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Ask HN: Why the sudden hate towards meritocracy in tech?

• sharemywin 11y ago
  you proved your counter answer. when you have humans make decisions you get bias. "his", "guy" etc. You've already assumed it's a guy. or at least discouraged most women from bothering to apply. meritocratic would great if it were achievable.
  • johnvic 11y ago
    That's ridiculous, I'm a minority and I don't feel discouraged because they show a white guy in an ad for a job, I'm not going to choose some other company just because they put an afro-latino person like myself in the ad.
    • sharemywin 11y ago
      I'm just trying to point out that sexism, racism, ageism are so ingrained in our culture we don't even notice we're doing it half the time. As well as a million other biases. so when you checked 3 instead of 4 on that performance review or selected candidate A over B was it 100% objective. Probably not so stop acting like it was. Maybe my wife pissed me off today and everyone gets an unconscious -1 on their review. Should we strive to get there absolutely but it's a perfection that's impossible to achieve.
• PaulHoule 11y ago
  The trouble is that the meritocracy is a lie. If you have connected and rich parents you can practice many forms of "achievement laundering" that make it look like you did itself, in fact you might believe you did do it yourself thus have a sense of entitlement, no sense of empathy for others, etc. There is not just one way of keeping score. My in-laws had neighbors who were filthy rich but the wife rolled her escalade while driving drunk and used connections to avoid prosecution. When it all fell apart they did massive damage to their luxury house (poured concrete down the drains, etc.) To spite the bank. At one time some people might think they were winners but somebody else would say they are a sorry excuse for human beings. When it comes to code or other creative works, same thing. I don't know who is a better programmer. I know a guy who writes optimization code in C++ put have him make a front end app and he will actively resist doing anything right because he buys into faddish ideas in a cargo cult way and won't listen to anybody else. Similarly some people are better at claiming credit for what their team does than others. When I look at a good team I don't think one person is necessarily better than the others but rather they have different skills, attitudes and strengths so the whole can accomplish more than they can on their own. And there is luck. The success of sv for instance has a lot to do with the world having places where people can afford to have and educate children, something only mark zuckerberg can do in Palo alto. If the whole world was like sv there would be no young people to provide a labor force, etc. Look how some people think don trump is a great businessman and others think he sucks. Or how a book or other creative work can be viewed in an entirely different way decades after it comes out. The best sysadmin I ever worked with had mediocre technical skills but she knew how to get help from the team and vendors, was tenacious and protective and had a skill set which was complimentary to myself or the rest of the team. You could not honestly say that she was better than me or I was better than her but I learned a huge amount working with here and I am better today for working with here.
  • stray 11y ago
    If she was the best sysadmin you ever worked with -- you could honestly say that she was better than you. Otherwise, you're saying you are the best sysadmin. So unless you consider yourself the best -- you indirectly did say that she was better than you. And the implication is that even with mediocre technical skills, she managed to leverage her considerable social skill to become the best sysadmin you ever worked with. Sounds like a person whose work has considerable merit.
    • PaulHoule 11y ago
      I was not the sysadmin in this team, I was a developer. She was definitely a better sysadmin, I was a better developer. The point is that nobody is better than everybody else in every way.
      • stray 11y ago
        Correct. Sysadmins should be judged solely on the value they bring as a Sysadmin: on merit. Likewise with butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers (and even developers).
  • johnvic 11y ago
    I do agree with a lot of what you are saying but that seems more like the result of a lack of meritocracy and not an excess of it. In any case you are showing me why people high up don't want a meritocracy, because they have little or no merit and in a meritocracy they would lose.
  • angersock 11y ago
    I don't know who is a better programmer. With respect, if you aren't willing to take a stand on what does and does not qualify somebody, you are by definition unable to comment meaningfully on the concept of a meritocracy. You list a lot of examples here that are basically red herrings or are completely unrelated to the discussion of what is and is not a meritocracy--your bringing up of books, for example, which are not capable of having merit as they are not people.
• stray 11y ago
  You're really opening a can of worms... Of course meritocracy is not unfair. And of course it is the best system. But there is a very strong, powerful group of people who judge fairness not in terms of opportunity -- but in terms of outcome. Such people cannot accept that the gender/race/etc identities of those who produce the most meritorious work may not match their idea of a fair outcome -- therefore, the game must be rigged. That if the winners aren't acceptably diverse -- it can only be because of the invisible hand of multiple systems of oppression. You correctly believe that a person's work should be judged purely on merit with no consideration of the attributes of the person who created it. The zeitgeist believes that the only things that matter are the attributes of the person -- and that there must always be equal outcomes for every category they can divide people into -- regardless of the content of their character or the value of their works. I personally believe we should do everything we possibly can to ensure some baseline level of opportunity to everybody -- and accept that what people do with that opportunity is up to them.
  • johnvic 11y ago
    I'm half Latino and half African, through the years people like me was kept outside of opportunities because no matter how good you were at something you were not "white" and therefore you couldn't get in. The same system but in reverse is still the same system and that is the last thing I want because how do I know its not going to reverse to those old days when people like me couldn't move up in life because I was born the wrong color?
  • cauterized 11y ago
    Conversely, there is a large group of people who judge merit only in terms of outcome, without taking into account that two people of equal merit may have unequal outcomes due to unequal opportunity (or the person with greater merit at even have a lesser outcome).
