The Post Meritocracy Manifesto

The problem I have with these kinds of manifestos is not the ideas they express (which by the way are terribly flawed, at least imho), but the implicit need to mandate these ideas and practices on others, using affirmative action, public shaming and other various techniques.

I, for one, would be extremely pleased if all my competitors suddenly decided to embrace post-meritocracy, if I could continue hiring people on a purely meritocratic base; I'd have a never-ending pool of good developers :)

Your immutable identity means nothing to me. If you believe that homogeneous identities produce homogeneous ideas, you’re mistaken.

Good ideas come from good people who are a good fit for their role.

Without meritocracy, how do we discriminate? How do we allocate resources?

Do we just fill the ranks with the prescribed amount of identities? Will any warm body do, given they have the right identity? Or do we pick someone with the right indentity based on how much favor they’ve curried?

> We do not believe that our value as human beings is intrinsically tied to our value as knowledge workers

Neither do I. But I believe the amount of money any of us get every month for your job as a developer is (and has to be) intrinsically tied to our value as knowledge workers.

Awful. If you need some eyewash after reading that, read this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...

I have probably always thought of meritocracy as an obviously good and economically sound principle, but this just made me realize that it’s basically local optimization. If we want the economy as a whole to work better, why should we expect hill climbing to be a good strategy?