I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself.
I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?
If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"
http://www.wnyc.org/story/268598-struggle-reclaim-word-jihad...
I think the word meritocracy is in a similar situation. It's an interesting and useful concept, but the word tends to get thrown around by people you probably don't want to get associated with or confused with, so if you want to be heard and understood maybe try a different word.
Maybe not. In many situations you want the best team, and the best team is not necessarily the team that has the most top flight individual contributors.
The best teams I've been on seem stronger than the sum of their individual members, and I've definitely been on teams I rate less highly that had some very strong individual contributors.
Along these lines, I found this article interesting: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...
So you can be a productive coder or a good presenter or whatever but by themselves, these are incomplete metrics. If you happen to also be an a*hole, you are probably an overall liability.
An even more useless metric, though, is your specific flavour of sexuality or your skin colour. None of these count as qualifications in any sense, and if management if measuring these things I'd be wary of their sense of judgement.
Jew professor: let's take 9 Jews and 1 Russians
Conservative professor: let's take 9 Russians and 1 Jew
Liberal professor: let'ts take 5 Jews and 5 Russians
Eldest professor: you are all bloody nationalists! Let's take 10 best musucians!
I mean like honestly, if you don't care _in principle_ about the quality of your staff, how are you deciding who to hire?
What I am claiming is that work is generally done by teams and optimising for high performing and highly capable teams is not the same as optimising for high performing and highly capable individuals (my understanding of what most people mean by 'meritocracy').
It's not merely word games. I've observed poorly performing teams built entirely of highly capable people. That kind of dynamic can hobble a company.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417714422...
"Chelsea were so happy with N'Golo Kante that they sent Leicester flowers to say thank you for selling him to them."
So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it.
How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face value provides a better solution than what you're suggesting. Even with its problems, you need to explain why your suggested solution is better than meritocracy.
I personally at least am yet to see a better alternative to meritocracy, despite its definite problems. In my opinion all proposed alternatives seem to introduce more unfairness and problems of their own.
http://contributor-covenant.org/
"Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with "merit" are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people. (For more critical analysis of meritocracy, refer to this entry on the Geek Feminism wiki.)
An easy way to begin addressing this problem is to be overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them as human beings and to foster an atmosphere of kindness, cooperation, and understanding."
AFAIK the word "merit" doesn't appear at all in the actual Code of Conduct.
Amongst almost everybody I know, "meritocracy" still means it's dictionary definition. If the definition is contested, I don't understand why other peoples' definitions of it take priority over the official one
