> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. > It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been sw

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. > It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. This isn’t about “hiring on merit”. This is a dogwhistle, saying to people “we are an anti-“woke” workplace”, specifically rejecting the concept of DEI principles. It’s an attempt to differentiate, probably to attempt to attract stereotypical programmers who are “tired of politics in the workplace” (as if working for a salary, paying taxes, and building technological tools were somehow apolitical). A less charitable interpretation is that they are attempting specifically to recruit people who would prefer to work exclusively amongst people very similar to themselves. There are a lot of good and reasonable arguments against this, even if you aren’t all-in on the modern concept of DEI (which is a whole ideology, separate and distinct from the basic non-jargon usages of the words “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion”).