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I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege. That is the crux of meritocracy. The amount of time someone spends on a task should have a strong co

I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege. That is the crux of meritocracy. The amount of time someone spends on a task should have a strong correlation, if not a strong causation, to their professional success. And on the privilege side of the argument, not having the time to learn or to do work makes someone less efficient at their job. Signals for high involvement in programming tasks are most likely also signals for high involvement in programming related jobs. That's just how life works. There isn't any way around it.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Yes. The best athletes are usually not the most talented but simply those who invest the most time. Kobe Bryant is a famous example of this. You can't get good without putting in the time, and those who put in the time usually have absurd passion. He's got some great points, but the "shaming" of working hard here is a loud aside from his main (and better) points.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Anyone who plays D-League is a 'talented athlete'. Kobe Bryant's father played in the NBA as a first round draft pick; his mother was the sister of an NBA player, Chubby Cox. Kobe Bryant is a talented athlete who also put in an absurd amount of time. He wasn't voted least likely to play in the NBA in high school. Where Kobe Bryant excelled was in recovery from that absurd effort.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege. Yet there is a correlation there. Someone working minimum wage is going to have a really tough time making it through college. Someone with a working wife, kids, and family will have a very tough time living in a high COL area working 70 hours a week. Should those people be forced to be antisocial busybodies just so large corporations can maximize output per employee? When does quality of life enter the equation?
jakelazaroff 9y ago
> I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege. The larger point of the article is that the idea that "people should work and learn in their spare time" has many built-in assumptions that select for a certain kind of person. For example, do you think you could spend as much time learning after work if you had kids to take care of? What if you didn't have a spouse/partner to pitch in? What would you do if one got sick? > That is the crux of meritocracy. This is true only if everyone has equal circumstances, and (in this example) you don't have to spend your nights and weekends taking care of children/helping relatives pay their bills/etc.
geofft 9y ago
Sure - as long as we admit that by "meritocracy" we mean "the people who have had the good fortune in life to be able to practice a thing" and not "the people who are most intrinsically skilled at a thing". If we're honest about that, we can then reason about other consequences: one natural one is that we'd have better programmers if we actively took steps as a culture to allow more people the ability to have time to practice a thing, because intrinsic ability does vary quite a bit, and our best programmers are now just the intersection of high intrinsic ability + high opportunity to practice. (I'm leaving "culture" deliberately underdefined: there are things we can do solely within tech to give junior devs more support for growing their skills while on the clock, and there are things we can do as a broader society.) Also, I'd argue that this analysis doesn't apply to all "programming related jobs", just those that are primarily about programming. Very quickly in my career, the most important thing wasn't the ability to write code myself, it was the ability to make sense of code that other people have written, work with teams to develop code together, understand customer needs, take existing code and make it more reliable, pay down technical debt, etc. But all the side projects on my GitHub are solo work that is essentially for show: if I churn out some code that happens to work and has no testing or security or resilience to future changes, that's not a problem at all, as long as I push some code that works. That skillset is extremely different from the skillset I use at work.
TrinaryWorksToo 9y ago
There's an alternative: time/effort is a privilege. If I'm broke, I don't have any time to put in the effort to learn a new skill. I need to make ends meet now. If I'm privileged I have the means to take risks. I can spend the time learning a new skill that other people can't. The broke person might be able to learn just as quickly and just as much as the privileged person, they have the merit.

aaron-lebo 9y ago

Yes. The best athletes are usually not the most talented but simply those who invest the most time. Kobe Bryant is a famous example of this. You can't get good without putting in the time, and those who put in the time usually have absurd passion. He's got some great points, but the "shaming" of working hard here is a loud aside from his main (and better) points.

CalChris 9y ago
Anyone who plays D-League is a 'talented athlete'. Kobe Bryant's father played in the NBA as a first round draft pick; his mother was the sister of an NBA player, Chubby Cox. Kobe Bryant is a talented athlete who also put in an absurd amount of time. He wasn't voted least likely to play in the NBA in high school. Where Kobe Bryant excelled was in recovery from that absurd effort.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

> I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege. Yet there is a correlation there. Someone working minimum wage is going to have a really tough time making it through college. Someone with a working wife, kids, and family will have a very tough time living in a high COL area working 70 hours a week. Should those people be forced to be antisocial busybodies just so large corporations can maximize output per employee? When does quality of life enter the equation?

jakelazaroff 9y ago

> I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege. The larger point of the article is that the idea that "people should work and learn in their spare time" has many built-in assumptions that select for a certain kind of person. For example, do you think you could spend as much time learning after work if you had kids to take care of? What if you didn't have a spouse/partner to pitch in? What would you do if one got sick? > That is the crux of meritocracy. This is true only if everyone has equal circumstances, and (in this example) you don't have to spend your nights and weekends taking care of children/helping relatives pay their bills/etc.

geofft 9y ago

Sure - as long as we admit that by "meritocracy" we mean "the people who have had the good fortune in life to be able to practice a thing" and not "the people who are most intrinsically skilled at a thing". If we're honest about that, we can then reason about other consequences: one natural one is that we'd have better programmers if we actively took steps as a culture to allow more people the ability to have time to practice a thing, because intrinsic ability does vary quite a bit, and our best programmers are now just the intersection of high intrinsic ability + high opportunity to practice. (I'm leaving "culture" deliberately underdefined: there are things we can do solely within tech to give junior devs more support for growing their skills while on the clock, and there are things we can do as a broader society.) Also, I'd argue that this analysis doesn't apply to all "programming related jobs", just those that are primarily about programming. Very quickly in my career, the most important thing wasn't the ability to write code myself, it was the ability to make sense of code that other people have written, work with teams to develop code together, understand customer needs, take existing code and make it more reliable, pay down technical debt, etc. But all the side projects on my GitHub are solo work that is essentially for show: if I churn out some code that happens to work and has no testing or security or resilience to future changes, that's not a problem at all, as long as I push some code that works. That skillset is extremely different from the skillset I use at work.

TrinaryWorksToo 9y ago

There's an alternative: time/effort is a privilege. If I'm broke, I don't have any time to put in the effort to learn a new skill. I need to make ends meet now. If I'm privileged I have the means to take risks. I can spend the time learning a new skill that other people can't. The broke person might be able to learn just as quickly and just as much as the privileged person, they have the merit.