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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

This is why merit based evaluation is the only sane hiring practice. I'd love to see legal protection for companies that can provide evidence they strictly adhered to the merit based hires.

You can also apply this rationale to your own projects, by including the Code of Merit into your projects[0][1].

[0] https://github.com/rosarior/Code-of-Merit/blob/master/CODE_O...

[1] http://code-of-merit.org/

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Until the idea of meritocracy is considered too messy in the real world.[0]

> GitHub’s Julie Ann Horvath, a designer who also founded the company’s all-female lecture series Passion Projects, said the rug first became a problem when photos of it made their way into feminist discussions online.

> The false idea that the tech industry is a meritocracy hurts everyone. It allows Paul Graham to continue thinking that the founders who make it into Y Combinator are the best of the best, not just the best people with the most privileges. It also furthers a culture of entrepreneur worship.

Make of it what you will. But it seems GitHub at least doesn't want their floors to reflect a meritocracy.

[0] http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/

Meritocracy is great. Just when everyone has equal access to education.

I'd argue that it's not the jobs of universities or employers to try to "fudge the difference" between actual outcomes and what they believe outcomes should be. By that I mean, just because not everybody has equal access to education doesn't mean employers and universities should be lowering their hiring standards (like it or not, this is what affirmative action necessitates) for people belonging to groups that on average come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Not only is it bad for business or the academic reputation of the university, it can also do more harm than good by placing people from disadvantaged groups in environments they are not prepared for, harming their growth and unnecessarily exposing them to discouraging failure.

So by that I mean, why can't we just evaluate individuals based on their own merits? If you want to stop inequality, fight to stop inequality of opportunity. Stopping inequality of outcomes makes little sense.

I get what you mean, and I don't think we're doing a terrible job at giving fair education for most. I would hope that companies use merit as primary measure in hiring candidates. However, there should be more than just merit that employers should consider. "Fit"ness may be one. Maybe the job doesn't require overqualified candidates. Merit doesn't always have to equal technical excellence.

Equal access to education can never produce fully equal abilities or equal candidates. Two people are essentially never identical in their capabilities regardless of education. One person will always be 'smarter,' more creative, better at math, have a better memory, write code better/faster/cleaner/etc, whatever-pick-your-thing-here. Most of the world's population could never be capable of being a top 1% programmer, by sheer mental capabilities at birth. Education can never fix the fact that people are not all equally capable of the same things mentally.

Agreed, but I think the point here is that when access to education is the problem, suing the employer is a bad solution.

It'll never work. Because it is accepted that "diversity" is a good thing, without question. So you could argue with stats to prove you're doing merit-based hiring only. But then they will force to you "measure" that merit against a nebulous term or benefit such as "racial/gender diversity".

Edit. Removed stuff about types of diversity; not relevant.

This is why merit based evaluation is the only sane hiring practice. I'd love to see legal protection for companies that can provide evidence they strictly adhered to the merit based hires.

Maybe something like that could work if we ever figure out how to consistently and accurately measure productivity. Assuming that productivity is in fact how you intend to measure "merit".

Also, from your link...

The project creators, lead developers, core team, constitute the managing members of the project and have final say in every decision of the project, technical or otherwise, including overruling previous decisions. There are no limitations to this decisional power.

Well, at least you're honest about being a dictatorship. :) OTOH, just saying doesn't make it so. Hostile forks are a thing, license changes without copyright assignment are not a thing, etc.

All members have the same opportunities to seek any challenge they want within the project.

Congratulations, you're biased in favor of people with more outgoing and assertive personalities. ;)

Authority or position in the project will be proportional to the accrued contribution. Seniority must be earned.

Proportional requires that contributions be quantifiable. I'm not aware of any accurate, objective way to do that. (If there was, it would also be a solution to the "how to measure productivity" problem.)

Software is evolutive: the better implementations must supersede lesser implementations. Technical advantage is the primary evaluation metric.

What does "technical advantage" include? Switching costs imposed on users? The level of skill required from contributors? IDE-computable code metrics?

This is a space for technical prowess; topics outside of the project will not be tolerated.

Non technical conflicts will be discussed in a separate space. Disruption of the project will not be allowed.

These sound like an excellent way to let the trees blind you to the forest.

Individual characteristics, including but not limited to, body, sex, sexual preference, race, language, religion, nationality, or political preferences are irrelevant in the scope of the project and will not be taken into account concerning your value or that of your contribution to the project.

So, there's no such thing as "reasonable accommodations"?

There is no room for ambiguity: Ambiguity will be met with questioning; further ambiguity will be met with silence. It is the responsibility of the originator to provide requested context.

Wow, working only on clearly-defined problems must be nice. What happens when the ambiguity is part of the problem space?

> Well, at least you're honest about being a dictatorship. :) OTOH, just saying doesn't make it so. Hostile forks are a thing, license changes without copyright assignment are not a thing, etc.

Hostile forks do not change the project, they create a new one. License changes are of course restricted by law, as are all other ‘decisional powers’ (as any reasonable person would assume).

> Congratulations, you're biased in favor of people with more outgoing and assertive personalities. ;)

Not my problem, a technical project is not a therapeutical session for people who can’t speak their mind.

> Proportional requires that contributions be quantifiable. I'm not aware of any accurate, objective way to do that. (If there was, it would also be a solution to the "how to measure productivity" problem.)

You only need a good enough comparison to differentiate two people if there is a dispute. This is often a very clear-cut case. If it isn’t, let the rest of the project decide in whatever way is appropriate.

> What does "technical advantage" include? Switching costs imposed on users? The level of skill required from contributors? IDE-computable code metrics?

I don’t see why different projects could not have different metrics there, to be decided upon by the project/core team? If it’s a fun-in-your-free-time project, you can expect as much as you want from future contributors and don’t give a shit about your users, conversely, if you try to sell it, you may need to take switching costs into account.

> Wow, working only on clearly-defined problems must be nice. What happens when the ambiguity is part of the problem space?

If your problem space is not well defined you have bigger problems than a code of merit you may or may not like. Do more research first until the problem space is defined. Apart from this trivial tidbit, the sentence obviously aims at ambiguity in communication, where there is never any place for it. Not using words ill-defined words or ambiguous constructs seems like a decent idea in general.

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