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Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing, the way we tend to implement it in tech. Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword fo

Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing, the way we tend to implement it in tech. Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. Particularly in tech, those biases tend to favor white, upper middle class, males. This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.

problems 9y ago
Perhaps - but the goal is to remove that kind of thing, which is in my opinion at least a noble goal and should be respected even if it's hard to implement properly. My point was not that it's perfect, but that successful meritocracy is something to strive for.
pc86 9y ago
So fix the implementation. Rather than say "well there's not a lot of brown people contributing to this JS package so we need to get some more" why not fix the way the mentioned biases (which I agree 100% exist) are affecting how merit is decided? The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.
- eropple 9y ago
  The people who generally push for that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being fixed in the first place.
  - nathanasmith 9y ago
    Does the converse not slip just as easily off the tongue? > The people who generally push against that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being implemented in the first place.
- notacoward 9y ago
  > why not fix the way the mentioned biases What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do. > The idea that the best way... Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?
dropstickle 9y ago
Do you have any sources on this bias in tech? Genuinely curious.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  If you're curious, consider doing research on the subject rather than asking people to re-litigate the whole thing from first principles every time the topic comes up. It gets exhausting because most people operate from a position of "a belief that there is no significant bias/significant effect from bias is the correct default assumption unless/until someone demonstrates otherwise through overwhelming evidence". And each individual person expects the whole thing to be proven for them from scratch each time. Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.
  - the_watcher 9y ago
    The post asked for sources. Presumably to facilitate research. The post did not ask anyone to relitigate anything.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      The thing is, at this point saying that there's discrimination and systemic bias should be about as controversial as saying that the earth orbits the sun. It's not something that should be responded to with a demand for sources, and the fact that it always is, and always devolves into people trying to shift the argument to whether there's even a problem at all (regardless of any one individual's reason for starting such a conversation, that's where the conversation inevitably ends up), is just ludicrous. People who are unaware of the existence of the problem can use a search engine and read up on it.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
eqdw 9y ago
> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself. I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle? If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"
- Jare 9y ago
  If the idea sounds great and is arguably great on all accounts, but in practice proves to not work, time and time again, perhaps the idea needs to be parked until the environment is fixed. Otherwise, arguing about it becomes a distraction while, in its corrupted form, the idea actively damages the things it should be improving. So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
  - problems 9y ago
    > So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on. That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it. How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face value provides a better solution than what you're suggesting. Even with its problems, you need to explain why your suggested solution is better than meritocracy. I personally at least am yet to see a better alternative to meritocracy, despite its definite problems. In my opinion all proposed alternatives seem to introduce more unfairness and problems of their own.
    - 9y ago
kybernetyk 9y ago
>Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so... And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.
- revelation 9y ago
  Yet you took the time out of your day to even login and leave us with your wisdom. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for this invaluable contribution.
whataretensors 9y ago
So suggest a public or concrete metric. Public github repos, for example. Merits are important in engineering. If our merit measurements are low resolution, enhance them. I don't care what team members look or sound like as long as they are good.
nice_byte 9y ago
> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", But there are such metrics. For example: * "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z" * "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much" * "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance" I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.
- Sorreah 9y ago
  A bug might be as simple as a single character fix on a printed string, or as complex as performance isn't as good as we expected, so profile and rewrite parts of the entire application to get acceptable performance. Both count as a single unit in your "bugs fixed" metric. Or do we have meetings to play poker and assign points for bugs? Unless you're fixing tens of thousands of bugs I don't think you're going to have a good sample size to judge the output of 2 people based on just how many bugs they've closed. This can also be gamed ie. pick up easier bugs to appear more productive, open bugs for small issues you notice yourself and fix, and this has the byproduct that real work never gets done. Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring. No earned dollars, no "features" shipped, good luck measuring "saved engineering hours". There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
  - nice_byte 9y ago
    > A bug might be as simple as a single character fix on a printed string, which could be really important if that single character was a decimal point that was screwing up sscanf in a european locale :-) obviously, impact of the fixed bugs should be taken into account. It's pretty easy to measure too, by things like: * is this bug affecting many customers? * is it affecting just one, but a really important one? * is this bug release-blocking? etc. If you try to game it, it will become very obvious. > Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring Infrastructure is a feature in and of itself. Besides, doing things like improving a build system to reduce build times, or streamlining code review workflow has clear measurable impact. Every rewrite must have an observable measurable impact, otherwise it is simply not worth doing. Your mentees' performance is an excellent proxy to measure your quality as a mentor. Again, all of these can be assessed without much hand-waving. Code reviews shouldn't even count towards your performance. It's just something that you have to do. (though arguably, if you have to do a lot of code reviews, then it's a clear signal that you're a valuable person on the team who knows a lot of detail about the system). > There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers. I think there clearly are, and I just listed some of them. Sometimes they're hard to boil down to a single number, but in most cases you can easily tell who's doing meaningful work.
blockmeamadeus 9y ago
It's true that Meritocracy alone overlooks the differences in opportunity people have starting out. Still, I think the criticism is somewhat misguided. I like to think about Neurosurgery to illustrate: if you need a tumor removed from your brain, would you rather have the surgeon be a privileged, elite surgeon from Harvard, or some random dude from the streets? We should be happy that we are able to produce elite Neurosurgeons, and strive to give more people the opportunity (including random dudes from the street). Attacking elite Neurosurgeons is completely counterproductive.
- louithethrid 9y ago
  If that random dude from the street has a 100 % succes rate, and the other has a printed out paper diploma and 50 % succes rate, guess where im going. Academia usually garants a minimum of performance - i will give you that, it is no indicator for a maximum.
  - hasenj 9y ago
    What kind of world do you live in where a random dude form the street has a 100% success rate in neurosurgeries? Well I guess if he performed zero surgeries then he automatically gets 100% success rate.
    - louithethrid 9y ago
      In a world where i know nurses often perform doctors dutys and jobs, while new doctors stumble around clueless. Knowledge on adjunct fields and skills can accumulate in a person over time, thus allowing them to perform similar feets. Like, a bright pupil might learn from a master, if it is not intended. It has happend- since medieval times- apprenticeships, although a attack on caste-think can happen today. Yes, they did not jump through the money hoops, that are suppossed to keep them away- but some of them studied what happens around them. Those servant peoples.. they might not be automatons.
      - hasenj 9y ago
hasenj 9y ago
No one knows whether you are a white male or a green apple if all that identifies you is a screen name. Good code speaks for itself, and competent programmers will quickly recognize you.
ihalip 9y ago
That wasn't the case with ElectronConf. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
nunez 9y ago
Given that the only alternatives that I know of are seniority (age of employment before contributions) or favoritism (find the right people to move you forward), what alternative is there that won't enforce a bias? At the end of the day, businesses are driven by people, and people are emotional.

