[danharaj]

Meritocracy, like all words that reduce to "good thing", are always troublesome. No one ever claims to be a "bad thing"ocracy. The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?

Using words to maintain a culture has a sort of Newton's third law. It might push you towards striving to be "good thing", but it also pushes back, making people resistant to the idea that you aren't striving for "good thing". This is an inescapable fact of how humans hold values.

Better words are the ones that aren't exclusively evaluated by humans. These are things on which people can agree there exists an impartial measure of the thing. There is no such measure of merit. Merit is an undecidable value at best and an incoherent one at worst.

So, counterintuitively, "good thing" words to describe values are kind of bad. It is easy to construe acknowledging their badness as thinking the underlying concept is bad. I think that is happening in this comment thread. I think rewarding people with trust and responsibility based on merit is a great idea! I think it is detrimental to the cause to codify that in your mission statement.

[bluecalm]

Well meritocracy means we will try to select and give influence/recognition based on merit. When someone tries to push an idea like "let's have more Asians" or "let's have more men" in the project we can direct them to the very first statement where they see we do selection based on merit and not skin color, gender or sexual orientation. Any attempt to introduce gender/race/sexual orientation quotas will promptly be rejected on those basis. There is value in wording it like this beyond "let's do good".

[guitarbill]

Who gets to define merit? Say a certain style was more likely to pass code review. And that style was more often associated with people with CS degrees, vs self-taught programmers. Even though it's a stylistic choice, functionally equivalent, one is "better" than the other and is introducing bias.

It's very easy to do, especially because consistency is important for legibility, but a stylistic choice nonetheless. I think a decent, practical solution to some degree are prettifiers/code-formatters and linters. Because the style is codified, and trivial for anybody to apply.

[derefr]

Usually calling something a meritocracy implies that it also has public bars for promotion that you can constantly self-test against and so iterate toward.

A common example is a marital-arts dojo: every student can take a belt (rank) promotion test at any time, and as many times as they like; and it is crystal-clear what such a test entails (usually, being able to beat someone who is already at the given skill-level, with both participants using a defined subset of the taught skills that the target ranking "expects.") Thus, even without taking the official test, students can simply ask their peers who have reached that skill level to spar with them, and in-so-doing iterate toward being of that skill level themselves.

For a more hypothetical example: a meritocratic public schooling system would be one where there're no "years" of education, but rather "ranks" (or just a big unified "tech tree" of topic-units to study), with tests to attain new ranks/unlock new topic-units; and where each student can take each test an infinite number of times (presumably with procedurally-generated tests that resist answer-memorization.)

In such systems, you (ideally) will first very quickly equilibrate to the rank in the system that your initial level of merit allows you to reach, and then will continue forward through the system at the rate you're willing to grind to increase your merit.

[sanxiyn]

You should follow the project's style when you start contributing. If style is pointed out in code review, fix it.

[guitarbill]

Well yes, I agree. It's a bit of a toy example, simplistic, but hopefully one we can all relate to.

It does illustrate the issue of using "meritocracy" without anything else. It's like saying "we follow a style guide", and then not providing that style guide. Obviously sub-optimal.

(The example breaks down since providing a style guide is doable, whereas providing a "merit guide" is hard/impossible? In that case, is it better to remove that? I don't know.)

[bluecalm]

Just because it's hard to accomplish pure meritocracy doesn't mean we can't strive for it or have it our stated values. It has an advantage that we can reject all efforts which contradicting the principle and could possibly undermine the project.

[davorak]

> Well meritocracy means we will try to select and give influence/recognition based on merit. When someone tries to push an idea like "let's have more Asians" or "let's have more men" ...

Isn't the argument normal something more like: "I don't think we are living up to the description of meritocracy. Our demographics lean heavily one direct and we lack female/male/asian/<descriptor> for no merit based reason. Lets do something about that."

The core of such arguments are an attempt to support/bolster meritocracy.

[TheAdamAndChe]

> "good thing" words to describe values are kind of bad.

