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Comment by povertyworld | Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading that article when he implied that Gates' wealth should be considered or measured in relation to programming skill. Debates about meritocracy are important, but starting from flawed frame like that made me not want to invest more time reading that particular author. If he wanted to compare Gates to other technology entrepreneurs, that might have been worthwhile, but implying that we don't live in a meritocracy because there are better programmers than Gates shows the author is not interested in a rigorous look at the issue. I wasn't surprised to see Bill Gates clickbait at the top of the Apple News app, but I was a little bummed to also see it on the top of HN. Then again, I still clicked it and commented on it, so mission accomplished for Fast Company I suppose.

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That same sentence made me stop reading. It's perhaps not an obvious point, but there are several dimensions that require excellence to succeed in entrepreneurship, and failing at passing the bar on any one of those dimensions make the probability of success drop dramatically.

Maybe you shouldn't be commenting if you didn't read the article

I disagree. Many people do not read the articles. You can easily tell by taking the number of unique users commenting on articles and comparing to standard marketing metrics for shared articles.

And they don’t need to read anyway, because comments are the real reason people come to a site like this. If the comments praise the article highly or make strong references, then perhaps it warrants a read, otherwise the comments make for much better content. You can often tell what the article’s main idea is from the headline anyway, otherwise it’s just a bad headline and probably a bad article.

I disagree. Comparing returns to labor productivity along a particular dimension (programming labor) is a useful framework for explaining that it’s clearly not a meritocracy.

Obviously, as nearly any reader would grant, there are other dimensions like business acumen, network connections, market timing, etc., that matter hugely in the specific story of Bill Gates, and clearly the article does not have as a goal a desire to discuss all those different dimensions as much as discussing labor productivity.

And that’s fine.

Some essays may focus on one of these aspects or another. This one happens to be among the subset that focus on labor productivity, which is a valid and worthwhile subset of factors to spend an essay focusing on.

An essay focusing on one side of things and conveniently omitting the other one is not an essay, it's propaganda.

I'm afraid if we run a proper statistical analysis of programming labor vs. the result, we'll see a pretty strong correlation between the two.

There will be outliers, but according to my personal (non-scientific) observation, "negative" outliers are extremely rare: I know very average software developers who raised to the top overtaking their smarter colleagues. I still have to see a great developer who due to the lack of opportunities cannot make ends meet.

Nobody is “omitting” anything. Not all discussions of X must focus on all aspects of X. Sometimes it’s useful to just study a subset of attributes of X, and that’s perfectly valid.

Separately to your second point, I think you’re just badly mistaken. Firstly, meritocracy would mean someone receives financial compensation directly proportional to their productivity. I don’t know any software developers for whom this is remotely true. Often developers are paid a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate, nothing remotely approaching a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view.

Secondly, there are many skilled software developers who cannot find work and cannot find competitive wages. Some end up unemployed from chronic burnout or the toll that dysfunctional open plan work environments take, some have family circumstances requiring them to live in places where the job markets are poor, some are unemployed after being fired for ageist cost cutting, and some work for successful companies but are deeply exploited, earning a fraction of what the person in the next cubicle is earning, despite being equally productive.

It’s really harmful to propagate this stereotype that just because a person had training or skill in software engineering, they have a simple path to a middle class life. Absolutely not true.

> Firstly, meritocracy would mean someone receives financial compensation directly proportional to their productivity. I don’t know any software developers for whom this is remotely true. Often developers are paid a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate, nothing remotely approaching a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view.

I would call this a bad strawman of meritocracy if you weren't obviously for meritocracy. The parts I object to are "directly proportional" and the assertion that "a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate" is not "a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view".

Why do you object to those points? For example, I’d say a developer earning $200k per year in total comp (which is at the very high end of the spectrum) is drastically underpaid at almost any company, relative to the revenue they directly bring in, even after you account for risks that investors / owners are taking, costs of benefits / office space / equipment / sales / distribution / etc. The developer is still drastically underpaid.

And if they are really a skilled developer whose productivity is sincerely a large multiplier beyond their peers’ productivity, they’ll be lucky to earn even 30% more, despite literally accounting for 10x, 100x, 1000x more revenue.

I do not see how any rational argument could be made to suggest this is even the tiniest bit meritocratic. And we’re not even discussing the role of political favorites or nepotism might play in bonuses or promotions, etc. etc.

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