Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability. The poorer developer may have had a natural advantage over the other one, but didn't have the money to develop it as much. So you're really just selecting for wealth all over again.

This is what's behind the achievement gap anxiety: Wise rich people don't want to perpetuate a world where only money selects success. It's wasteful and ultimately unsustainable.

View on HN

>There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability.

You're using an overly restrictive definition of "merit". When you hire the best person for the job you're hiring based on merit. How they got there isn't really that important from your perspective as an employer. That's a meritocracy.

So could we then say based upon your comment and the parent that a meritocracy is antagonistic to diversity. Not trying to be argumentative, just more of a thought exercise. If a meritocracy chooses the best, and the wealthiest tend to have the resources and opportunity to make themselves better, then always choosing based upon merit means favoring less diverse backgrounds. Additionally, we tend to always view ourselves as ‘having merit.’ So we will also be predisposed to choose people like ourselves further hindering diversity. I personally have always favored the idea of being meritocratic, but am also leaning more toward purely favoring diversity, not diversity of superficial attributes, but the diversity of peoples background. I feel it helps to expand the breadth of knowledge of the team and avoid blindspots.

>So could we then say based upon your comment and the parent that a meritocracy is antagonistic to diversity.

Yes, I would say that's the bias. It's human nature to allocate your resources to give your children the best possible start in life. In poor societies that may be as simple as feeding them when you yourself go hungry. In our society it means scheming to get them into the best college or giving them seed money to start a business.

I would note that making alterations to promote diversity don't change that, either. They just distort the system such that people with resources game the system in unproductive ways. A good example is all those "women and minority owned" businesses that get preferential treatment in government contracting. From what I can tell nearly all of them are headed (wink wink) by the wife of a white guy with a relatively upper class upbringing.

i've also had the thought of hiring purely for diversity, but I'm not and likely will not be in a position to hire someone.

What I said is if you define merit as merely "the best person for the job" you are only really selecting for wealth in the end. Let me direct you to a little cartoon that explains it very succinctly.

http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate

No, I don't think so. Wealth is part of it, sure. But so is intelligence. So is looks. So is ambition. You're focusing on wealth because it's the easiest thing to measure, but wealth, especially wealth alone, isn't destiny.

Everybody knows people who grew up poor and "made it", and also people who had all the advantages but can't seem to make anything of themselves.

I never meant to convey a polemic about wealth alone. What I'm saying is wealth is the strongest correlation to a "meritocracy", not the only one. There are always examples of outliers in both rich and poor camps.

The thing is "merit" an be any number of things. You can say the student most in debt merits the job the most, or the person with the most experience, or the person exhibiting most ability, or the person who had to overcome obstacle.

But when people invoke merit they typically mean they're avoiding favoritism, nepotism, and are looking for someone who given what they know or learn about the person would best fit into the job to execute it.

The trouble is we can only really recognize "fit" to structures we are familiar with. We simply cannot see talent unless it is a kind of talent we've seen up close before. Because of this we end up only being able to approximate "the best candidate in my social group". And we neglect better candidates in foreign social groups.

But that's a different problem altogether. That goes beyond what people mean by "merit".

Yes, people only hiring people for whom they feel affinity is somewhat of an issue. I say somewhat, because it can be problematic working with people who understand things differently --say working with people who have a union attitude vs people who have a work at will attitude.

So, I understand the "I'd have beer with them" kind of thing even though it does bother me. I don't drink beer and I'm not into peer dynamics. But I understand why people might be into that.

That said, merit typically means not hiring someone just because they're friends, family, owed a favor, seniority, strict ethnic affinity (which happened and happens in lots of immigrant communities, of old and new), belong to some specific group, etc.

Hiring someone because they remind you of your friends/family/ethnic group is exactly what I'm talking about.

There has been no society in history that has ever truly had an answer for people born into privilege, except ours. We're in the information age, and its possible for people to learn highly technical skills through a bunch of free internet content, and apply it with very little to no starting capital. Sometimes its luck, other times its just a really good idea.

A good way to partially mitigate this is to stop with specific code interviews, where you ask someone how do implement X in Y language.

Instead, ask them about problems they've encountered and how they solved them. Doesn't even need to be programming problems. Get an idea for their problem solving process and ability. That's what you should be hiring people for.

genetics != merit

> When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability.

Ahh, but natural ability is just as much of a privilege as having a fortunate upbringing! Both are essentially unchosen, born-with things; you can't choose your inborn talents, and you can't choose your parent's resources.

Really, what you're scoffing at is learned skill and saying that born-with skill is better, for whatever reason.

But meritocracy[1] just means "only results matter". It doesn't matter if you worked your ass off for 30 years in acquiring skills that bring results, against all odds (whether genetic or externally imposed). Or if you were just born with it and hardly had to put in any effort.

[1] Whether that is a reality or not; doesn't matter for the sake of the argument.

Not really. Learned skill and natural ability are not mutually exclusive. Being a great developer still means you have to learn a lot of things. Consider someone with a mere 1% better "natural" ability to write code but never had the chance to develop it into a viable "learned" ability versus someone who was merely "average" but had the wealth to develop the skill, the latter will get the job in a "meritocracy". So you're selecting for wealth mostly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com