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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.