    • johnvic 11y ago
      I agree but you will never be able to have a perfectly level field, I had friends whose parents were already in IT and thus learned to program years before I did which gave them a substantial advantage, but how do you solve that?.
• angersock 11y ago
  So, the first problem is, what is a meritocracy? In Young's original 1958 formulation, we get: "merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications." That's clearly not how it is actually used today, but people will still use the term's origins as some proof of original sin. Napolean's definition is a bit better (and older!): the tools to him that can handle them. A modern definition, and one I think all of us here can probably agree is congruent with the spirit most of us use it in, is: A process of governance by which the authority of people is weighted in direct proportion to their demonstrated competence and ability. In theory, such a system is clearly the most reasonable--after all, why wouldn't we defer to people that know the most or that have the best track record? And here's where things get murky. The big issue is that the "track record" is very much subject to the whimns of charisma and reality distortion. Steve Jobs was objectively a liar, a narcissist, abusive, a very bad manager (at least until much later), and a bad father. And yet, he would still be promoted under any modern notion of meritocracy, because he did have the critical skill of conning a bunch of folks into thinking he was actually worth following. A more honest definition of meritocracy might be: A process of governance by which the authority of people is weighted in direct proportion to their perceived competence and ability. Noting the change of one word, suddenly the system is seen as a sham: all it takes is a person to appropriate the accomplishments of one other person, and suddenly they have access to more political capital, which they can use to take credit for others' accomplishments (like Banzi seems to have done with Arduino), and thus unlocking still further capital, and so on, and so forth. This isn't as likely to happen in small groups with equal distributions of skills: at such a stage, perception and demonstration of abilities are nearly the same. As a group grows and specializes, however, the gap between perception and demonstration can widen as people suddenly are uncomfortable or unable to recognize when somebody is getting undue merit. Orthogonal to all this is the question of diversity and of privilege, which is discussed by a sibling commenter stray. There's a deal more to unpack there.
  • johnvic 11y ago
    I think the title makes it very clear I'm strictly talking about the tech industry here, I can't say meritocracy is the best for all industries, let alone as a form of governance. >In Young's original 1958 formulation I'm using the modern/current idea of meritocracy, I know it meant other things in the past but bringing that out is like racists talking about some event in the past to say "certain people" should be kept aside in case they do it again. >And yet, he would still be promoted under any modern notion of meritocracy, because he did have the critical skill of conning a bunch of folks into thinking he was actually worth following. Not a fan of jobs but I think that what worked for him because he arrived at a company that had no future and so not a lot of people wanted to challenge him to be the captain of a sinking ship. And his success was the result of consumers who as always care little about who makes their products, not meritocracy. Anyway, I hope you didn't write this from an apple product... >all it takes is a person to appropriate the accomplishments of one other person, and suddenly they have access to more political capital That is what we currently have, and its not a meritocracy
• DanBC 11y ago
  Because it's usually not meritocracy, but "you look like me". As soon as you add bias-cancelling features you notice changes, which suggests that while merit played some part it wasn't the only, or most important, thing. For years orchestras claimed to be meritocracies. As soon as they started binded auditions they saw more women being hired. We see similar results with people sending identical -apart from the name- resumes for job applications. The male names see more replies.
  • stray 11y ago
    So then a meritocracy is the solution -- and putting measures in place to ensure that irrelevant information is withheld from decision makers is proven (at least in orchestras) to result in more equitable outcomes.
    • DanBC 11y ago
      A true meritocracy is hard to achieve, and it's only a partial solution to a narrow part of the problem. An orchestra putting up screens only fixes the problem for people who manage to get to audition; you still need to fix the conservatories, and the schools, so that you get enough people to get to audition. And then once a person's got in you need to recognise that some people are going to work less hours - women may have children; someone with caring responsibilities may need to attend hospital with their loved one; someone with a disability may need to attend treatment for themselves. Some people see this as merit (time off means less merit), others see it as irrelevant information. Sure, if you can achieve meritocracy it's probably a good thing. But you need to be aware that very often when people say "this is a meritocracy" they mean "we are subject to cognitive bias, but don't recognise that, and haven't taken any steps to address it".
      • johnvic 11y ago
        You seem to be making the same mistake than people who say democracy isn't the best system and yet you fail to understand that is the best system we have so far. A meritocracy in tech would be the same case, its not perfect but it would be far better than the current system were talented but socially unskilled coders from any group are at a disadvantage.
• 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
  > how is not the best system for this industry Mostly because we're terrible at actually implementing it, but phenomenal at fooling ourselves into believing that we've implemented it.
• carapace 11y ago
  There is a spectrum of power. During WWII the locus of power finally transitioned from raw destructive power (which reached its ultimate form in the Atomic Bomb) to Metis, that quality that in its lesser form we call cunning, and which develops into cleverness, then intelligence, and finally Wisdom. (There is a discontinuity between intelligence and wisdom.) The physical form of Metis is the Turing Machine, the Universal Machine. (That other great monster child of the war.) Those that are most capable and driven master this media and are at this very moment driving forward the "cutting edge" of evolution on the world. They are not obvious, you have not heard their names. These unknown masters rule the world merely as a side-effect of their total obsession to seek Truth. This, we call "Meritocracy."
• DonJuanAny 11y ago
  It'll only work if the review process is fair and executed by competent individuals. To share one of my last reviews, after exceeding expectations, my reviewer assessed: "...but I expected you to exceed expectations!".