6 ms·

For all its talk of 'meritoctacy', the bay area really runs on looking the part.

shimman 2mo ago
Because meritocracy isn't a real thing. It's just another form of authoritarianism, despotism, and oligarchy. Who decides what work is worth rewarding? What about the type of work? It was always an antidemocratic idea sold to tech workers to stop the idea of questioning the system. The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims. How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences? What about in our neoliberal society where money is the only purpose to life?
- antisthenes 2mo ago
  > Because meritocracy isn't a real thing. It absolutely is a real thing. You don't get to declare that an existing word with more than 2000 years of history doesn't exist. It may not exist in the Bay Area or in whatever subset of parameters you invented, but it absolutely exists and is something to strive towards. > The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims. Complete non-sequitur with 0 evidence. > How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences? You decide just like everything else. Based on context and some objective measurements. It's not a perfect system, because sometimes measurements can become the goal, rather than the underlying objective, but it's the best system we have.
  - jltsiren 2mo ago
    You may have heard the joke that polyamory is wrong, because it should be multiamory or polyphilia. Meritocracy is a similar case. Because the word mixes Latin and Greek roots, it's unlikely to be old. The first recorded uses of "meritocracy" are apparently by Marxist sociologists in the 1950s. They used it to describe a dystopian society, where merit serves as a moral justification for social classes, and social class determines the opportunities available to gain and demonstrate merit. Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law.
    - antisthenes 2mo ago
      > Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law. Do you have any evidence for that? Aside from the thought-terminating cliché "it was used by Marxists once" ?
      - jltsiren 2mo ago
        (Upper) middle class culture, where parents try to give their children a favorable start in life, which often involves a lot of effort. Such as buying a home in a good school district or helping them gain admission to a good university.
        antisthenes 2mo ago
        What's this supposed to be evidence of? Failure of meritocracy?
        jltsiren 2mo ago
        The moral justification for meritocracy is that the society benefits when the most capable people are in charge. Which means the society should find the children with the most potential and give them the best education and other opportunities available. But parents subvert this by trying to improve the relative standing of their children. Which means the people who had the best education and other opportunities will be less capable on the average, and the society benefits less.
      - ghaff 2mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Man you need to read more, I'm happy other users commented in a more pleasant manner; but congrats on learning that you have a total misunderstanding of both the term and it's real world applications, I bet you can solve 2 LC hards in an hour huh?
    - antisthenes 2mo ago
      You need to read less, since apparently you couldn't even get past the dictionary definition of meritocracy. If you have some kind of point to make about the term, please list your qualifications on what makes you an arbiter of meaning.
  - happymellon 2mo ago
    > It absolutely is a real thing Unfortunately due to outside forces, it isn't. Two people build something. One knows a guy who runs local meet up, and offers them a spot to talk about it. Present at the meet up is a tech funder who catches them afterwards, and wants to meet for lunch to talk about this cool idea... The other doesn't. They live in a small rural town. They may have even have come up with the idea first. Without a local meet up they don't get the chance to present. So they post to HN, but Apple announced a new AI tool and their stuff quickly gets bumped by links to Apple, Ars Technica, and a few Apple blogs. Same idea, different outcomes due to outside forces. Sorry to break it to you but your environment has far more influence to your success than your personal merits.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago
  What would your preferred alternative look like?
  - shimman 2mo ago
    For the modern American tech corporation? Full throated workplace democracy, with an emphasis on small d: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Corporations are the last authoritarian forces we willfully allow to dictate how we live our lives, I think anything to dismantle their power is worth pursuing. If democracy is good enough for states, it should surely be more than good enough for the economy. As someone who is a big fan of consensus and voice, I don't see how current corporate leadership could get worse if more workers inside the company had more opportunities to direct its future. It's their future too, they need a say and telling people to just leave goes back to the neoliberal decaying value of money above all us.
    - Xirdus 2mo ago
      At the risk of being accused of reductio ad absurdum - do you want companies to be run like American HOAs? If so, do you expect the results to be the same or different than with HOAs?
      - wredcoll 2mo ago
        There are, if not millions of HOAs, surely at least one hundred thousand, but you only hear about the ones being silly. It's a bit of a lazy punchline, especially because HOAs are one of the purest forms of democracy, they really only exist (barring certain corporate controlled ones that I don't think count) because the people there want them to.
        Xirdus 2mo ago
        It's not a punchline at all. If HOAs are pure democracy, and businesses should be as democratic as possible, then naturally the ideal structure of a business is very close to HOA, if not identical to HOA. As far as I know, the vast majority of HOAs fall into "exists only on paper" category, where they have virtually no rules and do virtually nothing except the basic necessities, sometimes they also maintain shared spaces and that's it. They don't even have regular meetings most of the time, only special ones. This is obviously not how a sustainable business can be run. Of the remaining ones (which is a tiny minority of the grand total), the vast majority are exactly like the horror stories you hear - corruption, nepotism, stupid rules with selective enforcement, interpersonal politics getting in the way of actually getting things done. If a business was run like a HOA, since it cannot be the first kind, I predict it would usually devolve to this within a few years. I honestly never heard of a single case where HOA 1) does a lot, 2) has comprehensive rules, 3) actually enforces the rules, and 4) isn't a horror story. So I really don't know how such a HOA would operate, what the governance structure would be, how enthusiastic people would be to participate and exercise their voting rights, or how it all would translate into a business. If you know of a case like this, or have a theory how it would play out, please share!
- inigyou 2mo ago
  > Because meritocracy isn't a real thing. Comment should have ended there. Meritocracy isn't authoritarianism, because it isn't anything because it isn't real. Meritocracy isn't despotism, because it isn't anything because it doesn't exist. However, authoritarians, despots and oligarchs often pretend they're meritocrats (or several other popular ideologies).

