7 ms·

What's the deal with all this anti-meritocracy stuff? Can't we all just work on a level playing field and move past this junk? Seems like not doing so causes a

What's the deal with all this anti-meritocracy stuff? Can't we all just work on a level playing field and move past this junk? Seems like not doing so causes a lot more problems than it solves.

HerraBRE 10y ago
I think many people feel "meritocracy" has become a code-word for "allowing technical contributions to justify and excuse bad social behaviour." Important free Software and Open Source projects are almost always community efforts. Ignoring bad behaviour which harms the community may have technical benefits in the short term (assuming the people behaving badly are skilled hackers), but in the long term their contributions may not be worth the harm they do by excluding and driving away other potential contributors. A hostile work environment is rightly considered a problem that needs to be fixed in a professional context. For those of us doing FOSS as a hobby, it's even more important - few will spend time on a hobby where they are treated badly. I also like the meritocracy concept. But I feel rather strongly that it is important that the "metrics" are not just technical, but social as well.
- problems 10y ago
  I hear you, I definitely agree with your premise, but my worry is that this will basically boil down to a political test to participate in many FOSS communities. At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly.
  - HerraBRE 10y ago
    Drawing that line is exactly what codes of conduct are supposed to do - and like everything else in our community, these are documents which are copied, forked and improved by pull requests.
    - problems 10y ago
      The problem is it still needs to be up to project leaders to make a determination of whether or not the behavior violates those codes of conduct. And they might not be particularly well equipped for that. What's considered "harassment" for example? Does 1 off comment count or does it need to be systemic? What if it was a heat of the moment situation and an apology was made afterwards? Does expressing an opinion less than the generally accepted one about a rape case for example count as misogyny? What about mental health comments not in line with generally accepted opinions, but which might still hold some validity? How about defending political opinions based on your religion? There are too many questions that I know many people would respond very differently to.
      - HerraBRE 10y ago
        There are indeed many questions. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these things. The answers are out there... I think if we take a step back and don't try to invent all the wheels ourselves, we'll find that almost all of these questions have established answers from the world of business and human resources. We do have to get past the first step though, which is agreeing that these are problems we care to solve. The wider community is still divided on that, as illustrated by this thread and the comments on the OP.
        problems 10y ago
        I don't think "the answers are out there" so cut and dry. There's many political and social opinions that there isn't a clear resolution on. So unless we have a very good way to solve this concretely and provably I think it's best to not get involved in trying.
        inopinatus 10y ago
        No, that is a reason to keep trying and iteratively improving. Just because a problem is hard, doesn't mean we should all give up on it.
  - gdwatson 10y ago
    "At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly." This is key. A large part of contemporary American (and, as I understand it, European) politics involves struggles over the size of the Overton window. This means that even people with little interest in the project will have a strong incentive to use the project's code of conduct as a tool for defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the communities that overlap with the project.
xienze 10y ago
The latest thinking from our fine universities is that only white males can get ahead in a meritocracy. Everyone else lives life at a disadvantage so they can't truly compete in such a system. Or something like that.
minikites 10y ago
It sure would be nice to live in a meritocracy but we're not even close: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 > The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.
- problems 10y ago
  Sorry, I'm not saying everywhere in society _is_ a meritocracy, simply that it should try to function like one. Meritocracy should be a respectable goal, not one to be shunned. The labor market would be a better place if it were a meritocracy - can we agree on that? And isn't the only way to live in that goal of meritocracy to actually try to?
  - empthought 10y ago
    Setting aside the pressing question of measurement and bias, it's not at all clear to me that it is just to apportion power according to ability and talent. Consider Rawl's original position argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position -- sure, if you perceive yourself to be (or actually are) of high merit, a meritocracy sounds great. But defining a just society requires one to consider the possibility that one could be in the position of being incapable of meeting the demands that a meritocracy requires of its participants in order to flourish.
ealexhudson 10y ago
I don't see why promoting inclusiveness and frictionless contribution shouldn't be seen as meritorious activity - I'm not saying that's what you're suggesting, but "meritocracy" in the context of a software project like this is often taken to mean "can be socially dysfunctional so long as it is technically functional", as if the two requirements are in opposition to each other. I don't believe they are, and I think there are more examples of friendly and socially functional projects (that happen to be meritorious) than not.
