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Comment by PrimHelios | Hacker News Reader

If you're pushing to have unqualified people on your board simply because they're women, your company will die. Aside from that, why strive if I know I have a good chance of getting a position even without any kind of merit?

Fucking hell, I want to be seen as more than just a disabled trans woman, I want people to look at the shit I've done and say "Wow, she's really awesome, let's hire her/accept her into our college", not "Wow, she's super oppressed! We can get grants if we do nice things for her!". Hiring me/accepting me based on "diversity" is the most patronizing thing you can fucking do. I don't need your help because I'm a minority, and viewing me as just a trans person instead of viewing me as a normal candidate is breaking me down to nothing but my identity, and that's transphobic as fuck.

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a) I never said anything about advocating for unqualified people.

b) Almost all Fortune 1000+ companies are doing this today. And it's been conclusively shown to be improving the quality and strength of the board and encouraging more diverse people to join the SLTs.

c) Not sure what that rant at the end has to do with anything.

>I never said anything about advocating for unqualified people.

That's what being against meritocracy means. A system based on something other than merit. If the people in charge aren't the people with the most merit, they aren't really qualified.

>Almost all Fortune 1000+ companies are doing this today

Appeal to popularity is a fallacy

> And it's been conclusively shown to be improving the quality and strength of the board and encouraging more diverse people to join the SLTs.

Do you have citations for those?

>Not sure what that rant at the end has to do with anything.

Personal reasons, mainly. Just tired of being seen as nothing but a trans person. Yeah, it's part of me, but I hate when people make that my entire personality.

>A system based on something other than merit. If the people in charge aren't the people with the most merit, they aren't really qualified.

Merit isn't an absolute, there's no test that shows what your merit would be to a company. Diversity adds to your merit, both through positive PR and through having a range of experiences to draw from when dealing with a problem.

If my code sucks, I have exactly the same experience fixing it that a black woman would have, because the arbiter of correctness is a computer without any opinions about the author. Diversity in skill comes from having worked in different kinds of software and languages and frameworks, not going out and collecting fifty shades of node hipster.

Sometimes code sucks because the programmer doesn't realize names work differently in other cultures.[1] Sometimes it sucks because it outs LGBT kids.[2] Sometimes it sucks because nobody noticed what the team called something was also a racial slur.

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

[1] is part of the basic domain knowledge that makes one competent. E.g., any programmer who deals with US PII should also know that social security number collisions exist even though nobody on the team has struggled with it. Your coworkers' personal experiences are not the only or best way to learn about users' problems, because not only are they a very small sample but they are self-selected nerds and inherently unlike most users (unless you sell programming tools).

[2] is a product design decision, not a programmer's ignorant error. "A product should side with a child against their legal guardian who actually paid for the product" is by no means the consensus across all cultures.

Neither of those things would be better because of a black woman being a programmer.

Even as an LGBT person myself, I probably wouldn't have thought about the implications of the second one.

The first one is fixable by not being a shit programmer. You don't need to know anything about the names of other cultures, you just need to know that everything should be using Unicode, although I agree that Euro-centrism dominates programming and computer science in general.

So why is it the first thing you mention in your HN profile?

Because it's an extremely important part of who I am. If you look, you'll notice there's more than that.

Also, because people will see my comments and scream something about me being a white cishet male or say that I "sound like a cisshit". Shit's happened to me before and I try my best to squash it before it happens again.

"Meritocracy" isn't. It's a sham, a veneer layered on over an ugly and disgusting history of bigotry and oppression, to cover up the underlying biases which still exist and are perpetuated every day.

Assuming that any attempt to change the system necessarily involves hiring/promoting "unqualified" people shows one of those biases: the bias to believe that anyone who does not resemble the existing majority must be "unqualified" or else they'd already have succeeded.

Which is much like the economics joke: an economist and his friend are walking along, and the friend spots a $20 bill on the ground reaches for it. The economist says "that's impossible -- if it really were a $20 bill it would've been picked up by someone else already!"

We know that the old convenient lies -- "people of that race/gender/etc. just aren't as interested in our field" or "evolution shaped their brains to be good at other things, not at this thing" or... well, any of them -- are just that: lies. We know that when a more level playing field is forced upon an industry, suddenly that industry stops looking a lot less white and a lot less male, and further stabs the heart of the "it's a meritocracy" lie.

Promoting the lie of "meritocracy" is, at this point, insupportable and indefensible, no matter who does it or why.

