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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, I had an employer who was looking for a machine learning expert. I mean, we had a brilliant mathematician who was breaking serious ground in the field, but we needed an expert, apparently. We were having trouble drawing experts out of Silicon Valley, and our resident genius said "Hey, I satisfy all of the requirements for this job you've posted, and I'm already doing the work. Can you promote me from this crap software-dev role you stuck me in?" and the company's response was "No, it clearly states in the posting that you'd need a PhD in machine learning." We promptly lost our genius. If only TPTB knew that it was a meritocracy!

In short: article's claims sound fishy; your lived experience may vary.

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Meritocracy is a big word.

Chess is a meritocracy. So is tennis and sales. Anyone can play. The best player wins.

Chess coaching is not. Better coaches might win more or get better gigs, but stuff other than coaching "merit" can play a big role.

But rather than getting stuck in a semantic argument... What the article means is that it's a relatively accessible field, on the way that software engineering is. The formal pathways are not as locked in.

A motivated and talented individual can bootstrap a career without formal education, qualification or approval.

All this is relative to, for example, civil engineering, law, medicine... There you'll need qualifications earned via established formal channels, gatekeepers and such.

Could one say that meritocracy is not meritocracy? No matter what skill you measure, a population with adequate nutrition since conception is going to be far better than a population where malnutrition impacts both pregnancy and children.

So what is the take away, especially with applying this to all areas of our lives? We can do something to try to equalize the workplace, the chess tournament, or the tennis court. But what about equalizing the stage or the bar?

Define "merit". You seem to want to use it to mean something like "potential merit", but that's a pretty slippery concept. Nobody, or very nearly nobody, lives up to their "true potential". It's difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, if it's even possible to do either.

In terms of actual merit, as measured by actualities and not potentials, a healthy population is going to have more merit than an unhealthy population. If that feels weird to say, well, it's just a restatement of the why you want populations to be healthy and why you want to help unhealthy populations become healthy. It isn't because healthiness is somehow an abstract goodness disconnected from any real effect, it's precisely because it represents a real loss in capability.

Personally I don't like the idea of trying to equalize the results at the final measurement bar, like the chess tournament, because that just removes all incentive to improve actual health. We should strive to make people really better and healthier, not break our measurement tools for effectiveness and healthiness, thus guaranteeing a lack of ability to improve either.

>Nobody, or very nearly nobody, lives up to their "true potential".

I agree.

But how do we discuss reasons that are or aren't justified to be taken into account. For example you can break down potential blockers into temporary and permanent. Being sick or the death of a loved one can temporarily hurt your potential. Poor nutrition or a brain injury can permanently hurt your potential.

Do we judge people based on if they can overcome anything holding them back? Or do we wait for them to overcome it before we judge them? What if we are the gatekeepers of a method to overcome our limitations (such as the person deciding who gets to attend university)?

> Chess is a meritocracy. So is tennis and sales. Anyone can play. The best player wins.

I'm not sure you are having the correct definition of meritocracy in mind. A meritocracy is a system where the actors who provide the most benefit to the society, benefit the most. However, in chess, tennis, etc., there is no real benefit.

The term "meritocracy" can be defined in various ways.

Originally it was coined as a satirical characterisation of a hypothetical stratified future society so obsessed with test performances in early years that all power became concentrated in the hands of adults who had demonstrated youthful aptitude and were thus assumed to not need to prove themselves any further thereafter since competition could only demoralise lesser minds; the author took the view that the "merit" of passing test thresholds would often be dependent on access to sufficiently expensive early years education and would resemble and often simply be a justification for upholding traditional social class divisions

As for tennis, I think it's fair to say that tennis fans consider Federer et al to provide them with considerable enjoyment, and far more so than less talented players whose games they don't watch, or indeed most people working in non-entertainment jobs who can only help a few people at once and/or find it difficult to prove how much better they are than other people in the same role

> As for tennis, I think it's fair to say that tennis fans consider Federer et al to provide them with considerable enjoyment

The problem here is that "meritocracy" reduces to "free market", where everybody is simply paid for the benefit they bring to others, and where only the few best win.

Free marketeers often argue that markets are a better reflection of merit than alternative systems. I am considerably more ambivalent towards markets than this, but still think the fact that Federer is (i) disproportionately better compensated than other tennis players and (ii) better compensated than the average person is congruent with his performances having significant merit relative to people who cannot do what Federer does. At the very least, it is impossible to not to agree that Federer has significant merit with respect to the average tennis player (unlike, say, a programmer who is good at salary negotiations, well networked and lives in SV with respect to a lower-earning programmer who is merely better at every relevant aspect of software development) which I think was the OP's point.

And my original point was that meritocracy wasn't even originally conceived as a "good thing", never mind a utopian distribution of wealth and power allocation according to some ideal standard of social utility. Other people have subsequently chosen to [re]define meritocracy as some sort of aspirational standard for allowing more talented people to succeed; people defining 'meritocracy' with respect to the propensity of that skill to generate revenue are making as valid a use of the term as anyone else.

I know HN frowns on this sort of comment, but am perplexed by the downvotes here. Do people genuinely find an explanation of what Michael Young's book which coined the term was about objectionable or irrelevant?

X is a meritocracy, and everyone with skill and imagination may aspire to reach the highest level.

