"Meritocracy is all well and good as a theory. It's all about who decides what merit is. If it's a privileged group of people who decide the merit, then it's going to be biased. Thus championing meritocracy in this organisation means upholding a hierarchy which is unfair, biased and oppressive to those outside of the people at the top".
In other words, meritocracy = an aristocracy of white males, where if you do good according to white male values you progress. Therefore meritocracy is not progression based on good work.
In a less gender explanation - removing the rug equated to a statement of a lack of trust in the employers. The employers agreed to it being removed in an attempt to gather back some of that trust.
What the whole issue ignores is that the rug was about the platform - meritocracy - because all people see is code, where the better projects get the more stars. Now there is a valid argument here that popularity doesn't equal merit - but it does not negate the concept of meritocracy.
Anyhow, I'm just the messenger - I think that there are some serious problems with this reasoning. It's horrible to twist something good to something bad.
I'm amazed the company wouldn't respond to her by saying: while the tech industry is a very imperfect meritocracy, and our company is still an imperfect one, the service we provide attempts to be a true meritocracy. The rug is about the goal, not the status quo.
The whole purpose of these statements is to represent an ideal to strive for. Things like this are exactly what give militant feminists and other PC groups a bad name.
In short, it’s a not-really-present ideal that’s often used to mask the existing power relationships that are really responsible for people being promoted/demoted to where they are.
You can't. Merit -- including "success" or "accomplishment" -- is always a subjective value judgement. Even if there is an objective measure, the evaluation of the measure as something meaningful to measure (i.e., that the measure is one of merit or success) is a subjective value judgement.
Then what is the viable alternative to achieving merit in the judgement of that group?
And the dominant group in society is, pretty much by definition, the one whose judgement is most influential.
Organizing people is the fourth hard problem.
Essentially, use of the word as a description (rather than an aspiration) packages up a whole bundle of problematic claims of the form "we're not sexist, we would have more women rise to the top if only they {tried harder | were smarter | had the technical ability | ...}" (and similarly for minorities).
I also don't agree the inverse conclusion (upper management must be all male because women don't have merit) really follows. What if the women in upper management simply work elsewhere? Where there even any women who complained that they weren't in upper management at GitHub? Do they even have a better/worse hierarchy for people so that people not in upper management should feel like losers?
</Lebowski>
All joking aside, that rug thing is pretty silly. "Meritocracy" is not code for "Straight White Males only." Nevertheless Horvath being feminist does not invalidate any unfair treatment she may have experienced should her claims be substantiated.
If you "succeed" and do "well" on GitHub (what metric can we use? Lots of a stars? Getting your name out there?), what does that actually prove?
If GitHub is a meritocracy, what have the "winners" done to set them apart from the rest, and how does that translate into the professional world?
So, as with these outrageous stories there is always a highly commented /g/ thread.
http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/40840868
I'd say it supplies much needed contrast to this thread's aversion to calling this chick out on her flawed character.
Githubs image is being crushed. Schadenfreude. They only need to grow a backbone.
not saying she is right or wrong about how things went down with the founder's wife etc.
but she clearly is insane.