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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

I found that episode terribly confused, and I never understood the rationale behind it. Isn't "meritocracy" a value and environment that feminists have told us over and over again is a positive development for women? Don't women want to work in a "meritocracy" precisely because their work will be valued and appreciated not because they are women but because excellence at work knows no sex, colour, or creed?

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The reasoning goes like this:

"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.

When I look for libraries to use on github I don't know or care about the race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs of the person who wrote the code...

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.

It's so sad to see things like this twisted around by people with too much time and an axe to grind. I don't think anyone expects to put down a mat and claim 'Mission Accomplished' on building a meritocracy. Or any other vision statement from a company or person.

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.

Steve Klabnik explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7405881

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.

The assumption underlying this analysis is that no merit exists outside of subjective value judgement. Furthermore, subjective value judgments are biased in favor of the existing privileged groups. Do I have that about right?

Sort of. “Merit” is more a measure of those groups’ definitions of success. Calling it a meritocracy overly simplifies the circumstances for that success, often reinforcing the power relationships.

So, how does one tease apart what is meant by the original definition of merit, let's call it 'accomplishment', from these subjective definitions of success? Or is that even possible?

> So, how does one tease apart what is meant by the original definition of merit, let's call it 'accomplishment', from these subjective definitions of success? Or is that even possible?

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.

So, is there any way to make an achievement or do something of merit outside of the dominant power group's judgement?

Nothing is an achievement or thing of merit outside of the judgement of some individual or set of individuals. Merit/achievement isn't something that exists independently.

And the dominant group in society is, pretty much by definition, the one whose judgement is most influential.

>And the dominant group in society is, pretty much by definition, the one whose judgement is most influential.

Then what is the viable alternative to achieving merit in the judgement of that group?

We're talking about software development here. Writing code that works, and implementing features that make it to the website/product are easily quantifiable metrics (someone who contributes a lot of good code is judged as more worthy).

I love this line of reasoning. X isn't perfectly Y, so let's get rid of it in favor of something that's even farther from Y!

It’s not “get rid of meritocracy” but rather “recognize that it isn’t really meritocracy and it’s preserving problems”.

"X isn't perfectly Y, so let's stop working towards it in favor of working towards something that's even farther from Y!" is equally absurd.

No, it’s “X isn’t really Y, despite what we say, and it’s actually harmful, so let’s stop reinforcing problems by pretending that it is Y”. As being discussed elsewhere in this thread, the problem with meritocracy is that it’s dependent on value judgements by those already in power. Simply, it is a fine ideal, but in practice it is unachievable, utopic. Establishing an organization or community as “meritocratic” means ignoring the role of existing dynamics.

Everything you've said is equally true of any hiring system. It makes sense why employers are drawn to the one that provides them with the most value, while also carrying the added benefit of also being the one that isn't systematically sexist/racist.

Meritocracy as an ideal may not be intrinsically sexist or racist, but declaring an organization a meritocracy doesn’t automatically eliminate existing sexism, racism, etc, and instead masks it. That’s the problem. It’s not unlike the “structureless organization”. It’s not really structureless — there are always informal social dynamics in play — and acting as if it is structureless results in avoiding problems instead of confronting them. Everything was all rainbows and unicorns at GitHub until the informal structure apparently resulted in an institutional inability to deal with certain issues. Valve has seen similar problems.

Organizing people is the fourth hard problem.

Are you suggesting that hiring less qualified women for the sake of diversity would help to dispel the notion that women are less qualified, and hired for the sake of diversity?

Of course not. But don’t use meritocracy as an excuse to not be proactive about diversity.

It's certainly something to aspire to. But think about it this way: if someone is claiming that you are already a meritocracy, but their upper management are almost entirely white and male, what subsidiary claim does that seem to be making?

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).

So by removing the rug she already told the management what she thinks of them. No wonder that love didn't really grow between them...

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?

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