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Comment by simonlc | Hacker News Reader

Why was he fired?

And that's the part of being fired you usually don't discuss publicly. It always makes somebody look bad and nobody wants to burn bridges

But part of the problem is that in a meritocracy you need people to know who the bad actors are. It seems pretty obvious from outside Github that something has gone rotten in the company over the past couple of years, and the is the latest of the smells.

Now any one of us could end up hiring that rotten apple from github in the future, if we don't know who it is.

Of course you don't want to slander or libel people, but giving them the cover of complete anonymity is not good.

GitHub is very explicitly no longer a meritocracy: http://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocra...

And per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158997 the same Julie Ann Horvath was both his ex and wanted him fired.

Github has acknowledged that unconscious biases make it nearly impossible to have a true, pure meritocracy. It's a bit like communism - the ideal is wonderful, the actual implementation problematic.

Perhaps meritocracy is a term used by those in power to placate those that don't have power, to give them the illusion that it is all just a objective and clear and if they fail it is all their fault because they didn't merit it.

>meritocracy

Has anyone ever seen an actual meritocratic work place? Eight years working and I'm convinced that it's nearly impossible for small organizations to implement and outright impossible for large organizations.

I'll show you a meritocratic workplace as soon as you show me a way to measure developer productivity.

Every engineer knows the pecking order of who the top performers are. The trick is not determining merit, it's arriving at a consensus about merit without politics hopelessly skewing the result.

I don't think this is true. Programmers' values vary. One person may value the number of features implemented over the maintainability of the code, while another may not. One may value finding creative uses for existing components over integrating new components, while another may not. As a result, programmers' evaluations of their own and each other's performance may not be consistent.

I once worked somewhere where there was a guy who went round the company getting involved in projects, pushing radical new approaches, not thinking things through properly, writing mediocre code, then moving on to something else. I thought he was a hazard [1]. I recently learned that he's been promoted to 'principal engineer'.

[1] Exaggerating somewhat. I like the guy, i think most of his ideas are great, and i respect him a lot. I just worried about the complexity and speed of change exceeding our ability to execute successfully.

You're free to ask people who come in to interview at your company, "why did you leave your last job?" and apply your own judgement.

Or if you truly want to help improve Github, you should join them! :-)

Well, he doesn't detail things, but you can see subtle bitchings about management:

"Do you know what happens after you tell them the whole story behind your termination? Virtually everyone I've had drinks with tells a similar story about the time they got fired. Seemingly everyone’s got stories of being stuck under shit managers, or dealing the fallout from things out of their control."

You tell them your story, they tell you their similar story about being stuck under shit managers...

Image is paramount in this meritocracy.

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