It's just another form of authoritarianism, despotism, and oligarchy. Who decides what work is worth rewarding? What about the type of work?
It was always an antidemocratic idea sold to tech workers to stop the idea of questioning the system.
The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims. How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences? What about in our neoliberal society where money is the only purpose to life?
It absolutely is a real thing. You don't get to declare that an existing word with more than 2000 years of history doesn't exist.
It may not exist in the Bay Area or in whatever subset of parameters you invented, but it absolutely exists and is something to strive towards.
> The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims.
Complete non-sequitur with 0 evidence.
> How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences?
You decide just like everything else. Based on context and some objective measurements. It's not a perfect system, because sometimes measurements can become the goal, rather than the underlying objective, but it's the best system we have.
The first recorded uses of "meritocracy" are apparently by Marxist sociologists in the 1950s. They used it to describe a dystopian society, where merit serves as a moral justification for social classes, and social class determines the opportunities available to gain and demonstrate merit.
Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law.
Do you have any evidence for that? Aside from the thought-terminating cliché "it was used by Marxists once" ?
If you have some kind of point to make about the term, please list your qualifications on what makes you an arbiter of meaning.
Unfortunately due to outside forces, it isn't.
Two people build something.
One knows a guy who runs local meet up, and offers them a spot to talk about it. Present at the meet up is a tech funder who catches them afterwards, and wants to meet for lunch to talk about this cool idea...
The other doesn't. They live in a small rural town. They may have even have come up with the idea first. Without a local meet up they don't get the chance to present. So they post to HN, but Apple announced a new AI tool and their stuff quickly gets bumped by links to Apple, Ars Technica, and a few Apple blogs.
Same idea, different outcomes due to outside forces. Sorry to break it to you but your environment has far more influence to your success than your personal merits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Corporations are the last authoritarian forces we willfully allow to dictate how we live our lives, I think anything to dismantle their power is worth pursuing. If democracy is good enough for states, it should surely be more than good enough for the economy.
As someone who is a big fan of consensus and voice, I don't see how current corporate leadership could get worse if more workers inside the company had more opportunities to direct its future. It's their future too, they need a say and telling people to just leave goes back to the neoliberal decaying value of money above all us.
It's a bit of a lazy punchline, especially because HOAs are one of the purest forms of democracy, they really only exist (barring certain corporate controlled ones that I don't think count) because the people there want them to.
As far as I know, the vast majority of HOAs fall into "exists only on paper" category, where they have virtually no rules and do virtually nothing except the basic necessities, sometimes they also maintain shared spaces and that's it. They don't even have regular meetings most of the time, only special ones. This is obviously not how a sustainable business can be run.
Of the remaining ones (which is a tiny minority of the grand total), the vast majority are exactly like the horror stories you hear - corruption, nepotism, stupid rules with selective enforcement, interpersonal politics getting in the way of actually getting things done. If a business was run like a HOA, since it cannot be the first kind, I predict it would usually devolve to this within a few years.
I honestly never heard of a single case where HOA 1) does a lot, 2) has comprehensive rules, 3) actually enforces the rules, and 4) isn't a horror story. So I really don't know how such a HOA would operate, what the governance structure would be, how enthusiastic people would be to participate and exercise their voting rights, or how it all would translate into a business. If you know of a case like this, or have a theory how it would play out, please share!
Presumably if you were running a corporation as a democracy you'd just go through the same basic stages as a city-state where you rapidly end up with representatives serving terms.
This sort of thing depends wildly on the size/number of people involved of course.
A 5-10 person company doesn't really need much in the way of a power structure, presumably everyone knows what needs to be done and you probably have different specialties anyways so you consult each other when required and then each person does their thing. Perhaps occasionally you need some kind of tie breaking vote.
A manufacturing company employing 50,000 people at every level from (ceo of 50,000 person company) to (effectively minimum wage bolt tightener) is going to need more authority explicitly defined and delegated.
