Meritocracy at Scale | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy at Scale

scale.com

39 pointstosh56 comments

I work for a Fortune 250 that is literally withering on the vine because they chose to focus on DEI before it was even a publicly-recognized thing. A VP of HR once told a former boss -- who had a resume of a good, local choice for a role he needed to fill -- that he was not allowed to hire his guy because "that's not our focus," and was forced to fill the spot with a random H1-B with the right keywords on his CV.

As a company, we're not making the turn on a critical changes that need to happen in order to remain competitive. I expect that the product lines will falter within a few years, because of our inability to meet customer requirements and a complete miss in engaging with emerging technology in the space. As our stock takes hit after hit, the remains of the company will be subsumed by an even larger company within 10 years, and all the execs will make out like bandits.

I posit that the natural state of any corporation over 1000 employees is a giant game of politics, where the only thing that REALLY matters in hiring is getting more warm bodies, because that means budget, and budget means "power" amongst managerial peers. Fighting THIS driver towards mediocrity is the key to standout success.

DEI?

Diversity Equity and Inclusion

I was eating lunch at a place I'm applying to, and volunteering at, and someone casually dropped a hateful comment towards "straight white males." At work! Nobody called her out on it. It boggles the mind. So I stopped volunteering and applying there. Good luck with the hate, that's my thought.

I’ve reported comments like this that were delivered in writing and HR couldn’t care less.

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.

Isn't this what everyone tries to do?

> A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.

It might, but probably not because you have found people who have 'merit' whatever that nebulously defined thing might be.

> > Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.

> Isn't this what everyone tries to do?

You seem to have missed that meritocracy has recently become a bad word and undesirable in some political circles.

> You seem to have missed that meritocracy has recently become a bad word and undesirable in some political circles

I also did (miss that). Could you explain, or were you just drawing conclusion from the Wang's «There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity»?

Edit: I think I found an acronym in this page that I cannot recall ever meeting (at least, never so strongly highlighted), and I suspect that is the reference (to political circles).

Edit 2: but really, has there been anywhere an explicit attack declaring "meritocracy" a "bad" concept? Or is it just an implicit perception/conclusion?

I’ve worked at 2 saas companies that both declared this. Out loud. In writing. In all hands meetings.

HR departments went buck wild

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.

> It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.

This isn’t about “hiring on merit”. This is a dogwhistle, saying to people “we are an anti-“woke” workplace”, specifically rejecting the concept of DEI principles.

It’s an attempt to differentiate, probably to attempt to attract stereotypical programmers who are “tired of politics in the workplace” (as if working for a salary, paying taxes, and building technological tools were somehow apolitical). A less charitable interpretation is that they are attempting specifically to recruit people who would prefer to work exclusively amongst people very similar to themselves.

There are a lot of good and reasonable arguments against this, even if you aren’t all-in on the modern concept of DEI (which is a whole ideology, separate and distinct from the basic non-jargon usages of the words “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion”).

>A less charitable interpretation is that they are attempting specifically to recruit people who would prefer to work exclusively amongst people very similar to themselves.

This is the case with pretty much everyone.

When it comes to companies that have an aggressive DEI policy, you may end up with employees more diverse in terms of race and sex, but they are usually all required to adhere to the exact same ideology. They only hire people very much like themselves, only on a different metric.

This is really it. They feel safe doing it and will even openly brag about their discriminatory policies, safe in the knowledge that their brand of of discrimination is righteous. Where have we seen this before...

No, plenty of companies I worked at had explicit targets to achieve certain percentages of women and URM hires. Sure, leadership vociferously denied that these were quotas: they were just "inclusion targets" and "diversity goals". But if you failed to meet them you'd either have bad reviews or see your pay reduced (remember, a "bonus" contingent on achieving a quota is identical to a penalty contingent on failure to meet the quota).

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.

We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.

That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job? How do you prevent unconscious biases from causing you to unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual?

There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity.

I think there is a very well founded belief that organisations that claim to be pure meritocracies struggle with diversity.

I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.

That’s probably true, if the hiring process truly is based on merit and nothing else. We have no way to tell if that’s the case here.

MEI has gotten us to where we are today.

Or maybe it was just product/market fit.

You can prevent discrimination by anonymizing interviews. You can't discriminate on the basis of race and gender if your interviewers can't discriminate between men and women, and between ethnicities. If bias was really the cause of the lack of "diversity" then anonymization will solve this. And if it doesn't then bias was not the cause of the lack of "diversity".

You are assuming that diversity for diversity's sake is a worthwhile pursuit to begin with. When the metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric.

   > How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job?

I understood Scale’s stance as: « out of the candidates we have in front of us for any opened job position, we’ll select the one providing the best immediate value on their concrete field - as opposed to the one offering less of a direct outcome but more « indirect » value, such as helping make our workplace a diverse, intercultural and safe place. »

I’d bet this article answers very concrete decisions they had to take internally recently and the article’s writer simply decided to turn his opinion into a company « value ».

