Of course, to be truly accurate, the question "merit for what?" needs to be answered. Merit is a hazy word when applied across a whole industry - it needs to be

Of course, to be truly accurate, the question "merit for what?" needs to be answered. Merit is a hazy word when applied across a whole industry - it needs to be matched to very specific tasks, projects, and goals to become clear. An embedded systems designer may exhibit less "merit" than a wizard of front-end programming when dropped into front-end programming - and vice-versa. There's no absolute, gold standard for merit, no matter how hard we try to find one. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to hire the most suitable (meritorious?) people for our own companies. Just because merit is a hazy target, and subject to different caveats, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, or that you can't judge one person as more effective than another for a specific set of tasks. That's why we make job descriptions specialized, so that match peoples skills and attributes to the needs of the job.