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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

The article, like many on this topic, conflates meritocracy with a just world:

The idea of a meritocracy presumes that everyone starts off and continues through with the same level of access to opportunity, time, and money...

Meritocracy is simply the belief that meritorious people will (either deterministically or probabilistically) rise to the top. It is not the belief that the distribution of merit is fair.

A person who ate lots of lead paint as a child, had Down's syndrome, or some similar tragic circumstance, will have very little programming ability and very little merit. This is unfair. The lack of mentally retarded individuals in open source is not evidence against meritocracy.

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This article isn't talking about people who ate lead paint, though. It's talking about people who might be brilliant programmers, but don't have the opportunity, time, and money to contribute to OSS for one reason or another. Someone who doesn't contribute outside work doesn't necessarily have less merit, unless we accept that merit really means being of a certain social class.

Wait, we have a social class of programmers (who on average make well above the median income) that are unable to contribute to something on github? I would agree that there is a whole class of people unwilling to contribute anything, and they largely overlap with the programmers who don't do anything to sharpen their saw. Consequently they are also the programmers who will have a horrible time trying to find a job after they have been laid off from the company they have been at for the last 10 years because they didn't take the time to stay on top of what's happening in the technology world.

Imagine being a single mother with a young child. You're a great programmer. But you spend 90% of your time outside work raising your kid, so you can't make the time to make significant contributions to OSS.

...

You can't get a job that requires a Github OSS history. You're severely disadvantaged in job hunting when OSS contributions are a major metric.

If people tested your suitability for a job by pair programming with you, or looking at code samples, you'd look just as good as someone who contributes to OSS. But because OSS is an important metric, you're disadvantaged.

Does this make clear how it's discriminatory?

It's pretty clear that requiring a Github history is discriminatory. I wonder, though:

(1) Are there any companies which literally remove a person's resume from the running if his/her fit seems to be good in other ways, just because they do not have a public facing github repo? Or is this just something that people are talking about but not actually implementing.

(2) In what sense is any job requirement not discriminatory? Requiring 5 years of Ruby experience discriminates against those with only 6 months of Ruby experience. Requiring a Masters degree discriminates against those with a Bachelors or no degree. Making the candidate do a programming test discriminates against people who don't perform well on tests. The question is whether the programmers that a company hires based on a Github criterion are measurably "better" than those hired using different criteria. As far as I know, no such comparison has been done.

I could absolutely see myself using this as a screening mechanism. When I was hiring developers, I would get literally hundreds of resumes sent to me. Filtering through resumes is a waste of time. You cannot tell from that piece of paper (PDF, Word Doc, etc) how technically capable a person is, or if they would be a good fit for the team.

I do not have time to interview hundreds of people, so we have to apply some filtering. Are we going to potentially filter out a good candidate because they didn't take the time to make themselves stand out? Maybe, but I'm okay with that.

Good point. If you have to go through hundreds, then you're more or less looking for a reason to say no. Better that you miss the odd good candidate, than waste weeks of productive time trying to make the process 100% perfect.

What makes her a great programmer? Some natural ability? Surely during the time she has developed all of these skills she has developed something that is worth showing off? If she is such a great programmer, how is she maintaining her skills if all she is doing is working on what her employer puts in front of her?

If that single mother literally has no time outside of her 40 hour work week to be learning new things and staying current with technology, she will have a hard time finding new jobs regardless of the screening methods used.

This is also one contrived example. Not an entire "social class" of the programming population.

The rate of mentally retarded people in open source community is actually much higher than in general population. Various forms of autism, social anxieties, mild psychopathy and border-line schizophrenia are surprisingly common.

But it was always ok to bully nerds, physically or other way.

Care to supply any proof of that claim?

"The belief that meritorious people will rise to the top" requires believing that people of equal merit are treated equally, but that doesn't happen - people have all kinds of biases and *isms that muddy this up.

Github is the great equalizer against bias of almost any sort. I look at github when filtering candidates. At the time I'm deciding to interview them, I probably don't even know their name, race, gender, if they went to college, or anything else of that sort. All I can see is their code.

The point is, by the time they get there, this filtering has already happened.

Of course, to be truly accurate, the question "merit for what?" needs to be answered. Merit is a hazy word when applied across a whole industry - it needs to be matched to very specific tasks, projects, and goals to become clear.

An embedded systems designer may exhibit less "merit" than a wizard of front-end programming when dropped into front-end programming - and vice-versa. There's no absolute, gold standard for merit, no matter how hard we try to find one.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to hire the most suitable (meritorious?) people for our own companies. Just because merit is a hazy target, and subject to different caveats, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, or that you can't judge one person as more effective than another for a specific set of tasks. That's why we make job descriptions specialized, so that match peoples skills and attributes to the needs of the job.

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