> Assuming that any attempt to change the system necessarily involves hiring/promoting "unqualified" people shows one of those biases: the bias to believe that anyone who does not resemble the existing majority must be "unqualified" or else they'd already have succeeded

You're not describing meritocracy, which has literally nothing to do with majority conformity, but literally reduces to ability. It's the most unbiased position possible.

There is literally zero unjustified bias in a true meritocracy.

When trying to build a meritocracy, pre-existing bias can certainly skew who has more ability, because some group or other has better access to education or opportunities for acquiring better experience. The solution is not to decry meritocracy, but to enforce those principles even more strongly.

They're describing what Michael Young coined the term "meritocracy" to warn about.

The closest thing to a consensus on programmer productivity is that it's impossible to quantify. How can we objectively predict ability when we don't know how to objectively measure outcomes?

You can't measure productivity in an interview, so I don't see how this is relevant. At best, you can test for knowledge and understanding, which is exactly what people do. I don't see how this entails some kind cultural homogeneity.

> The closest thing to a consensus on programmer productivity is that it's impossible to quantify

Precision isn't as important as accuracy, and this is achievable. It's difficult, but not impossible.

Thank you, you said it much better than I could've.

Your entire post can be responded to with two words: Citation needed.

Your virtue signaling feat has apparently failed

This is a low effort comment that adds nothing to the conversation.

The most generously I can interpret this is that you are claiming that the poster you are responding to does not authentically hold the views you disagree with. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, because if that's all you've got, it's a horrible way to argue and poisons debate.

Apply it to yourself - a quick overview of these threads show that there are a lot of people who share your viewpoint, do you think that me claiming that you don't authentically hold those views and are only arguing them in order to get people to like you would be a good addition to the debate?

Claiming that nobody could possibly have a genuine different opinion to you says more about you than about them.

Oh come on.

Anyone seriously espousing the idealism of pure "meritocracy" needs to put aside their gradeschool naivete. Next you'll start quoting Anne Rand back to us. It's one of those ideas that sure sounds good... I mean, who can possibly argue with the idea that they should pick the best speakers with the best content?

Until you actually think about it.

What you fail to recognize is that, unless you can find me quantitative measures that can be used to determine a person's skill, meritocracy isn't about merit. It's about convincing fallible human beings of the level of merit. And that means running up against both conscious and unconscious cognitive bias.

So the reality is, like it or not, if you want a fair shot in the professional world, you damn well do need the help of people fighting the good fight against personal and institutional bias. Hell, 20 or 30 years ago it's entirely possible you wouldn't have had a job at all if it weren't for the actions of people who came before you who understood this and fought for a more inclusive society and workplace.

But it's rather easy to rail against policies like affirmative action when you've already benefited from them. It reminds me of anti-vaxxers who argue about the rarity of diseases to justify not getting inoculated, not realizing that that situation exists because people got vaccinated.

Nobody cares about diversity in accounting. There are no role models. It's just a bunch of nerds trying to score 100% on the big test because nobody else is obsessed enough to be any good at it.

That's what programming was like before these people chasing big paychecks invaded.

In life in general sure but in cases like these a blind review process (that I think they used) should be good enough.

I mean it is pretty odd that you would do a call for papers and pick out those you liked the most without knowing race or gender but then replace some just because it turns out they had the wrong gender/skin color/whatever.

It's actually totally understandable.

Let me explain.

The conference organizers clearly have diversity as a goal.

In their naivete, they thought to themselves "we want equality for everyone! I know... let's just make this a pure meritocracy! Then there won't be bias and everyone will be happy!", and so they used a blind review process.

Of course, it didn't dawn on them at the time that if you took a blind random sampling of programmers, had them write presentations, and then approved them, you'd end up with a lack of diversity because the industry itself has an almost comically absurd lack of diversity.

So unless the average skill level of individuals in minority groups is extemely disproportionately higher than the average population (which rather contradicts the idea that race or gender don't impact skill), they would be poorly represented because they're poorly represented in our community in general.

So after approving their blindly reviewed set of presentations, they realized, shoot, they have an alarming lack of diversity in their presentations (read the above two paragraphs again if you don't understand why).

And so now they have to go back to the drawing board. All because they didn't understand population statistics.

The issue is that diversity shouldn't be a goal. If you want more diverse speakers, then the only proper thing to do is let the conf continue, and then you'll start creating more people who have the knowledge to give talks, and you'll build a better divers background that way.

There's no reason to require diversity for a conference talk.

The issue is that diversity shouldn't be a goal.

In your opinion.

Feel free to run your own conference adhering to your own values, and feel free to skip this one.

But the breathless, hysterical overreaction to this by some in the tech community is simply juvenile and absurd.

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