6 ms·

This is a fine and good idea, as long as the central pillar is that we remain meritocratic first, everything else should come after that.

• jordanlev 10y ago
  What if we start from an assumption though that things are currently not meritocrous? Doesn't that then imply if we want to get to a place of full meritocracy some things need to be done that are different than the status quo?
  • trentnix 10y ago
    I would assume that the solution wouldn't be to double down on bias hoping that bias in the opposite direction will somehow result in harmony. That's like a cable news network letting polemics on opposite sides of an issue (as if there are only to ways to look at an issue in the first place) scream at each other for a segment and then patting themselves on the back for their "balance". After all, they "presented both sides"! If some organization isn't meritocrous in how it promotes people and participation, the solution is to make it so. And it will take time for the effects of the previous bias to unwind.
    • CJefferson 10y ago
      I disagree. There are a number of papers (and I'm very afraid I'm on my phone right now, so I can't cite them. I am sorry for that) which show that things like severe gender imbalance are not self-correcting systems in the case of extreme bias -- you have to push them back closer to 50/50, but then the system will remain balanced. This makes (to me) intuitive sense -- current staff / managers will tend to employ, and promote, people "like them", creating a self-perpetuating system.
      • RodericDay 10y ago
        Anyone with any knowledge of system dynamics knows that it's entirely possible that a strategy of "forcing" diversity for a while (say, a generation) may be optimal in terms of correcting the damage caused by many generations of forced exclusion.
      • GauntletWizard 10y ago
        I'd love to see those papers; I intuit the same result, but I don't trust my intuition on social issues. The problem is going to remain - Where do we draw the line? Where does pressure towards the center start to hurt progress because of pushback? I'd posit that much of the "Black Lives Matter" debate is actually this debate - But that the communities are speaking past one another. The places where Black Lives Matter is considered axiomatic are already past that line, while the places where it's viewed with disdain are where racism is still firmly rooted.
  • zigzigzag 10y ago
    But why would we start from that assumption? Developer hiring is pretty rigorous compared to a lot of fields where the process boils down to "turn up, is the candidate presentable and interested, do they avoid saying anything dumb in the interview, do they have a good CV, hired". People are asked to actually demonstrate their skills during the hiring process, for instance, something a lot of job interviews lack. Moreover, the demand for skilled talent is enormous. All sorts of people who are kind of weird or anti-social get hired as programmers when they would struggle to get hired as, say, business analysts or salespeople, simply because people want software and beggars can't be choosers. In such an environment, implying that the industry is not meritocratic or hopelessly biased against women is especially silly. Women programmers are sought after everywhere. They already have the playing field tipped in their favour in precise, specific, concrete ways. The idea that there's some impossible to see glass barriers stopping them from getting into programming is never nailed down with specifics, probably because no such barriers exist.
  • DalaiObama 10y ago
    If you pick your starting assumption, you can reach any conclusion you desire.
• bitexploder 10y ago
  This is an interesting area sort of like affirmative action. If we don't cede some ground to the notion meritocracy, might that not delay the length of time it takes to increase diversity in the field? Will this create the best possible computing and technology world possible -- cutting out or limiting half the population? That is the point Rob is subtly making. We may have to trade a little merit now for increased diversity and a stronger future world of computing. To be clear merit is the easiest way to go about things. That said, I have a daughter and am not sure I would want her in my field as it stands right now (high end infosec). It is even more male dominated than typical engineering and dev. Things to think long and hard about. edit: we are also assuming things are an in general meritocracy in technology amd I suspect that isn't true, but that is a different but relatef discussion.
  • jfaucett 10y ago
    What is the point of diversity? You're just drawing arbitrary lines based on skin color or gender or sexual orientation. If you drew those lines somewhere else say, favorite color/food, political affiliation, mathematical abilities, etc. you'd have a completely different categorization. This is why a meritocracy is so important. There is no smaller minority group than the individual, basing outcomes on anything else is inherently arbitrarily discriminatory.
    • stale2002 10y ago
      The purpose of diversity is to promote a meritocracy. Non-diverse environments are unmeritocratic. They drive away half of the talent. If half of the good talent is unwelcome, and leaves, then the environment by definition isn't as good or meritocratic as it could be.
    • bitexploder 10y ago
      The biggest point to me is thinking if this would make technology better, increasing th pool of practioners. Increasing the odds of advancement. Diversity isn't the end outcome desired. Better technology is. Diversity (widest possible pool qualified of humans participating). It is not clear if diversity will help, but it seems like it would. I don't think there is anything inherent to male brains that makes them better at STEM fields.
• arximboldi 10y ago
  I think you mean phallocratic.
• projektir 10y ago
  Meritocracy paradoxically seems to lead to worse results overall. Remember that measuring merit is effectively impossible in any kind of reliable and systematic fashion. Which means its measured by heuristics, and heuristics are very sensitive to preconceptions, stereotypes, etc.
