Comment by alukima | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alukima | Hacker News Reader

This is why I get annoyed when I hear people claim that their workplace is a true meritocracy and 20 of 20 employees are white males. So only white males have the intellectual talent to make it in tech?

I totally get that it's not meant that way, but that's what it looks like to people who are not in SV tech.

Off topic but since this has come up this week several times: Meritocracies seem great in theory but rarely work in practice. What exactly are we measuring? How much code you can write in an hour? The quality of the code? What if you spend more time helping other members of your team with new concepts and that limits the amount of code you can write? What about the people in the office who support you and help you get things done faster? Do we include things like pairing skills?

The only time I worked at company who claimed to be a meritocracy I benefited greatly but people whose skills weren't as easily measured were unfairly left behind. We had a PM quit after being denied a raise and his departure set us back quite a bit, clearly we weren't measuring his value accordingly.

Not that I have any particular stance on the legitimacy of meritocracies, but why would a meritocracy imply racial diversity, exactly?

Especially, when taken as the starting point, an income distribution for candidates that is biased along racial lines?

(Income of family is known to be linked to educational quality.)

If the system were fully meritocratic, you'd expect a lot more females in the industry, for one. Unless you suppose that females of all races are objectively less capable in some way. But then you'd have to explain why there are so many females being successful in other hard sciences like biology.

The fact is that many people aren't given early access and encouragement to technology, and the ones that do experience constant pressure and put-downs. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. I've done hundreds of interviews and dozens of interview trainings, and have personally observed lots of silly behavior, from treating women more harshly than men, to dismissing a candidate because their family name implied a background of poverty.

A "safe" example to think about: it's very common to rubbish people who went to this university or that one instead of yours, which is obviously the best. You can write that off as good-natured play, but consider that I've had to build a career in tech without a degree. It's only by the slimmest chain of coincidences that I was able to even get the opportunity to be seen and evaluated. The "meritocratic" system simply doesn't believe that anyone without the nous to afford college is worth even noticing.

The hiring manager at the end of that food chain is often unaware of all that. He (and it's usually a "he") passes over resumes and chuckles at their university choices, then picks "the good ones" to jump through hoops and from there picks "the best". To him, that's meritocracy.

Alright, I can agree with that.

Once again though, meritocracy would only mean equal opportunity and not necessarily facilitate any particular effort for equal representation. A system can still be meritocratic (although I'm not saying ours is) while social influences still skew the demographics.

Assuming that raw talent is equally spread among races, and that education is equally effective for all races, then a meritocracy should have a racial diversity that is the same as the larger population's.

I consider the first assumption (equal raw talent) to be quite probable. I consider the second assumption to be implausible.

Black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population but 7.14% of tech workers, if we were a true meritocracy you wouldn't expect those numbers.

Of course, this isn't the fault of the tech industry. People in lower socio-economic classes are not exposed to technology at early ages and often don't have the ability to go college.

So if tech is a meritocracy it's a meritocracy for people in certain classes.

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