… is done this way because it is convenient and cheap, not because it produces the best outcome for both the company and the candidate.

Consequences of outdated hiring practices

As I wrote in my follow-up article, the consequences of outdated hiring practices will result in:

• Mass skills stagnation in the economy

• Lack of innovation in companies (AI is the only exception in the American economy)

• Widespread skills shortages

All these consequences will have a negative long-term impact on the economic future of our country. It will make our economy uncompetitive in the long run.

Enshittification

Enshttification was first mentioned in 2022 to describe the pattern in which

… online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Today, we are noticing that enshittification is spreading beyond online products. People are also starting to notice that the quality of offerings from Big Businesses is declining too (e.g. financial products, banking, insurance, aviation, telecommunication services, supermarkets).

These are signs that our economy is getting less and less competitive.

I am wondering, to what extent do broken hiring processes contribute to the enshittification process of our entire economy? Or the broken hiring is a symptom of enshittification?

Deep Seek and Alibaba burst in

This week, we saw an obscure Chinese company called “Deep Seek” sparking a financial panic on Wall Street. As this Wall Street Journal article reported,

… it showed that Chinese AI developers were not as far behind U.S. rivals as many had previously thought.

Deep Seek should be the wake-up call to ourselves. We cannot rest on our laurels. If we do not reverse the enshittification and rot in our economies, we cannot stay competitive in the long run.

Make no mistake, the Chinese are hyper-competitive. Enterprises in China are often at each other’s throats to vie for supremacy. As mentioned in my previous article,

China subjects their own enterprises to a ruthless Game of Thrones within their own country. Enterprises will battle other enterprises in brutal hunger games until the strongest survives. The rest will die and go bankrupt. The survivor is the provably fittest, and will then go out to battle the rest of the world.

Back to hiring practices…

To survive in hyper-competitive China, enterprises have to think outside the box and take contrarian approaches. In the previously-mentioned Wall Street Journal article, Deep Seek has an unorthodox philosophy when it comes to hiring:

He said he looks for people fresh out of college with fresh ideas. He values capability and creativity over credentials. And he believes experience stifles innovation because it means people end up leaning on their past experiences to solve problems.

“For short-term goals, hiring experienced individuals makes sense,” he said. “But for long-term success, experience doesn’t matter that much.”

Our broken hiring practices are extremely obsessed with hiring only for experience. It is great for the short term. But it will not set us up for long-term success. This practice is so widespread in our economy that we are now beginning to see that it is causing rot and enshittification in our economy. If this practice is not the cause, then it is yet another symptom of rot and enshittification.

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Don’t be surprised that we are going to see more surprises from China in the days to come.