[beaconstudios]

I don't think a whole region can really be called a meritocracy - that strikes me as a pervasive myth. It would seem that meritocracy is something that a lot of SV companies strive for, but you'll always get companies that operate like Uber where meritocracy takes a back seat to politics and posturing.

[jordigh]

While in principle being judged by nothing by your actions is a great, well, principle, in practice "meritocracy" ends up favouring people who were already socially advantaged in some way or another (e.g. male) to elicit the actions that the meritocratic judge is looking for.

The idea sounds nice, but it ends up just reinforcing cronyism. If you belong to the right in-group, usually stratified along some social injustice, you'll display the merits that in-group wants.

[beaconstudios]

the point of a meritocracy is to produce the best possible work and reward good performance, not to right real or perceived injustices. Statistically speaking, if the majority of developers are male then a majority of high-performing developers will also be male. Hiring lower-performing females to attempt to achieve balance does not fix the original issue, and it serves to harm the hiring company by choosing people based on social group rather than skill.

Solving underrepresentation issues is, in my opinion, more about changing the perception of the industry for those poorly represented groups and performing outreach at younger ages, rather than having companies hire disproportionately more women or people of colour so that their employees look more diverse. That doesn't really solve anything.

[jordigh]

Okay, so when I object and say "cronyism" you hear "let's hire idiots just because they're women". It doesn't have to be either of these.

A simple thing you can do is publicly state, "we encourage women and other minorities to apply". And that's all. You encourage them. You don't have to give them any preferential treatment to pad your numbers (and I don't think anyone ever really does that, but a lot of people seem to be afraid that it happens). You just have to explicitly direct your invitation to them. That's enough to increase your hiring pool and give your company culture a nudge in the right direction. If you object to the alleged benefits of having a diverse staff, I can't imagine you would object to attracting more people to apply who otherwise wouldn't.

A further point I want to emphasise: what is merit? Who decides what is merit? If you think being nice to others has no merit (or is not "good performance"), then you may end up hiring toxic employees like Fowler's sexual harasser and then keep him around because of your merit metric. This will end up costing you good employees like Fowler.

[beaconstudios]

I wasn't suggesting you were saying "let's hire idiots just because they're women", I was pointing out a hypothetical scenario in which meritocracy plays second fiddle. There's no need to get defensive.

I agree with your suggestion that encouraging women and minorities to apply, and ensuring that one's company culture is inclusive, is a good start. However, this doesn't really help with the core issue, which is that the number of women and minorities getting into the field in the first place is disproportionately low to their demographic representation. I'm not well-positioned to suggest why that is, being a white man myself, but until the underlying issues are solved, decrying meritocracy as promoting white men over other candidates is not a valid criticism.

Merit is for each company to decide for itself. I'm sure there are many companies, Uber included, that consider themselves a meritocracy but the way they measure individual merit just leads to toxic culture. Fowler made mention of a number of bad actors who were not fired because they were high-performers in the company's eyes - and this is a valid concern for companies that aim to be purely numbers-based in their evaluations. Personally, I'd say that there has to be a baseline of decency for an employee to be valuable at all, and that how someone interacts with others should be considered as a metric for their individual merit. Quantifying that, however, is a whole 'nother question.

[Nitramp]

> I wasn't suggesting you were saying "let's hire idiots just because they're women", I was pointing out a hypothetical scenario in which meritocracy plays second fiddle.

You suggested "if the majority of developers are mal, then a majority of high-performing developers will also be male". So far so good. Then you made the non sequitur jump to "Hiring lower-performing females to attempt to achieve balance does not fix the original issue". That's a straw man, nobody suggests that. You risk being perceived as creating an absurd hypothetical ("let's hire worse people for social justice reasons") just for the sake of winning the argument, or even believing this is the choice that's posited.

I think this is a recurring problem with these kinds of discussions, people tend to put forward very extreme views of reality where what'd be useful is to seek the middle ground, understand the problem, and then nudge a bit in the right direction.

Additionally, even the basic premise that we currently hire for merit is questionable. Of course everyone tries to hover the best and brightest, but it's easy to see see how a very homogeneous group like SV software devs might mistake group conformity for competence.

[beaconstudios]

> That's a straw man, nobody suggests that.

Not directly, but one of the main attempts to address a lack of diversity in tech seems to be diversity quotas, or companies actively looking to hire more women or POC. Diversity quotas directly cause the exact issue I quoted, where the ratios of allowed hires by social group does not match the ratio of applicants. Statistically speaking, that's equivalent to agreeing to hire less-qualified individuals. Attempts to specifically hire more women or POC through outreach might help an individual company, but it's a zero-sum game of multiple companies competing for the existing small pool of candidates.

> I think this is a recurring problem with these kinds of discussions, people tend to put forward very extreme views of reality where what'd be useful is to seek the middle ground, understand the problem, and then nudge a bit in the right direction.

I think part of the issue is that you immediately devolved into hyperbole about hiring "idiots". Hiring slightly-less-than-the-top-candidate developers is in no way comparable to hiring "idiots" and your suggestion that it is is only muddying the topic further.

> Additionally, even the basic premise that we currently hire for merit is questionable. Of course everyone tries to hover the best and brightest, but it's easy to see see how a very homogeneous group like SV software devs might mistake group conformity for competence.

Of course suggesting that hires are always for merit is questionable - it's more of an ideal to aim for than an actually achievable goal.

[mcguire]

Are you aware of Ms Fowler's allegations?

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Nothing to do (directly) with underrepresentation or "hiring lower-performing females".

[beaconstudios]

I'm not suggesting it is. This discussion has kind of branched out from the issues Ms Fowler faced into a general one around diversity.