problems 9y ago

Perhaps - but the goal is to remove that kind of thing, which is in my opinion at least a noble goal and should be respected even if it's hard to implement properly. My point was not that it's perfect, but that successful meritocracy is something to strive for.

pc86 9y ago

So fix the implementation. Rather than say "well there's not a lot of brown people contributing to this JS package so we need to get some more" why not fix the way the mentioned biases (which I agree 100% exist) are affecting how merit is decided? The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.

eropple 9y ago
The people who generally push for that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being fixed in the first place.
- nathanasmith 9y ago
  Does the converse not slip just as easily off the tongue? > The people who generally push against that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being implemented in the first place.
notacoward 9y ago
> why not fix the way the mentioned biases What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do. > The idea that the best way... Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?

dropstickle 9y ago

Do you have any sources on this bias in tech? Genuinely curious.

ubernostrum 9y ago
If you're curious, consider doing research on the subject rather than asking people to re-litigate the whole thing from first principles every time the topic comes up. It gets exhausting because most people operate from a position of "a belief that there is no significant bias/significant effect from bias is the correct default assumption unless/until someone demonstrates otherwise through overwhelming evidence". And each individual person expects the whole thing to be proven for them from scratch each time. Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.
- the_watcher 9y ago
  The post asked for sources. Presumably to facilitate research. The post did not ask anyone to relitigate anything.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    The thing is, at this point saying that there's discrimination and systemic bias should be about as controversial as saying that the earth orbits the sun. It's not something that should be responded to with a demand for sources, and the fact that it always is, and always devolves into people trying to shift the argument to whether there's even a problem at all (regardless of any one individual's reason for starting such a conversation, that's where the conversation inevitably ends up), is just ludicrous. People who are unaware of the existence of the problem can use a search engine and read up on it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

eqdw 9y ago

> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself. I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle? If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"