Because meritocracy isn't a real thing. It's just another form of authoritarianism, despotism, and oligarchy. Who decides what work is worth rewarding? What about the type of work? It was always an antidemocratic idea sold to tech workers to stop the idea of questioning the system. The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims. How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences? What about in our neoliberal society where money is the only purpose to life?

antisthenes 2mo ago
> Because meritocracy isn't a real thing. It absolutely is a real thing. You don't get to declare that an existing word with more than 2000 years of history doesn't exist. It may not exist in the Bay Area or in whatever subset of parameters you invented, but it absolutely exists and is something to strive towards. > The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims. Complete non-sequitur with 0 evidence. > How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences? You decide just like everything else. Based on context and some objective measurements. It's not a perfect system, because sometimes measurements can become the goal, rather than the underlying objective, but it's the best system we have.
- jltsiren 2mo ago
  You may have heard the joke that polyamory is wrong, because it should be multiamory or polyphilia. Meritocracy is a similar case. Because the word mixes Latin and Greek roots, it's unlikely to be old. The first recorded uses of "meritocracy" are apparently by Marxist sociologists in the 1950s. They used it to describe a dystopian society, where merit serves as a moral justification for social classes, and social class determines the opportunities available to gain and demonstrate merit. Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law.
  - antisthenes 2mo ago
    > Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law. Do you have any evidence for that? Aside from the thought-terminating cliché "it was used by Marxists once" ?
    - jltsiren 2mo ago
      (Upper) middle class culture, where parents try to give their children a favorable start in life, which often involves a lot of effort. Such as buying a home in a good school district or helping them gain admission to a good university.
      - antisthenes 2mo ago
        What's this supposed to be evidence of? Failure of meritocracy?
        jltsiren 2mo ago
        The moral justification for meritocracy is that the society benefits when the most capable people are in charge. Which means the society should find the children with the most potential and give them the best education and other opportunities available. But parents subvert this by trying to improve the relative standing of their children. Which means the people who had the best education and other opportunities will be less capable on the average, and the society benefits less.
    - ghaff 2mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
- shimman 2mo ago
  Man you need to read more, I'm happy other users commented in a more pleasant manner; but congrats on learning that you have a total misunderstanding of both the term and it's real world applications, I bet you can solve 2 LC hards in an hour huh?
  - antisthenes 2mo ago
    You need to read less, since apparently you couldn't even get past the dictionary definition of meritocracy. If you have some kind of point to make about the term, please list your qualifications on what makes you an arbiter of meaning.
- happymellon 2mo ago
  > It absolutely is a real thing Unfortunately due to outside forces, it isn't. Two people build something. One knows a guy who runs local meet up, and offers them a spot to talk about it. Present at the meet up is a tech funder who catches them afterwards, and wants to meet for lunch to talk about this cool idea... The other doesn't. They live in a small rural town. They may have even have come up with the idea first. Without a local meet up they don't get the chance to present. So they post to HN, but Apple announced a new AI tool and their stuff quickly gets bumped by links to Apple, Ars Technica, and a few Apple blogs. Same idea, different outcomes due to outside forces. Sorry to break it to you but your environment has far more influence to your success than your personal merits.
rootusrootus 2mo ago
What would your preferred alternative look like?
- shimman 2mo ago
  For the modern American tech corporation? Full throated workplace democracy, with an emphasis on small d: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Corporations are the last authoritarian forces we willfully allow to dictate how we live our lives, I think anything to dismantle their power is worth pursuing. If democracy is good enough for states, it should surely be more than good enough for the economy. As someone who is a big fan of consensus and voice, I don't see how current corporate leadership could get worse if more workers inside the company had more opportunities to direct its future. It's their future too, they need a say and telling people to just leave goes back to the neoliberal decaying value of money above all us.
  - Xirdus 2mo ago
    At the risk of being accused of reductio ad absurdum - do you want companies to be run like American HOAs? If so, do you expect the results to be the same or different than with HOAs?
    - wredcoll 2mo ago
      There are, if not millions of HOAs, surely at least one hundred thousand, but you only hear about the ones being silly. It's a bit of a lazy punchline, especially because HOAs are one of the purest forms of democracy, they really only exist (barring certain corporate controlled ones that I don't think count) because the people there want them to.
      - Xirdus 2mo ago
        It's not a punchline at all. If HOAs are pure democracy, and businesses should be as democratic as possible, then naturally the ideal structure of a business is very close to HOA, if not identical to HOA. As far as I know, the vast majority of HOAs fall into "exists only on paper" category, where they have virtually no rules and do virtually nothing except the basic necessities, sometimes they also maintain shared spaces and that's it. They don't even have regular meetings most of the time, only special ones. This is obviously not how a sustainable business can be run. Of the remaining ones (which is a tiny minority of the grand total), the vast majority are exactly like the horror stories you hear - corruption, nepotism, stupid rules with selective enforcement, interpersonal politics getting in the way of actually getting things done. If a business was run like a HOA, since it cannot be the first kind, I predict it would usually devolve to this within a few years. I honestly never heard of a single case where HOA 1) does a lot, 2) has comprehensive rules, 3) actually enforces the rules, and 4) isn't a horror story. So I really don't know how such a HOA would operate, what the governance structure would be, how enthusiastic people would be to participate and exercise their voting rights, or how it all would translate into a business. If you know of a case like this, or have a theory how it would play out, please share!
inigyou 2mo ago
> Because meritocracy isn't a real thing. Comment should have ended there. Meritocracy isn't authoritarianism, because it isn't anything because it isn't real. Meritocracy isn't despotism, because it isn't anything because it doesn't exist. However, authoritarians, despots and oligarchs often pretend they're meritocrats (or several other popular ideologies).