Spending 5 minutes thinking about it, you'd pass the equivalent of a law saying "everyone in this class of (bolt tighteners) must work 20+ hours a week and gets paid $xx.00 an hour and so on and so forth and if they fail to adhere to this then x, y and z happens then get fired".
This law could be passed either by a direct vote or more likely created by a body of representatives.
I don't know offhand of any business that runs this explicitly as a democracy, there's various co-op businesses that do exist but I've never investigated how exactly they run these things.
I don't see anything stopping you from having a company that elects its ceo though.
For example, those bolt tighteners. The joint vote by the tire balancers, CNC operators and facility maintainers has beat the opposition and a resolution was passed that excludes bolt tighteners from annual bonus. Or the bolt tighteners have joined with delivery drivers and passed a rule requiring a certain number of bolts in all new designs whether they make sense or not. Or a hundred other ways in which people can use their vote to put their own self-interest above the shared good.
What are the main forces that keep a democratic workplace like the one you described from collapsing due to bad votes and bad rules?
The same forces that keep autocratic ones from collapsing due to incompetent owners making bad decisions, which is to say, nothing at all.
I'm too lazy to look up actual stats, but its well known that "most" businesses fail, and if you extens the timeframe long enough they all fail, so this isn't really a problem I need to solve.
A more real problem, if you need one, is probably involving investment to create the company, but that's heavily dependent on the surrounding systems to begin with so where are we stopping this thought experiment?
Also why are you assuming that parliaments would be the dominating collaboration structure? Your imagination is vastly limited if you're only looking toward western examples.
At the opposite end, maybe a question to ask yourself if the current system is leading to good outcomes and for who because the vast majority of Americans are suffering as the result of our current neoliberal economic system that was forced upon us with no consent from the governed. Alternatives should be explored and giving voice to workers seems like the simplest thing we can do. People should be allowed to have a voice in the direction of their employment.
Exit is not sufficient.
Things can be better, only if we allow it to.
Compared to what? The most pro-employee capitalist business imaginable? No, not really, the most pro-employee capitalist business imaginable already provides me with pretty sweet life, how can workplace democracy improve on that?
If you compare the best example of one system with the worst example of another system, of course the best example wins. But then you switch around the picks and you end up with exactly the opposite conclusion. It's useless.
The only good comparisons are average v. average, and worst v. worst. What is the expected situation most workers will find themselves in? What is the lower bound of how bad things can become? Only equal-to-equal comparisons give you any useful information.
I'm not assuming parliaments. I'm assuming interest groups acting selfishly and collaborating with other interest groups to further their respective selfish interests. No matter how the democracy happens, in the end somebody chooses what gets voted on, and somebody votes on those proposals, and sooner or later somebody will try to put the question of "should we steal from this other group?" under vote, and everybody not in that group will be heavily incentivized to vote yes. That's just human nature. If your system cannot survive that, then it's not a good system.
Reality is a lost cause. Replacing the system with something better has 0% chance of ever happening. So, since it's all purely theoretical anyway, what's the harm in considering the downsides too in addition to upsides?
It won't fix everything but it will give people a chance to dictate more of their lives through means of mass consensus while experiencing less authority.
Voice has a place - check.
Incentives other than monetary - check.
Chance to dictate more of their lives - check.
Mass consensus - check.
Maybe I'm missing something but I really don't see how HOA doesn't fit here.
How would workplace democracy solve the problem of office politics and the associated corruption and nepotism dominating the leadership elections? Or do you consider workplace democracy to be better than the current system even if that problem stays unsolved?
Like other commentators, some guess that they would form representative republics. I also don't think this is true.
What I do think is that by giving people the ability to shape their world, they may very likely shape it in ways that are beneficial to more than the few.
How they do that is their prerogative, but surely you can see how this would be more beneficial than the oligarchies or dictatorships (the version of HOA you're thinking of, where the tyranical minority selected few harass the many) that form the vast majority of working corporations.
We already know that centrally planned economies are extremely inefficient and some of the worst ways to foster collaboration, so why should we accept the same system in our working lives?
I'm not saying I know how things will be better, but surely letting workers decide their fates is better than the current reality.
