I recently heard on the radio, that nearly half the Indian population suffered a power outage due, not to the lack of capacity, but due to interfering politics. That's something that developing nations have to endure, though one would hope that it will, eventually, pass.

Here, in the U.S, it's often the "Human Resources" people who screw things up in the area of salary and placements. Often, for example, the HR person doesn't know that LAN and Ethernet mean essentially the same thing. Hence, if HR gets a list of qualifications including expertise in Ethernet and FPGA, an applicant who lists LAN and FPGA on his CV will be treated differently than one indicating expertise in local area networking and programmable logic. It could mean as much as a 70% difference in salary if the latter applicant is even invited for an interview. Fortunately, the interview process will force such information to the surface and avoid such a disparity, but only if it gets that far.

I've seen published salaries purportedly from national surveys, in national trade magazines, that are so obviously published to drive down salary demands in certain parts of the country it is unmistakably distorted. OTOH, I've seen companies with completely incompetent engineering staff, paid over twice as much as very capable staff in other organizations in the same community. I've also seen extremely clever work from seemingly unsophisticated persons whom, at first glance, one would never credit with such imagination.

A "system" in such a context is a "two-edged sword" in that it certainly can be an obstacle to good decisions about placement and compensation. It does, however, provide the HR people with a mechanism for sorting things out, no matter how poorly.

RE