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Comment by freefrancisco | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley? If there is, then the author's argument has some merit. If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal. To what end?

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That is an interesting question. I still can't think of one better than math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV.

The to what end question is easy to answer though. It gets you a lot more attention to claim SV isn't a meritocracy than to claim that math isn't.

> math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV

Can you point me to the great mathematical and hard science accomplishments going on right now?

All I see is ad sales and hucksterism.

> is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Obviously professional sport. Especially "one-dimensional" sports like running or swimming. The "best" runners in the world are so named because they consistently run the fastest. There are some qualifiers in terms of who has the time and money to train, and access to coaching, but all in all it's highly meritocratic.

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Jobs where the individual’s numbers are everything, like sales and trading.

If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal.

The author makes the mistake of looking at Silicon Valley as a monolithic institution. There are many different aspects to life as a dev.

Having said that, coding ability isn’t >*. Things like culture fit and the ability to work with other people also factor in, unless you go the solo dev route. Also, there are still a lot of idiots getting promoted, like the people that end up populating the tales of The Daily WTF.

I would submit that mind sports are the most meritocratic subculture; performance is statistically ranked and sometimes measured directly.

And........ we find that there are no women at the top.

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at speedcubing [1].

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at chess.

There are only a few women in the top 100 at scrabble [2].

There is only one woman in the top 100 at Go (EGF).

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

Here's one story of why a girl quit playing competitive chess as a teenager: http://fanoudraws.tumblr.com/post/68091072768/sorry-this-pos...

The end is to sell her book, which is published tomorrow.

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