Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meritocracy at Scale

scale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 70 posts

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#51

Post by hurrdurr57 »

sneak wrote: post #33
kwhitefoot wrote: post #7

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. Isn't this what everyone tries to do? > A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. It might, but probably not because you have found people who have 'merit' whatever that nebulously defined thing might be.

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. > It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. This isn’t about “hiring on merit”. This is a dogwhistle, saying to people “we are an anti-“woke” workplace”, s…

>A less charitable interpretation is that they are attempting specifically to recruit people who would prefer to work exclusively amongst people very similar to themselves.

This is the case with pretty much everyone.

When it comes to companies that have an aggressive DEI policy, you may end up with employees more diverse in terms of race and sex, but they are usually all required to adhere to the exact same ideology. They only hire people very much like themselves, only on a different metric.

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#53

Post by verticalscaler »

gumbo wrote: post #52
verticalscaler wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Yes, it very much did hit a nerve.

Gumbo does not disclose anything about what group with special privileges you're supposed to be a part of and that's the entire point - I don't want to know. I don't care if you're black, white, or purple. Don't care about your gender, sexuality or personal life either. Never did, never will.

Which is precisely why bringing up minorities when you are just an anonymous jumble of letters and the attempted guilt trip is a bunch of insufferable manipulative hooey. It is not a "fair question" by any stretch of the imagination, you know nothing about me other than I don't subscribe to your garbage worldview.

You already exposed yourself as an insufferable bully with this: "The only people I’ve talked to who oppose DEI efforts were either blatantly sexist/racist"

Nice try. You go place burdens and play these games with people who have patience to put up with your nonsense. Strain as hard as you will to be offended and oppressed, no such luck bud, and absolutely nobody called you any names either.

I don't need you to be upset, your emotional state does not concern me one iota.

Talk about a lack of self control. You are extremely out of line.

You obviously will disrupt every workplace and gathering with tantrums and false accusations whenever you don't get your way. Tough cookies, you ain't getting your way with me no matter what.

"If you don't agree with me you are a bad person" is the most childish kindergarten bullshit imaginable. Take a look in the mirror, enough woke sharia. Enough.

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#54

Post by kwhitefoot »

RobLach wrote: post #17

The word comes from the book “The Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Dunlop Young. Worth a read.

Young was not a fan of meritocracy though:

"meritocracy (n.)

coined 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young (1915-2002) and used in title of his book, "The Rise of the Meritocracy"; from merit (n.) + -cracy. Related: Meritocratic.

    [Young's book] imagined an elite that got its position not from ancestry, but from test scores and effort. For him, meritocracy was a negative term; his spoof was a warning about the negative consequences of assigning social status based on formal educational qualifications, and showed how excluding from leadership anyone who couldn't jump through the educational hoops would create a new form of discrimination. And that's exactly what has happened. [Lani Guinier, interview, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2015] "
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=meritocracy

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#55

Post by hurrdurr57 »

x3ro wrote: post #9
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

My hot take: a meritocracy will never fully exist in a workplace so long as there’s a hierarchy of power and therefore politics. But I’m not advocating for removing a hierarchy.

Out of curiosity, are you implying that "no hierarchy" is possible? And would "no hierarchy" somehow mean no politics, as your statement seems to imply? I'm personally convinced that "no hierarchy" or "flat hierarchies" mostly means that hidden hierarchies will form anyway, and thus the situation you end up with, while different to traditional strict hierarchies, is still extremely hierarchical in the end.

Personally, I think hierarchies are tyrannical and oppressive and should be abolished entirely.

As I have just demonstrated my selfless pursuit of equality for all, naturally I should be placed at the very top of the new non-hierarchy.

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#56

Post by Waterluvian »

hurrdurr57 wrote: post #55
x3ro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, are you implying that "no hierarchy" is possible? And would "no hierarchy" somehow mean no politics, as your statement seems to imply? I'm personally convinced that "no hierarchy" or "flat hierarchies" mostly means that hidden hierarchies will form anyway, and thus the situation you end up with, while different to traditional strict hierarchies, is still extremely hierarchical in the end.

Personally, I think hierarchies are tyrannical and oppressive and should be abolished entirely. As I have just demonstrated my selfless pursuit of equality for all, naturally I should be placed at the very top of the new non-hierarchy.

There is no top. But you can be in the most middle position.

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#57

Post by flappyeagle »

mdp2021 wrote: post #34
bberrry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. > Isn't this what everyone tries to do? You seem to have missed that meritocracy has recently become a bad word and undesirable in some political circles.

> You seem to have missed that meritocracy has recently become a bad word and undesirable in some political circles I also did (miss that). Could you explain, or were you just drawing conclusion from the Wang's «There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity»? Edit: I think I found an acronym in this page that I cannot recall ever meeting (at least, never so strongly highlighted), and I…

I’ve worked at 2 saas companies that both declared this. Out loud. In writing. In all hands meetings.

HR departments went buck wild

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#58

Post by Manuel_D »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #7

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. Isn't this what everyone tries to do? > A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. It might, but probably not because you have found people who have 'merit' whatever that nebulously defined thing might be.

No, plenty of companies I worked at had explicit targets to achieve certain percentages of women and URM hires. Sure, leadership vociferously denied that these were quotas: they were just "inclusion targets" and "diversity goals". But if you failed to meet them you'd either have bad reviews or see your pay reduced (remember, a "bonus" contingent on achieving a quota is identical to a penalty contingent on failure to meet the quota).

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#59

Post by Manuel_D »

catapart wrote: post #25
ipnon wrote: post #5

How brave of a company to say they will only hire those who will contribute the most to the bottom line!

While also providing no actual metrics for their so-called "merit"-based system. Oh, you prefer "smart" people, you say?! What a concept! It's like the screechers about "meritocracy" never get the memo that the issue people have with it is not it's conceptual structure, but that its details aren't ever (in any situation I've seen) spelled out with the kind of logical consistency that they pretend they are relying on.…

A meritocratic system doesn't have to be perfect or exactly defined. It's enough for a system to be based on work-related capabilities and output, rather than the gender, race, etc. of candidates and workers. An automatically graded leetcode interview is a meritocratic system, even if leetcode performance is not an exact measure of an employee's potential performance.

It's totally viable to define meritocracy in contrast to gender-conscious and race-conscious DEI policies.

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#60

Post by Manuel_D »

y7 wrote: post #21

The interesting question is not the choice between diversity and merit, but how you attract and select the most meritorious candidates in a setting where your company overwhelmingly skews towards one demographic, given that people are more likely to hire others that are similar to them (and conversely, potential candidates are not likely to join companies when there are no people similar to them).

An easy way is to anonymize the interview process. Strip out identifying material in resumes. Conduct Zoom interviews with camera off and a voice modulator. It'd be harder to anonymize performance reviews while working in person, but the application process can be pretty robustly anonymized.

The thing is, when tech companies experiment with putting the proverbial veil between candidates and interviewers they don't get the results they expect: https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...

> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women.

Post reply on HN