Where X is [machine learning, tennis, chess].

I wonder how normal stories like this are. Was this just one bad manager in one company, which you remember because of how surprising it was? If so, maybe the core claim that software is a meritocracy holds.

Or are stories like this common and everywhere?

Or are stories like this common and everywhere?

Very much so. Bad management is afraid of competence, because good performance cannot be argued away. I've seen this.

They simply play safe. If you hire someone with PhD it's very unlikely that anyone will ever blame you for not taking that other random smart dude instead. The other way around you might get into a trouble for your choice. It's just how bureaucracy works, protecting your butt first, and everything else comes 2nd.

I find the key factor the be company size.

When I worked for a Fortune 500, credentials mattered. Possibly more than competence.

I'm working for a much smaller company now and it's significantly closer to a meritocracy (or a "who will generate the most obvious value - even if it means working 90 hours per week" ocracy).

In a previous workplace we had a very capable part-time instructor. This fellow was never converted to a full-time position (eventually they got fed up and left); instead management kept recruiting externally for the full-time instructor position. They went through 3 or 4 people in as many years because the new recruits were glaringly incompetent. They were, however, innocuous and unthreatening. So far, no consequences for the departmental chair.

This is the HR version of “Nobody ever got fired for bringing in IBM”.

It’s true till it’s not.

Not a genius but had something similar happen. Was literally doing the work already and successfully. My coworkers and boss all vouched for me but the company had a policy. There are probably other companies where a similar policy that effects single person that works there.

So many times policy goes out the door if a Director or VP wants a specific person for whatever reason.

HR: no sorry, it’s policy

Worker: but you set the policy, it can be whatever you want it to

HR: ...

Saying “policy” must be a cover for a real reason that the company wants kept secret

Super common. More common than the opposite.

In fact a version of the above story has happened in the last two companies I worked for.

Right but, are most hiring decisions like this? If most hiring / firing decisions are based on ability (which is the case everywhere I've ever worked) then its a meritocracy with flaws. That is to say, if these stories surprise and disappoint you then the overall philosophy is that its a meritocracy and you're disappointed that its flawed for not being meritocratic enough.

As far as I can tell, even obsessing over credentials happens because its a proxy for merit[1], and we care about merit. Its often a lousy proxy, but our industry as a whole didn't care about merit, why would anyone care to look at a candidate's credentials?

[1] "Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" -> "No recruiter gets fired for hiring a PhD"

Seriously, yes. This happens all the time. I recently finished a Masters in CS with a focus on data science and machine learning from DePaul University, and I built predictive models that saved my previous employer hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. They had multiple machine learning positions open, but they told me they wanted Ph.D.s from University of Chicago level schools.

Now I lead a team of analysts and junior data scientists at the University of Chicago.

That company is still making money hand over fist.

By the way, the point of the concept of meritocracy is that it depends on performance, not on some proxy variable.

Worth noting that the person who coined the term "meritocracy" did it to criticize the use of just those proxy values, particularly education, rather than actual performance:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

So I have something of a different experience, not exactly with DePaul or U of C students per se, but let's say, A and B respectively, where A=practical and B=theoretical.

A or B students could generally get the job done, but B students tend to be able to go deeper because of their greater theoretical horsepower. I could assign them tasks of greater difficulty and they will figure it out on their own and deliver.

If the organization only requires A-level talent, then let's be honest, there's no difference between A or B students. The majority of enterprises out there really only require A-level talent.

But if your organization has the kind of challenges that require B-level talent (a minority of organizations, to be sure), I think you might struggle with A-level talent. I faced this first hand when I learned that I couldn't scale because I was limited with the A-level talent that I had and was spending an inordinate amount of my time training and guiding them that I barely had time to do my work.

In general you are correct, but in some very specific situations, my experience has been there's value in identifying the right kind of talent that fits the problems you are trying to solve.

It's not uncommon.

But there is sometimes more going on than meets the eye. If it's an A.I/M.L startup, the number of PhDs is a significant factor in fund raising. Being able to say "we have 6 PhDs on staff" will open doors.

Just ignore the fact they're not in the field of CS or mathematics. ;)

Recruiters/managers are very picky about the Masters/PhD requirements, even if the corresponding day-to-day work does not necessarily warrant it.

It's normal in my experience. It's not necessarily that these managers are stupid: they're just working in what they perceive to be their own best interests.

In the general case it's impossible to objectively evaluate the merit of knowledge workers because so much of what they do can't be quantified. But a good manager can make reasonably accurate subjective rankings.

It is often the case, and very unfortunate.

Also besides a 'written job description' -- there are always unspoken 'tokens' for candidate's gender or, even, race, perhaps other attributes.

Studies on this type of subject are a taboo these days.

Promotions to different organizational levels in larger corps (with 20k employees or more, I would say) -- is like breaking through glass ceiling. You can see the other side, you can do the job on the other side -- but you cannot get through there...

Scott Adams, Dilbert author, had a personal experience about a promotion he was sharing. [1]

To me, it resonated, because it was closely matching my own at some point in my career.

[1] https://youtu.be/ddBRiUsL_5I?t=2041

Occam's razor suggests incompetent management.

Or, it could be, the above suggests confirmation bias (which, in turn, results in selective justice).

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