w @ 49: Face it, men are expandable.

FIFY

If need be, one man can do the most critical fathering duties of some number of others.

One can have a fine argument about the eugenic effects of war. I suspect that historically, they were neutral to positive. When you start excluding the faulty from battle, however, … I dunno. As long as you give modest priority to promoting the very best taking them off the front lines (not to mention letting them lead the lower levels away from unnecessary carnage) I suspect the negative effects on the lower-level troops are near neutral, even so.

–

jmh @ 51: Another parallel, which would be more Ballmer than Gates, was heavily skewing the rewards to a handfull of “top performers” in a highly competitive company.

Yeah. In regards to this and to “Larry the PM/Manager” these are old, old problems. In the 1960s (!) IBM invented the “dual ladder” system to try to keep techs in tech and let managers manage and reward both appropriately. It didn’t always work, but simply by giving official recognition to the issue, it was immensely helpful. And those were IBM’s glory years, rather than the outsourcing zombie they are now.

Where I’ve been (and that’s a lot of places) there is serious trouble getting management to recognize just who *is* doing the difficult, critical, or valuable work, in quality or quantity. So, you end up promoting the tall guy with the deep voice, or the girl – no, not that, but the lesbian who is politically non-threatening. See enough of that, and an early exit doesn’t seem all that bad.