The exact opposite stance would’ve been possible (as in « we’re an intercultural, diverse place to work and we try to make the world a better and safe place for everybody, one hire at a time »), and companies usually mix a bit of the 2.

Don’t assume evil intentions or a big « socio-political » plan. That just looks like a company leader trying to make an opinionated decision public, so anyone working there could subscribe. Better in my opinion than nothing.

The MEI (as opposed to DEI) acronym is however unfortunate as it can easily raise unneeded binary conflicts, as seen on this forum ;)

This is all fine but it's virtual signaling to the likes of PG and other VCs. To be merit based they'd need blind entrance exams so as not to fast lane referrals, friends of friends, alumni networks etc.

Thank God it is virtual signaling and not done by physical means

The interesting question is not the choice between diversity and merit, but how you attract and select the most meritorious candidates in a setting where your company overwhelmingly skews towards one demographic, given that people are more likely to hire others that are similar to them (and conversely, potential candidates are not likely to join companies when there are no people similar to them).

An easy way is to anonymize the interview process. Strip out identifying material in resumes. Conduct Zoom interviews with camera off and a voice modulator. It'd be harder to anonymize performance reviews while working in person, but the application process can be pretty robustly anonymized.

The thing is, when tech companies experiment with putting the proverbial veil between candidates and interviewers they don't get the results they expect: https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...

> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women.

Max Levchin (Paypal) said this on diversity:

"The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible"

I'm not saying I agree, just seemed a good time to drag it up.

If you know what you want to build and how you want to build it, then maybe I would agree. You want a crew team of a half dozen interchangeable rowers and the fewer boat rockers the better. It might be a miserably bland social environment, and the jokes are all going to be the same, and they all have the same ideas, but they can probably work pretty efficiently because there is no translational loss between the team.

The problem is that most companies don't have savvy enough leadership to actually know what they need to build. In those cases you want diversity of experience, education, culture, etc. so that you have fertile soil in which to grow your solutions.

In my experience, the biggest impediment to this goal of always hiring the best people is what I call "good talkers". People who are good at talking, good at convincing, but not good at technical work. The bigger an org gets, the more likely some interviewer will be fooled by a good talker. Once there's one, they like to hire other good talkers. Good talkers don't know as much about tech, so they are more easily convinced by other good talkers. Good talkers strive for positions of power where talking is more important than the technical work they don't know how to do. Before long, your company is run by professional managers who don't know how to do anything but talk. Once those people are in charge, any kind of technical meritocracy is impossible. Like they say, "the turds always float to the top".

How brave of a company to say they will only hire those who will contribute the most to the bottom line!

While also providing no actual metrics for their so-called "merit"-based system. Oh, you prefer "smart" people, you say?! What a concept!

It's like the screechers about "meritocracy" never get the memo that the issue people have with it is not it's conceptual structure, but that its details aren't ever (in any situation I've seen) spelled out with the kind of logical consistency that they pretend they are relying on. Does "smarter" mean "came up with a working solution in the shortest time"? Or maybe "came up with the most robust solution during an allotted time"? What if they both come through, which one has more merit? Is it contextual? If so, when does the context determine precedence? In short: How would a rational actor plan for upward mobility using actual metrics (no wiggle-words like "think nimbly", in your so-called "meritocracy"?

I mean, I get that it's easier to just handwave the details and blame any counter-argument on "woke"-ism or an affinity for DEI, but I've never had a single person be able to satisfy my very simple logical questions about their meritocracy with any kind of truly actionable information. And most people who try to convince me haven't even - themselves - experienced these meritocracies. The people who work for these companies usually say they're not meritocracies. It's mostly the people on the outside, looking in, (or on the top, looking down) preaching the company lines rather than trying to hone in on specifics.

But I'm sure Scale is different...

> Is it contextual?

Yes. How decided? Pretty easily sometimes. (In your example, it depends whether the impact of the solution exceeds or not the time bargain or constraint).

Do you see that those metrics you are requesting are very doable, just sometimes not worth expliciting - common sense should do?

When you say not "worth" expliciting... worth it to whom?

All I see is someone saying "don't worry, it's obvious. When the time comes, we'll make decisions based on what we believe to be metrics, but we will back that up with literally nothing."

If you wanted me to believe you, you should provide some examples. And, again, I've never received any actual examples of specific binary evaluations for specific actions. And the handwave is always the same as the one you're trotting out now: 'if you need everything to be spelled out, you're probably not smart enough'.

Good line. Great dodge! But do you see how "we'll know what to do, based on the circumstances and, thus, the more meritorious will be obvious in any given situation" is functionally the same as "the bosses will make whatever decisions in the moment they want, and back it up with whatever they choose to decide is 'merit' for the purposes of their current framing (subject to change for the next situation)"?