You're acting as if workers don't know what's in their best interest to have sustainable careers. Give people a chance, they're way more imaginative than you think.
And if they cannot vote on that then what can they vote on?
Comment should have ended there. Meritocracy isn't authoritarianism, because it isn't anything because it isn't real. Meritocracy isn't despotism, because it isn't anything because it doesn't exist.
However, authoritarians, despots and oligarchs often pretend they're meritocrats (or several other popular ideologies).
Honestly I would see that as a huge red flag. In western countries a used laptop costs almost nothing.
I'm sure there are outliers, but given the low cost of used ex-corporate laptops in the western world, and presumably the candidate's interest in computers and software development, it's a fairly low bar to expect a candidate to have some sort of PC (laptop, desktop, Linux, Windows, Mac - whatever). I wouldn't expect it to be modern or expensive (I do this for a job and barely spend any money on computers these days), but I'd be really surprised if a candidate had nothing available.
Why do you think the job posting doesn't explicitly mention "owning a PC" as a requirement? If it's a relevant criterion why not make it clear there? If it's not, why have it at all, only to keep it hidden in your biases?
Accepting to run random code sent by someone you don't know should be a red flag for them. Getting asked to run random code sent by someone you don't know should be a red flag for you.
and with PC is so accessible now (you can even find free PC in some cases), that tells me you are not really passionate about software dev.
This is a different problem. If a candidate said "I don't want to run the code you send me" it might be a good opportunity to talk through what it does. Maybe I'd set up a VM for them in the cloud, or we could find a mutually acceptable solution. If a candidate says "I don't own a general purpose computing device" then I would really be questioning that candidates interest in computers, and therefore ability to develop and test software for them.
> Why do you think the job posting doesn't explicitly mention "owning a PC" as a requirement?
The job description also doesn't say "owns clean clothes", but how the candidate presents themselves is certainly a consideration when hiring.
Obviously. I just figured I'd point you to the real red flags you missed instead of the "I find it weird so it's a problem" thing.
> The job description also doesn't say "owns clean clothes"
That's a false parallel. A commenter higher up already pointed out to you that the candidate could own a tablet. An iPad Pro M5 is faster than most laptops, perfectly good for coding, and not able to run any of the crap sent out by the interviewer which likely expects desktop OSes.
The advert also shouldn't mention such a thing. Some people work remotely, others could honestly tell you they'll get better clothes from the first salary. If you're interviewing someone, they're the best at the job but you stumble on this, it's definitely a red flag. For the candidate, to look elsewhere. Why would you want to work for an employer who focuses more on the sweat stains on your armpit than the actual work or your character?
And now let me paint a different picture to understand the magnitude of the unfairness in your logic. I assume you are the Leo Rampen from the website you advertise in your profile. How many red flags do you count from someone advertising a blog which at the time of writing this has a certificate expired more than a month ago, and the last content update is more than a decade old? How does this reflect on a multi-disciplinary HW/SW engineer who even works on things as critical as satellites? This is to say, don't focus of flagging trivialities. You'll probably look in all the wrong places.
There are people that do like not to do work in their free time.
They apparently couldn’t ask directly whether I owned a car, but the coded question is: “Do you have Reliable Transportation?” <wink wink> and that was a confusing question to me, at face value; I would reply with candor, “I take public transit!” which of course gave away my situation every time.
In extreme cases we can work it out but you should have something that makes up for the extra annoyance compared to 99% of applicants.
Do you actually believe what you’re saying, or have you not thought it through?
stop advocating that we discriminate against them because you feel you need your hand held.
I kinda assumed that most developers took a similar approach to me. Laptop because portable when you need it, hooked to large screens, nice keyboard, nice mouse/whatever. I don't know what having a desktop would really buy me. I do 99% of my work with the laptop docked but that remaining 1% it sure is handy to grab it and go.
If you are just making web apps, it does not matter, but I do data processing where having the headroom can make a big difference.
I do have the cheapest used laptop I could find for those moments when I might require portability.