- lmm 10y ago
  I think that's all true, but too often "inclusiveness" is used as a stick to beat political opponents with. I'm all for attracting more developers for FreeBSD. However I'm against e.g. giving an appointed and unaccountable committee the authority to kick out anyone at their sole discretion, which was what some of the "code of conduct" proposals boiled down to.
  - HerraBRE 10y ago
    I disagree. Codes of conduct boil down to requiring members of the community to treat each other with basic decency, and defining a process for showing them the door when they fail to do so. This is not a controversial concept in the real world. You'll be fired from your job if you treat your co-workers badly, you'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients.
    - lmm 10y ago
      > You'll be fired from your job if you treat your co-workers badly Sure, but there'll be a process. You'll have a right to a hearing, the right to your own union representative, and a right to appeal to a tribunal or similar. And the HR people themselves will have oversight. HR don't get handed a license to just fire anyone they want to. > You'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients Pubs are not an institution to emulate. A project like FreeBSD should hold itself to a higher standard.
      - 10y ago
chickenfries 10y ago
I think the article goes into the problems with that pretty extensively.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
There's a big difference between the concept of meritocracy on paper and the actual behavior of organizations calling themselves meritocratic. In many cases, the operational definition of "merit" ends up incorporating irrelevant biases of the most senior and influential members, sometimes cloaked by formalities such as HR performance metrics. So, much like with debates over communism, I think we end up with a major disconnect between people who focus on love for the ideal and people who focus on hate for the implementations they've seen.
- problems 10y ago
  Do you have such an example of an organization that claimed to be meritocratic but defied that in practice? There are plenty of such examples for communism of course, but I'm blanking on ones of meritocracy. Seems like it should at least be an amicable goal.
  - jballanc 10y ago
    I don't know that they've ever (publicly) published a post-mortem, but I know GitHub used to emphasize being a "meritocracy" but have since moved away from that after some long-festering issues (that were distinctly anti-idealistic-meritocratic) surfaced. There's also the fact that the participation of women and minorities in OSS is smaller than their participation in the technology industry as a whole. Granted, not every OSS project touts itself as a meritocracy, but it's probably the area where the concept is championed most vociferously.
    - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      >participation of women and minorities in OSS is smaller I think that can mostly be diversity hiring. A company can hire women/minorities to increase diversity. A FOSS project can't accept code on the premise of diversity. I think the narrow scope of most FOSS projects (or the individual components that contributors wind up specializing in) also makes most of the benefits of diversity less relevant. Diverse teams do better on diverse tasks. (I don't think diversity hiring is a bad practice as long as the people hired are qualified for the job)
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Once upon a time, social justice types supported meritocracy. That was in the era when having classical musicians audition behind a screen increased the % of women. Unfortunately, the technology world has not had the same experience. When technology becomes more meritocratic (e.g., audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions rather than interviews), we get more Asians, fewer non-Asian minorities and fewer women. Because meritocracy in technology fails to achieve the goal of "gotta catch them all", it must be opposed.
- chrishacken 10y ago
  So what you're saying is, you want to hire people based on their gender and race rather than their skill set and experience.
  - anth1y 10y ago
    skills can be learned.
    - chrishacken 10y ago
      Then learn them before you apply for a job so that you can be competitive.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Yes, clearly "audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions" is a code word for race/gender.
    - chrishacken 10y ago
      I'm confused now. Which stance are you taking? > When technology becomes more meritocratic (e.g., audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions rather than interviews), we get more Asians, fewer non-Asian minorities and fewer women. Because meritocracy in technology fails to achieve the goal of "gotta catch them all", it must be opposed. This seems to suggest that you don't want meritocracy. Was that sarcasm?
moron4hire 10y ago
Did we read the same article? What do you mean?
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The FreeBSD project does now have a code of conduct; it is, Rice said, a "patched-up rush job". Project members still honestly thought that "meritocracy" meant "inclusiveness" initially. They have since learned otherwise, and the code is being reworked.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    There is merit in being able to work well with others. It's actually much more important than "raw lines of code tapped out on my own."

