Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes. No one is any better than anyone else at anything. In fact, github isn't a better hosted SCM/code review/issue tracking platform than any other. Which makes sense, because none of their employees are better at doing anything than anyone else. It's all just a rationalization, and a lie. Old boys club all the way down.

But why didn't the old boys club decide to have microsoft's hosted team foundation server win? Or sourceforge? The silicon valley conspiracy is hard to understand at times ...

View on HN

I've come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the "real" world simply doesn't work like that.

One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining "society". In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background.

The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do.

But I still very well remember when I graduated from "the annoying kid that doesn't know shit" to "the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity.

In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.

Thats part of it. But there is a whole other group that is using victim hood and distorted diversity arguments to extract monetary gain and organisational power from usually large companies who reflexively instantiated paid positions with little or no research and vague PR-friendly mission statements.

If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric its no surprise these positions attract people who have ideologically compatible beliefs.

There has been a small collection of black/brown power radical organisations in California for over 50 years. There views are openly racist and have anti white, anti European, anti Colonial America sentiments. These diversity jobs are a magnet for people with that mindset who live every day with there race on there sleeve. When they get in they can twist whatever mandate there is to promote there own agenda and beliefs.

The sheltered Ivy league set who runs these companies have no street smarts or experience with race politics in California. So you end up with what we have now with genuinely nasty ideologues hired into these organisations and they eventually do lots of damage.

> If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric

I suspect that in GitHub's case, the diversity officer was tasked with defining those goals, on the basis that the straight white male executives would have no clue what the "right" goals should be.

Yes, I think this is the heart of these issues. Most people are fundamentally incapable of ascertaining objective merit, and thus the concept of a meritocracy is meaningless to them. This is instructive in business too; never trust your customers to be able to tell that your offering is superior, you have to TELL them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com