  • zigzigzag 10y ago
    Meritocracy paradoxically seems to lead to worse results overall An extreme opinion stated as if it's a fact. Can you show me the phalanx of companies systematically beating their competition by deliberately hiring incompetent but genetically "diverse" people?
    • stale2002 10y ago
      No... You don't hire incompetent people. You hire competent people. The "competition" is the one that is hiring the incompetent people, by missing out on half of the talent. Focusing on diversity makes your company MORE competent, not less.
      • camelite 10y ago
        No. Focusing on competence AKA merit makes your company more competent. Focusing on something else necessarily hinders your ability to focus on competence.
• TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Well, the trouble with that, we would be asked to believe, is that we all have unconscious biases that lead us to recruit / promote people who are more like ourselves. In my experience this does seem to be the case.
• senthil_rajasek 10y ago
  Diversity is a social issue. Meritocracy is not a good tool to fix social issues.
  • MomentarySanity 10y ago
    Computer science is not a social issue. It's a technical issue. So meritocracy is a good tool for it.
• geofft 10y ago
  Absent a reason to believe that there should be more well-known men in computing than women, we have quite a distance to go to achieve a meritocracy. I haven't heard any plausible theories for this. The best I've heard is plausible theories for why, given existing biases in society, more men are entering and succeeding in the field than women. That's usually used to argue that some individual company or process isn't at fault for having an imbalanced output. But that's hardly a meritocracy when you know you're leaving qualified people behind, neither for the company, nor at all for the field as a whole! (Incidentally, the term "meritocracy" is from a dystopian essay trying to satirize the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy )
• sho_hn 10y ago
  People who raise their index finger to lament that, in the best of cases, do it speaking from a place of confidence that in a meritocratic system they are securely competitive. It's a little bit about where that confidence comes from and why not everyone enjoys that confidence.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• stale2002 10y ago
  Exactly. We need to be meritocratic. And the current world that we live in is NOT meritocratic, as half of the good talent is getting driven out of the industry. The way to promote meritocracy IS to support women. Anti diversity initiatives and environments are unmeritocratic.
  • alphapapa 10y ago
    Imagine a company which exists entirely online: no physical office, all employees work from home over the Internet. Imagine that all employees and managers and executives use gender-ambiguous screennames, and no one is allowed to ask any questions which would reveal identity, gender, etc. (Perhaps there's a small HR department that handles the real identities, but it's not allowed to share them with anyone else, nor to influence hiring or promotion.) Imagine that all hiring and promotion is done purely based on performance. It's impossible for identity or gender or race, etc. to be a factor in hiring or promotion. Would such an environment be "unmeritocratic"?
    • stale2002 10y ago
      This would be much more meritocratic than our current system. And it would result in much better diversity. You don't even have to be as extreme as your example (nobody could work in the conditions that you mentioned). Things like blind resume screening have been shown to significantly reduce hiring bias, and more companies should be doing it. Also, the biggest discrimination problems in tech aren't even direct hiring discrimination problems. One big reason why companies are not very diverse is that companies tell their employees "refer your friends!" and then they are surprised when the white men only refer other white men. Making efforts to specifically reach out to women, and making sure they apply to your company (without lowering any bars or anything), work very well in increasing diversity.
      • Shubley 10y ago
        I work in conditions very similar to what he mentioned. I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases). Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh. So yeah, you can work like this.
• zigzigzag 10y ago
  Pike is arguing the opposite - that computing should become less meritocratic. Hence promoting women "just because". I think I'll continue to promote people who seem to do good work, regardless of their gender. If some women lose interest in computing because they lack role models, too bad for them: there are plenty of female programmers in eastern Europe and Russia who don't seem to care.
  • tptacek 10y ago
    No, the fact that Pike doesn't accept the same premises you do about the nature of merit in the technology industry doesn't mean that he believes tech should become less meritocratic. A different set of priors creates a condition where gender parity results in more meritocracy.
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      Only with an absurd definition of "merit". Yes, if you define "merit" as including particular genes in your DNA, then you can get away with Pike's attitude and still claim to be merit-based. But hello, reality check, Pike is advocating for something that is not only immoral but also explicitly illegal. The law says that people should be assessed on their skill at the job and not selected due to their gender. Like, whether they write good code or not. The industry has a lot of different ways of measuring merit that are gender neutral - Pike is saying ignore those ways and promote bad coders over good, "just because" they're women.
      • tptacek 10y ago
        No part of this engages with my comment. You can't convincingly dismiss the entire class of arguments about how "merit" is evaluated as facially absurd, unless your definition of "merit" is "whatever produces the set of circumstances we're currently living in now". Arguments of that form have a name; they're called "the just-world fallacy".
        • ygaf 10y ago
• donovanm 10y ago
  Was software engineering ever meritocratic? It certainly doesn't seem so to me. Never mind the problem of how to evaluate who's the best which seems impossible.