You keep using that word "meritocracy" • Hacker News Board

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#61

Post by adwf » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 1:54 AM UTC

anthonyb wrote: post #49

adwf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules. This is quite an unusual definition. I always thought that a meritocracy was about giving the people best able to do a job the greatest rewards. The article seems to be assuming that all meritocr…

You're dancing around the point of the article, which is that what most people here consider a programming/technical meritocracy is a corrupt meritocracy. Most people who can program, can do so because of their background, not because of some innate quality.

I'll have to give up here. My personal experience is therefore colliding with forum experience, and my anecdotal evidence should never be given too much sway if so.

It's a tricky dilemma trying to work out whether background affects peoples ability to learn rather than their ability to do. An -innate- quality wasn't what I was trying to get at in saying that some people are better at their jobs than others, but I can certainly see the implications. I'll have to think about it...

If it helps, my background is from a UK perspective, so a lot of the biases may not be all that similar cross-culture.

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#62

Post by sopooneo » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 1:54 AM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #4

kolektiv wrote: post #3

"If we met the utopian ideal we toss around in blog posts, we’d still have lots of middle-aged women in this field. We’d have black people. We’d have Asian people – not a smattering, but a majority, cause the world is mostly Asian people." Just had to pick up on this, purely because it's symptomatic of another form of blindness. We DO have Asian people. Go and look in Asia. There aren't many Asian programmers in comp…

It's also worth noting that female developers seem much more common in asian countries too.

That is new information for me. Anyone have any insight on why it would be the case?

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#63

Post by ktizo » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 1:54 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #51

ktizo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"FizzBuzz is famously hard" Are we talking about the thing of writing "fizz" for multiples of 3 and "buzz" for multiples of 5 and "fizzbuzz" for both, for the numbers 1 - 100? If that is famously hard, then the definition of hard must have changed massively while I wasn't looking.

If the vast majority of people applying for programming jobs can't solve it, then it qualifies as hard by definition.

It is hard, only in the sense that programming anything is hard, if you don't know how to program. If you can program at all, you can solve it. It definitely wouldn't qualify as 'famously hard'. Things that achieve fame for being hard are usually very very difficult indeed. If anything, in the narrow circles in which it has any fame at all, it is famously easy.

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#64

Post by natrius » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 1:55 AM UTC

pron wrote: post #47

natrius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merit does not require effort. I haven't heard anyone claiming that their ability to program is a measure of their worth as a human being. It is, however, a measure of one's usefulness to a development team.

Ok, but isn't it in the interest of all software employers to use their political power to create more capable developers? This is simple economics; I'm not even touching ethics or justice here. And isn't it the immediate interest of current developers to maintain their value by blocking others from entering this profession? Sometimes we adhere to hidden interests without even realizing. Let us first open our eyes to…

Those incentives are there, but the linked post isn't about that, nor is it a particularly useful starting point for that discussion.

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#65

Post by sopooneo » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 2:00 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #51

ktizo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"FizzBuzz is famously hard" Are we talking about the thing of writing "fizz" for multiples of 3 and "buzz" for multiples of 5 and "fizzbuzz" for both, for the numbers 1 - 100? If that is famously hard, then the definition of hard must have changed massively while I wasn't looking.

If the vast majority of people applying for programming jobs can't solve it, then it qualifies as hard by definition.

I agree with your analysis. However I've only ever sat in on a few programmer interviews, and was lucky enough to get only the few that had already made it through several screens and were quite sharp. However, if so many people can't do FizzBuzz, that's baffling. If they can't do that, what can they do? I mean that literally. Do they just have knowledge of certain specific frameworks or something? Can anyone shed light on this?

I know this may be derailing the conversation, and it bothers people, I'll not mind deleting this post.

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#66

Post by amplitwist » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 2:04 AM UTC

Crake wrote: post #50

amplitwist wrote: post #40

If the PC police could do Fermi problems, they wouldn't be polluting my news feed with inane conspiracy theories. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm

Honestly, there are so many studies with conflicting results that I feel like it's hard to tell to what extent there may or may not be a sex based difference in math aptitude. However, I feel like we can't throw out the possibility of it having an effect just because it's politically incorrect. It's bad science to assume you know the results before even doing the experiment. Sex based differences (and/or similarities…

There's another article that makes an attempt to disentangle nature and nurture in the sex gap at http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm . Like I mentioned earlier, these articles are a few steps above Fermi problems; there are ways to calculate these things more accurately. However, these calculations should agree with the estimates, and the estimates indicate a significant genetic gender gap.