What's the deal with all this anti-meritocracy stuff? Can't we all just work on a level playing field and move past this junk? Seems like not doing so causes a lot more problems than it solves.

HerraBRE 10y ago

I think many people feel "meritocracy" has become a code-word for "allowing technical contributions to justify and excuse bad social behaviour." Important free Software and Open Source projects are almost always community efforts. Ignoring bad behaviour which harms the community may have technical benefits in the short term (assuming the people behaving badly are skilled hackers), but in the long term their contributions may not be worth the harm they do by excluding and driving away other potential contributors. A hostile work environment is rightly considered a problem that needs to be fixed in a professional context. For those of us doing FOSS as a hobby, it's even more important - few will spend time on a hobby where they are treated badly. I also like the meritocracy concept. But I feel rather strongly that it is important that the "metrics" are not just technical, but social as well.

problems 10y ago
I hear you, I definitely agree with your premise, but my worry is that this will basically boil down to a political test to participate in many FOSS communities. At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly.
- HerraBRE 10y ago
  Drawing that line is exactly what codes of conduct are supposed to do - and like everything else in our community, these are documents which are copied, forked and improved by pull requests.
  - problems 10y ago
    The problem is it still needs to be up to project leaders to make a determination of whether or not the behavior violates those codes of conduct. And they might not be particularly well equipped for that. What's considered "harassment" for example? Does 1 off comment count or does it need to be systemic? What if it was a heat of the moment situation and an apology was made afterwards? Does expressing an opinion less than the generally accepted one about a rape case for example count as misogyny? What about mental health comments not in line with generally accepted opinions, but which might still hold some validity? How about defending political opinions based on your religion? There are too many questions that I know many people would respond very differently to.
    - HerraBRE 10y ago
      There are indeed many questions. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these things. The answers are out there... I think if we take a step back and don't try to invent all the wheels ourselves, we'll find that almost all of these questions have established answers from the world of business and human resources. We do have to get past the first step though, which is agreeing that these are problems we care to solve. The wider community is still divided on that, as illustrated by this thread and the comments on the OP.
      - problems 10y ago
        I don't think "the answers are out there" so cut and dry. There's many political and social opinions that there isn't a clear resolution on. So unless we have a very good way to solve this concretely and provably I think it's best to not get involved in trying.
        inopinatus 10y ago
        No, that is a reason to keep trying and iteratively improving. Just because a problem is hard, doesn't mean we should all give up on it.
- gdwatson 10y ago
  "At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly." This is key. A large part of contemporary American (and, as I understand it, European) politics involves struggles over the size of the Overton window. This means that even people with little interest in the project will have a strong incentive to use the project's code of conduct as a tool for defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the communities that overlap with the project.

xienze 10y ago

The latest thinking from our fine universities is that only white males can get ahead in a meritocracy. Everyone else lives life at a disadvantage so they can't truly compete in such a system. Or something like that.

minikites 10y ago

It sure would be nice to live in a meritocracy but we're not even close: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 > The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

problems 10y ago
Sorry, I'm not saying everywhere in society _is_ a meritocracy, simply that it should try to function like one. Meritocracy should be a respectable goal, not one to be shunned. The labor market would be a better place if it were a meritocracy - can we agree on that? And isn't the only way to live in that goal of meritocracy to actually try to?
- empthought 10y ago
  Setting aside the pressing question of measurement and bias, it's not at all clear to me that it is just to apportion power according to ability and talent. Consider Rawl's original position argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position -- sure, if you perceive yourself to be (or actually are) of high merit, a meritocracy sounds great. But defining a just society requires one to consider the possibility that one could be in the position of being incapable of meeting the demands that a meritocracy requires of its participants in order to flourish.

ealexhudson 10y ago

I don't see why promoting inclusiveness and frictionless contribution shouldn't be seen as meritorious activity - I'm not saying that's what you're suggesting, but "meritocracy" in the context of a software project like this is often taken to mean "can be socially dysfunctional so long as it is technically functional", as if the two requirements are in opposition to each other. I don't believe they are, and I think there are more examples of friendly and socially functional projects (that happen to be meritorious) than not.

