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.
> 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.
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?
HR departments went buck wild
> 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”).
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.