Jare 9y ago
If the idea sounds great and is arguably great on all accounts, but in practice proves to not work, time and time again, perhaps the idea needs to be parked until the environment is fixed. Otherwise, arguing about it becomes a distraction while, in its corrupted form, the idea actively damages the things it should be improving. So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
- problems 9y ago
  > So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on. That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it. How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face value provides a better solution than what you're suggesting. Even with its problems, you need to explain why your suggested solution is better than meritocracy. I personally at least am yet to see a better alternative to meritocracy, despite its definite problems. In my opinion all proposed alternatives seem to introduce more unfairness and problems of their own.
  - 9y ago

kybernetyk 9y ago

>Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so... And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.

revelation 9y ago
Yet you took the time out of your day to even login and leave us with your wisdom. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for this invaluable contribution.

whataretensors 9y ago

So suggest a public or concrete metric. Public github repos, for example. Merits are important in engineering. If our merit measurements are low resolution, enhance them. I don't care what team members look or sound like as long as they are good.

nice_byte 9y ago

> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", But there are such metrics. For example: * "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z" * "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much" * "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance" I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.

Sorreah 9y ago
A bug might be as simple as a single character fix on a printed string, or as complex as performance isn't as good as we expected, so profile and rewrite parts of the entire application to get acceptable performance. Both count as a single unit in your "bugs fixed" metric. Or do we have meetings to play poker and assign points for bugs? Unless you're fixing tens of thousands of bugs I don't think you're going to have a good sample size to judge the output of 2 people based on just how many bugs they've closed. This can also be gamed ie. pick up easier bugs to appear more productive, open bugs for small issues you notice yourself and fix, and this has the byproduct that real work never gets done. Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring. No earned dollars, no "features" shipped, good luck measuring "saved engineering hours". There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
- nice_byte 9y ago
  > A bug might be as simple as a single character fix on a printed string, which could be really important if that single character was a decimal point that was screwing up sscanf in a european locale :-) obviously, impact of the fixed bugs should be taken into account. It's pretty easy to measure too, by things like: * is this bug affecting many customers? * is it affecting just one, but a really important one? * is this bug release-blocking? etc. If you try to game it, it will become very obvious. > Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring Infrastructure is a feature in and of itself. Besides, doing things like improving a build system to reduce build times, or streamlining code review workflow has clear measurable impact. Every rewrite must have an observable measurable impact, otherwise it is simply not worth doing. Your mentees' performance is an excellent proxy to measure your quality as a mentor. Again, all of these can be assessed without much hand-waving. Code reviews shouldn't even count towards your performance. It's just something that you have to do. (though arguably, if you have to do a lot of code reviews, then it's a clear signal that you're a valuable person on the team who knows a lot of detail about the system). > There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers. I think there clearly are, and I just listed some of them. Sometimes they're hard to boil down to a single number, but in most cases you can easily tell who's doing meaningful work.

blockmeamadeus 9y ago

It's true that Meritocracy alone overlooks the differences in opportunity people have starting out. Still, I think the criticism is somewhat misguided. I like to think about Neurosurgery to illustrate: if you need a tumor removed from your brain, would you rather have the surgeon be a privileged, elite surgeon from Harvard, or some random dude from the streets? We should be happy that we are able to produce elite Neurosurgeons, and strive to give more people the opportunity (including random dudes from the street). Attacking elite Neurosurgeons is completely counterproductive.

louithethrid 9y ago
If that random dude from the street has a 100 % succes rate, and the other has a printed out paper diploma and 50 % succes rate, guess where im going. Academia usually garants a minimum of performance - i will give you that, it is no indicator for a maximum.
- hasenj 9y ago
  What kind of world do you live in where a random dude form the street has a 100% success rate in neurosurgeries? Well I guess if he performed zero surgeries then he automatically gets 100% success rate.
  - louithethrid 9y ago
    In a world where i know nurses often perform doctors dutys and jobs, while new doctors stumble around clueless. Knowledge on adjunct fields and skills can accumulate in a person over time, thus allowing them to perform similar feets. Like, a bright pupil might learn from a master, if it is not intended. It has happend- since medieval times- apprenticeships, although a attack on caste-think can happen today. Yes, they did not jump through the money hoops, that are suppossed to keep them away- but some of them studied what happens around them. Those servant peoples.. they might not be automatons.
    - hasenj 9y ago

hasenj 9y ago

No one knows whether you are a white male or a green apple if all that identifies you is a screen name. Good code speaks for itself, and competent programmers will quickly recognize you.

ihalip 9y ago

That wasn't the case with ElectronConf. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868

nunez 9y ago

Given that the only alternatives that I know of are seniority (age of employment before contributions) or favoritism (find the right people to move you forward), what alternative is there that won't enforce a bias? At the end of the day, businesses are driven by people, and people are emotional.