This makes no sense to me. Values are principles or standards of behavior. If I try to keep good values, this makes me evil somehow? Why would common standards of behavior for a group with a common goal be bad? Wouldn't it help the group continue in the same direction?

[danharaj]

You have to separate the word from the underlying concept(s). They're not the same thing. If they were the same thing, I could conjure of invisible pink unicorns with an utterance and make all the world utopia by having everyone recite "I am a good person and I won't do anything bad". Words can fail and everyone acknowledges that at least tacitly. Hypocrisy is the purest form of words failing. Let's put it that way: Even if you call yourself a meritocracy you can still be a hypocrite. On the other hand being a meritocracy without calling yourself one is no problem. If you call your organization of 300 people a meritocracy, there will be 300 notions of merit. What benefit is there to calling yourself one if the word itself has no concrete, actionable content and doesn't unify people's vision?

This sort of trickery is easier to see when you are part of the management of an organization. The bulk of my relevant personal experience is as a software consultant where I have been embedded in many organizations, all of which considered themselves "good thing"ocracies, but usually fell far short of the mark. We are all hypocrites like that. Words are tricky devils. If you don't treat them with a healthy suspicion you can get in trouble. You have to make them servants of your goal, not arbiters of what your goal is.

[ThrowawayR2]

If your argument against the use of "meritocracy" is true, it would apply just as much to "diversity" or "equality", meaning that you are arguing those generically good words should not be used as well. Am I missing something?

[danharaj]

Those words are also empty if they are not provided along with a rubric of what they mean. Equality is perhaps more troublesome than meritocracy while diversity is somewhat better.

It is not obvious that diversity is a good thing, so it has more bits of information if you make it a value. Not much, though, if you do it like most corporations in a shallow and vague way.

[malwrar]

Better words are the ones that aren't exclusively evaluated by humans. These are things on which people can agree there exists an impartial measure of the thing.

What do you propose we replace it with then? I happen to think that the word "merit" is apt to describe what any good software company is looking for in its employees. If an individual brings value to the company, they have merit and should be rewarded for it.

The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?

How is this relevant? If someone is voicing dissent about a culture there's a million barriers they can hide behind instead of facing the allegations ("we're committed to working towards a more diverse and inclusive environment..."). Are we to cower away from any word that can be twisted to justify bad things as well as good things, for fear that people will abuse them?

The word "meritocracy" doesn't seem like a line of code specifying an objective action that is to be taken to solve a problem, it describes a vision of how someone would ideally like their company to operate. How about we just call out bad behavior when we see it and not let it pollute the vision? That's what needs to happen, or we'll be locked in this battle until one political group manages to suppress the others (that, by the way, seem to have the exact same endgoals they do).

[deltron3030]

>The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?

Context. Is it helpful for x business goal?

[Presquare]

If you mean your post as a general argument against organisations claiming to value any vague "good thing", I can respect that. With few word changes in your comment, you could use it to argue against claims of valuing: privacy, diversity, inclusivity, environment etc.

Do you believe organisations should remove all claims of valuing such things?

[danharaj]

I never take such value statements at face value and neither should you.

[vanderZwan]

Very nice way to put it.

What do you think of Google's "don't be evil" clause and that it was recently removed? Same thing, or subtly different? Not trying to be inflammatory, I don't know what to think myself: rationally I think it should feel the same, yet somehow it feels different.

[danharaj]

I think it feels different, at least to me, because "don't be evil" doesn't signal any value about how I would be treated if I worked at Google. We often evaluate such value statements by empathizing with the people affected. Everyone here wants to be evaluated on their merit. Everyone thinks they're meritorious.

So it's easy to see opposition to the word "meritocracy" and, putting oneself in the shoes of a member of the Mozilla org, feeling mistreated. On the other hand removing "don't be evil" doesn't feel like Google is going to start mistreating people I empathize with^.

^ I feel that way for different reasons :^)

[sanxiyn]

This is why I support measured merit instead of merit. If you have merit but didn't show it, it doesn't matter.