lmm 10y ago
I think that's all true, but too often "inclusiveness" is used as a stick to beat political opponents with. I'm all for attracting more developers for FreeBSD. However I'm against e.g. giving an appointed and unaccountable committee the authority to kick out anyone at their sole discretion, which was what some of the "code of conduct" proposals boiled down to.
- HerraBRE 10y ago
  I disagree. Codes of conduct boil down to requiring members of the community to treat each other with basic decency, and defining a process for showing them the door when they fail to do so. This is not a controversial concept in the real world. You'll be fired from your job if you treat your co-workers badly, you'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients.
  - lmm 10y ago
    > You'll be fired from your job if you treat your co-workers badly Sure, but there'll be a process. You'll have a right to a hearing, the right to your own union representative, and a right to appeal to a tribunal or similar. And the HR people themselves will have oversight. HR don't get handed a license to just fire anyone they want to. > You'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients Pubs are not an institution to emulate. A project like FreeBSD should hold itself to a higher standard.
    - 10y ago

chickenfries 10y ago

I think the article goes into the problems with that pretty extensively.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

There's a big difference between the concept of meritocracy on paper and the actual behavior of organizations calling themselves meritocratic. In many cases, the operational definition of "merit" ends up incorporating irrelevant biases of the most senior and influential members, sometimes cloaked by formalities such as HR performance metrics. So, much like with debates over communism, I think we end up with a major disconnect between people who focus on love for the ideal and people who focus on hate for the implementations they've seen.

problems 10y ago
Do you have such an example of an organization that claimed to be meritocratic but defied that in practice? There are plenty of such examples for communism of course, but I'm blanking on ones of meritocracy. Seems like it should at least be an amicable goal.
- jballanc 10y ago
  I don't know that they've ever (publicly) published a post-mortem, but I know GitHub used to emphasize being a "meritocracy" but have since moved away from that after some long-festering issues (that were distinctly anti-idealistic-meritocratic) surfaced. There's also the fact that the participation of women and minorities in OSS is smaller than their participation in the technology industry as a whole. Granted, not every OSS project touts itself as a meritocracy, but it's probably the area where the concept is championed most vociferously.
  - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    >participation of women and minorities in OSS is smaller I think that can mostly be diversity hiring. A company can hire women/minorities to increase diversity. A FOSS project can't accept code on the premise of diversity. I think the narrow scope of most FOSS projects (or the individual components that contributors wind up specializing in) also makes most of the benefits of diversity less relevant. Diverse teams do better on diverse tasks. (I don't think diversity hiring is a bad practice as long as the people hired are qualified for the job)

yummyfajitas 10y ago

Once upon a time, social justice types supported meritocracy. That was in the era when having classical musicians audition behind a screen increased the % of women. Unfortunately, the technology world has not had the same experience. When technology becomes more meritocratic (e.g., audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions rather than interviews), we get more Asians, fewer non-Asian minorities and fewer women. Because meritocracy in technology fails to achieve the goal of "gotta catch them all", it must be opposed.

chrishacken 10y ago
So what you're saying is, you want to hire people based on their gender and race rather than their skill set and experience.
- anth1y 10y ago
  skills can be learned.
  - chrishacken 10y ago
    Then learn them before you apply for a job so that you can be competitive.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Yes, clearly "audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions" is a code word for race/gender.
  - chrishacken 10y ago
    I'm confused now. Which stance are you taking? > When technology becomes more meritocratic (e.g., audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions rather than interviews), we get more Asians, fewer non-Asian minorities and fewer women. Because meritocracy in technology fails to achieve the goal of "gotta catch them all", it must be opposed. This seems to suggest that you don't want meritocracy. Was that sarcasm?

moron4hire 10y ago

Did we read the same article? What do you mean?

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The FreeBSD project does now have a code of conduct; it is, Rice said, a "patched-up rush job". Project members still honestly thought that "meritocracy" meant "inclusiveness" initially. They have since learned otherwise, and the code is being reworked.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  There is merit in being able to work well with others. It's actually much more important than "raw lines of code tapped out on my own."