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Comment by zacharytelschow | Hacker News Reader

"I don’t believe [meritocracy is] our strongest value, or quality as a community. And, it’s not something that I think embodies what is awesome about Postgres.

Our strongest quality is our ability to create great code."

Let's see... -great code -> merit -transparency -> code improvements (best idea wins)

And frankly, the "privileged" people he's talking about contributing to Postgres make the money and lead the lives they do precisely due to their merits as programmers.

Sounds an awful lot like an organization that promotes the best ideas and gives power based on the merit of the people in it to me.

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I'm a she, and you're leaving out all the things that led to becoming a programmer. Which largely had nothing to do with merit.

The point of the article isn't to discount the work involved in becoming excellent, but to point out that the opportunity to do that work at all is a privilege.

I don't particularly care if any one person changes their thinking about this. My post was meant for my community, which is taking the issue of involvement and its relation to privilege seriously.

...you're leaving out all the things that led to becoming a programmer. Which largely had nothing to do with merit.

Is your objection to the idea of "merit" merely reductionism?

I.e., merit (as defined by ability and willingness to code) is comprised of a combination of innate factors (genetic/environmental contributions to intelligence and demeanor) and social privileges (access to education, etc)? This is true. So what?

Ultimately, merit is merely a particular arrangement of atoms. It's hard to see how this reduction is useful.

Most people generally aren't comfortable conflating certain flukes of genetics and social privileges with merit.

Being born affluent, white, and male are the three factors which for the last couple of decades have made you statistically most likely to have owned your own computer prior to college. Because most people don't consider males to have more merit than females, or white people to be more meritorious than minority groups, declaring programming a meritocracy ignores and conceals these important factors in the makeup of the "programmers" social group.

Most people generally aren't comfortable conflating certain flukes of genetics and social privileges with merit.

No one is doing this. I am defining "merit" to be the ability/willingness to write good code.

If the universe has decided to allocate merit (defined as above) to white/asian males, so be it. That doesn't mean that my definition of merit is flawed. It merely means that the universe has not behaved in the manner you wish it did.

My objection is that the use of merit to justify rewards typically seen as an objective measure.

We should carefully identify the reasons for measuring and rewarding a thing - like "we reward excellent code with commit rights", rather than that we "reward people based on merit". The word itself is fraught, as is the philosophy of meritocracy. It's used as a broad brush for many different meanings.

We should just be specific, and say what it is that we are rewarding.

All you are doing is quibbling over definitions. It doesn't matter if you call it a "good-code-writer-ocracy", a"meritocracy" or "wheezlebum" - we are describing the same objective reality.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/

I'm not quibbling over definitions. And we are not describing the same reality.

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