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Alternatively, a top company will hire someone straight out of undergrad with a CS degree from a top engineering school, but they won't hire the guy who created
by Dr_tldr 11y ago
Alternatively, a top company will hire someone straight out of undergrad with a CS degree from a top engineering school, but they won't hire the guy who created Homebrew because he doesn't have the algo for reversing a binary search tree memorized.
The problem with meritocracy is that it implicitly depends upon a heuristic, and heuristics can always be gamed or inadvertently biased, no matter the industry.
I think this was part of what the author was trying to say, but I agree with you, it's a poorly written and wishy-washy op-ed.
- seivan 11y agoThey didn't implemented meritocracy then. They just compared the value of papers. Max could have lost to someone who has spent all their life as a social activist and has degree in humanism, womyns studies and various other bullshit with friends at Google. That's the point of what meritocracy is trying got avoid.
- Dr_tldr 11y agoThey didn't compare papers at all, they compared proficiency at a well-defined and concrete task with an objective standard, and he was worse than a recent CS grad. But who decides a task is or is not a measure of merit? And really, who decides a career social activist with good soft skills who can save the company 50 million in lawsuits and bad press has less merit than the engineer who may work for years on a project that ultimately gets canceled?
- rubberstamp 11y agoIt funny what "merit" consists of from different perspectives. For google, merit may be to invert a binary tree. But most of the products by those googlers ain't that great. As from my perspective, I think homebrew is something that deserves more credit(merit) than most of google's products. The guy identified a problem and architectured a good solution for that problem. That already shows he has solid software development foundations, doesn't it? Even though he doesn't have a fancy degree.