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#67

Post by Crake » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 2:06 AM UTC

beatpanda wrote: post #60

Crake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'd really rather the crazy social justice warriors stay on their infernally poorly constructed home base of tumblr. I find them really annoying. (Surf around for 20 minutes there and you'll see what I mean. Age is a "social construct"? Come on. And no, you are not "transabled" or "transethnic" or whatever's in style this week.) I do agree that the rise of programmers as they become rich and enter a new soc…

HAHA! THERE IT IS! I've "surfed around" those discussions IRL, and believe me, the ignorance comes on strong from both directions. (By "there it is" I'm talking about the assumption that "the social justice community" is mainly represented by a handful of Tumblogs, and dismissing decades upon decades of serious academic research as "poorly constructed", although you might have just been dissing Tumblr. Not to insult…

Yeah, I've gotten an earful of it IRL too, though. I'm liberal and hang with a mostly liberal crowd, so any liberal extremism usually comes from direct interaction (and/or horrifying stuff from the hellhole known as tumblr) and I just watch the conservative craziness on the news.

I don't deny that there is some relevance of gender studies to reality, but now it seems that "privilege" and "trigger warnings" are being thrown around as insults so much that they've lost all of their meaning. As someone who would benefit from those words not being diluted to the point of absurdity, I wish that the crazy tumblerites would kindly shut up and not presume to speak for people like me.

I 100% do not condone phrases like "die cis scum." Hatred towards cis people is just as gross as hatred towards GLBT persons. Just because you're GLBT doesn't make it ok to start hating on other people for their gender/sexual orientation. The goal is to get discrimination based on these things to stop, not just reverse the polarity. :/

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#68

Post by sopooneo » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 2:13 AM UTC

Crake wrote: post #43

aidenn0 wrote: post #13

You can have a meritocracy, and still have an unfair demographic skew. Given a black box in which the inputs are infants and the outputs are people applying for software jobs, if the black-box is unfair, then even if you have a perfect evaluation function in your interviewing process, you will be skewed to the input of the black box. All that being said, of course we have an imperfect evaluation function. And it is a…

I propose that it is easier to give unfair advantages to minorities at the college level than it is to fix the unfair disadvantages before that level. This is why I support affirmative action. This is interesting, because it really does get down to the core of the argument: how do we improve the academic success of minorities? Unfortunately, letting someone who can't do calculus into, say, Stanford, is not going to f…

The problem sometimes just gets pushed back in time by funneling unprepared high school kids into AP Calc classes. They don't have the algebra for it. I've seen this first-hand and while there are sometimes one or two kids for whom it is a godsend (and it's possible the benefit to them alone justifies having the rest of their classmates in an inappropriate class), the rest of tend to flounder.

AP! AP! AP! the cry goes. How can our kids succeed without the AP classes the suburbs have? But then you are really just renaming trig as "AP Calc" and with very few (but again important) exceptions, no one scores above a one.

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#69

Post by snogglethorpe » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 2:15 AM UTC

sopooneo wrote: post #65

Alex3917 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the vast majority of people applying for programming jobs can't solve it, then it qualifies as hard by definition.

I agree with your analysis. However I've only ever sat in on a few programmer interviews, and was lucky enough to get only the few that had already made it through several screens and were quite sharp. However, if so many people can't do FizzBuzz, that's baffling. If they can't do that, what can they do? I mean that literally. Do they just have knowledge of certain specific frameworks or something? Can anyone shed li…

One issue I've had is that if a question is too easy, I start out thinking "this must be a trick question..." and then tie myself up in knots trying to find the (non-existant) catch...

Of course in an interview, one should presumably just say "hey this seems too easy, is this a trick question?" but ...

Re: You keep using that word "meritocracy"

#70

Post by jiggy2011 » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 2:16 AM UTC

sopooneo wrote: post #62

jiggy2011 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that female developers seem much more common in asian countries too.

That is new information for me. Anyone have any insight on why it would be the case?

I can't find any information to back it up so it's possible I'm wrong. I've noticed this most specifically with Indians though.

If you look at Indian outsourcing shops that employ programmers there do tend to be more females than you would find in an equivalent western company.

If I had to hazard a guess I think the "nerdy" stigma attached to CS is more of a western thing. Whereas in a growing economy a woman who can go out and compete with men is perhaps viewed as more empowered somehow?