But if you're completely sold on it, let's start with an easier question than "how do you metric your merit?"; let's just see if you have an answer for how any employee could determine between the two scenarios I described in the previous paragraph? If a boss passes me over even though I did great work and achieved an agreed-upon goal, but I didn't do some other thing (that was never mentioned) - how would I know that, and how could I possibly petition for redress?

> When you say not "worth" expliciting... worth it to whom?

To the to-do list - it is (normally) not worth it to the one who should spend the time writing that metrics. It would also then become potentially heavy if those metrics become "red-tape", obligatory bureaucratic process, which consumed time and resources without returning benefits.

> And the handwave is always the same as the one you're trotting out now: 'if you need everything to be spelled out, you're probably not smart enough'

Err... Noo? It was not what I meant. But, following your example, if somebody could not discriminate after "Please pass me a pen" that which picks an adequate and that who invests time in finding an out-of-context "perfect", and after "Please design our flagship" that which attempts to polish an enviable craft and that who lazily cuts the effort at a potato-head, then there would be a problem of smarts.

> But do you see how ... the bosses will

Yes I see that we require common sense in the whole of active society.

It seems you are depicting a reality in which the judgement from management can be subjective. As if (no detraction from the actual situation meant implied) people accused Greg Davies to give unfair subjective marks at Taskmaster. The solution to such problem would probably not be algorithmic until good AGI, because sophistication of judgement is needed and Expert Systems in the '80s failed in being recognized as useful.

i'm happy your meritocracy is working out for you. sorry you can't figure out how to outline one in logical terms because of "worth" reasons, or whatever. maybe in your next meritocracy, you can raise someone to the top who can do that kind of thing for you.

> sorry you can't figure out how to

Oh no, I could very probably do. I *do* think, so I see things, and I could express them. But it would take a wasted long time, best spent on other efforts.

But if a society needs manuals "how to walk", there is a problem which is not solved with walking manuals - you are not supposed to have that problem.

> i'm happy ... is working out for you

You should restrain that.

just to be clear, for posterity:

> Err... Noo? It was not what I meant.

Yes it absolutely is what you meant, which is proven by your insisteneces here:

> [...]common sense should do?

> Yes I see that we require common sense[...]

what do you think "common sense" is? would it, maybe, be a certain "level" of "smart" that you think "non stupid" people have?

i honestly can't tell if you aren't able to recognize your criteria as biased, or if you're just philosophy trolling but that's when I dip out of the conversation, hence my other reply.

again, hope it all works out for you, or whatever!

I do not see any bias in stating that the example you provided, about time vs quality priority, has trivially judged instances - trivial judgement operated by so-called "common sense", uneffortful reasoning.

A meritocratic system doesn't have to be perfect or exactly defined. It's enough for a system to be based on work-related capabilities and output, rather than the gender, race, etc. of candidates and workers. An automatically graded leetcode interview is a meritocratic system, even if leetcode performance is not an exact measure of an employee's potential performance.

It's totally viable to define meritocracy in contrast to gender-conscious and race-conscious DEI policies.

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.

> We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic.

> There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.

Seems like a prelude to some bad news coming out about Scale. Otherwise why would you write a post like this?

Because you want to recruit talent that also believes the same thing?

Nothing is a meritocracy. If you believe your workplace is different, there's some obligation to provide evidence of why that is the case.

The word comes from the book “The Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Dunlop Young. Worth a read.

Young was not a fan of meritocracy though:

"meritocracy (n.)

coined 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young (1915-2002) and used in title of his book, "The Rise of the Meritocracy"; from merit (n.) + -cracy. Related: Meritocratic.

    [Young's book] imagined an elite that got its position not from ancestry, but from test scores and effort. For him, meritocracy was a negative term; his spoof was a warning about the negative consequences of assigning social status based on formal educational qualifications, and showed how excluding from leadership anyone who couldn't jump through the educational hoops would create a new form of discrimination. And that's exactly what has happened. [Lani Guinier, interview, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2015] "

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=meritocracy

My hot take: a meritocracy will never fully exist in a workplace so long as there’s a hierarchy of power and therefore politics.

But I’m not advocating for removing a hierarchy.

Out of curiosity, are you implying that "no hierarchy" is possible? And would "no hierarchy" somehow mean no politics, as your statement seems to imply?

I'm personally convinced that "no hierarchy" or "flat hierarchies" mostly means that hidden hierarchies will form anyway, and thus the situation you end up with, while different to traditional strict hierarchies, is still extremely hierarchical in the end.

I don’t believe it exists. I don’t think we can have both. I think it might be healthiest option to appreciate that the system, while possibly being the least bad option, is still irrational, and to operate with that knowledge.

This is known as "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The argument goes that there is always a power structure and it's better that it's explicit rather than implicit.

Reading that article changed the way I viewed organisations and structure, and how one should act within one.

Personally, I think hierarchies are tyrannical and oppressive and should be abolished entirely.

As I have just demonstrated my selfless pursuit of equality for all, naturally I should be placed at the very top of the new non-hierarchy.

There is no top. But you can be in the most middle position.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com