[cardiffspaceman]

I don't think you're doing a meritocracy if you use 'culture fit'. I think it's at best a cop-out.

I do share concerns with you about the ideas you are disadvocating. Such as that a person's productivity not a neat weighted sum. Such as that we could systematically find all the numbers that need to be summed. Plus concerns I'm not sure if you're getting at, such as the idea that sort of results from pushing a meritocratic view, which is that a person's value in the world is their value to some small collection of enterprises, their one job or their two jobs.

If you are paying people for their work and also providing some encouraging words, what do you then use to determine the pay packet or the words to say?

[WorldMaker]

That's an interesting question and I think the big point here is to differentiate merit from meritocracy. There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, by trying to base payment/encouragement upon perceived merit. The disconnect is trying to make it systemic (meritocratic) and forgetting the subjective nature of merit, and that the only merit you reward/punish is that which you perceive.

It's very easy to build a culture based on merit metrics and tautologize that numbers are objective, this merit system is based on numbers, therefore this merit system is objective and thus this is objectively a "meritocracy". There's a number of logical fallacies wound up in that thought process, but that's how a lot of bureaucracies get formed, and a how a lot of them rationalize themselves as objective/benign.

I guess the underlying problem is that merit is great, but the illusion that "merit" scales to form benign meritocracies is something that we need to question a lot more than we do.