> [...] so complex and difficult that a genuine meritocracy ensues, one that cannot be ignored or papered over with accolades or associations. Either your code

> [...] so complex and difficult that a genuine meritocracy ensues, one that cannot be ignored or papered over with accolades or associations. Either your code works or it doesn't. I don't think complexity automatically breeds meritocracy, and I don't think software is a meritocracy. There's still a "human side" of things that may drown out true merit. For example my first OSS project went something like this: I wrote something from scratch with thousands of lines of code and put it out under the GPL. I told my friend about it. My friend forked the project, wrote only a handful of lines of code of his own, and did a better job at advertising his fork than I did on mine. The result was that he basically stole control over the OSS project from me by doing a better job as a marketer rather than as a programmer. ...nothing meritocratic about that. One thing that has happened to me quite a lot working in commercial environments. Me: "Hey boss, I see your team is trying to tackle problem X with solution Y which doesn't take into account complexity Z. Let me solve that for you." Boss: "Okay, explain complexity Z to me." Me: "Yadda, yadda, yadda, ..." Boss: "I don't understand. It must be because you're a bad communicator." Me: "It may be because I'm smarter than you, and, as a corollary, you're dumber than I. Throw in some Dunning-Kruger effect." Boss: "I'm not dumb, you're dumb, and whenever I let you near any complex problem, you end up making me feel dumb. I don't like feeling that way. Go write some HTML, where I don't end up feeling that way as I go about micromanaging you."