In one instance for a data-oriented job interview I spun up a VM in the cloud because they linked a kaggle dataset for the at home test that was just a bit too big for my laptop to handle.
But to have nothing, no desktop, no laptop at all, is _odd_ for a developer. How did you get through school? If not school, then how is it a hobby-turned-profession without something to develop on?
The whole "no one should be denied access to a job" angle is weird too. What is the limit to accommodations?
Probably not common, but certainly plausible. Not everyone wants to bring work home or have hobbies that are the same as their work.
Tells you they are an extremely competent smart worker that could be surprisingly helpful in ways we don't understand.
I'd love to learn from such a person.
I knew one software developer who basically spent all his free time outside hiking and camping and rarely did anything with a computer when not working. He was a good dev and very competent. Just after being cooped up inside on a computer all week he didn’t want to spend more time on one at home.
It’s not much of a stretch beyond that to simply not owning one.
It wouldn’t stop them from being hired.
You’ve got 10,000 candidates applying. Seriously, what would make “doesn’t have a laptop” stand out to you positively? Why not just go with the 9800 applicants who do have one? Surely there’s no reason to think “broken laptop = good dev”. It’s so much easier to simply go with a candidate who has no problems. Beyond that, what’s the deal with making candidates do stuff on their own machines anyways? You don’t know what’s on there. You don’t even know if it’s stable enough for a test, and none of that has any bearing at all on their skill.
I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, but if this is common practice, I think I dodged a bullet.
I don't know about "should" but there are many things that must be working in order for you to get a job. If they are not then you won't get a job.
It happens:)
In the company where I work (in recent history, the most valuable company on the planet), there are younger employees who do not own personal computers.
One of them was (with different company now) a Gen Z developer who did not personally own a computer (besides a phone).
I was floored. Still am.
Most things I use a laptop for could be replaced with an iPad.
The experience for me would be worse, so I don't, but I could see other people not minding it.
> > I was floored. Still am.
> Why?
My personal computer is how I learned to be a software developer and how I continue to improve as one. So, it astonishes me that a software developer by trade doesn't own a personal computer.
To help separate my reaction from my personal bias (yeah, not possible), think about how you might feel upon discovering a professional cyclist who did not own a personal bicycle.
A better comparison is a professional influencer. You'd imagine someone posting high effort videos 5-10 times a week would at least have a video camera. Wrong. Most do it with their phones only, that's been the standard for around a decade. If you think about it, why would they buy a video cam? What benefit would be in it? The same thing is now happening with programming and laptops (let alone desktop PCs). It's only bizarre if you live in a world where there's no viable alternative.
I've described some prior experiences with some interviews as failing my litmus test and have cancelled further interviews when people start demand much too much from me before I'm on a payroll.
If you want me to run a particular piece of software, send me a fucking computer. If you want me to be on call on a company-managed cellphone, send me a phone that you can own and manage all you want.
Do not ask me to download, install, or run malware on MY computer or phone as part of the APPLICATION process. If you are the sort of company that thinks this is appropriate, then I do not want to work for you. I've actually turned down work because of this. "Oh, they just want you to install this Chrome extension to make sure you're not cheating during the video interview." No. Fuck you. Don't touch my fucking equipment.
if one of my hiring practices would reliably generate that many f-bombs, i'd consider it a success and stick with it!
I guess, sure, companies are technically allowed to request you install malware on your computer. It's probably a CFAA violation, but nobody gives a rat's ass about the CFAA unless you're hacking the FBI, so who cares.
Also, make no mistake: a piece of software that is designed to record your screen, keypresses, etc is malware. It is spyware. You have absolutely zero guarantee it isn't install hooks into your system that will exist long after the application is gone.
Just do the interview in a browser sandbox like a normal person, and share your screen. Boom, problem solved, we figured this out 10 years ago. Really that paranoid about cheating? Then pay up and do an in-person interview, paper code test and all. I've had it done to me multiple times.
You wouldn't by any chance normally use a different term for this group? Perhaps a single word?