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Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

> The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.

Honest question. Do you think you've cleared anything up with this definition? I don't think you've gotten anywhere closer to the truth. If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission. In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard. That should serve as a warning that it's not so clear.

And anyway, does the mission really have to say "We are a 'help the mission'ocracy"?

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> If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission.

This is how you get evaluated on a quarterly (or yearly) basis at a job. You had goals. Did you achieve them? Did you fall short? You were given tasks and a timeline (perhaps you even helped set the timeline). Did you complete the tasks? Were there excessive bugs? Were you on time?

These are all relatively simple things to measure, which is why they're used so often. If you tie merit to your performance in relation to stated goals (and I think that's reasonable), it's pretty straightforward to measure.

If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

An engineering team's goal is to take a problem and implement a solution. That is the mission. Anything that leads towards the completion of the problem their team wants to solve is in service of the mission. I don't understand what is complicated about that, what are you seeing that we're not?

In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard

Once the mission is no longer worth pursuing or becomes muddled, teams fall apart and motivation crumbles. My github has plenty of repos I've stopped working on because I stopped seeing why it was worth my time to work on those projects and moved on to things that would be of greater benefit to me. That's how things should be.

If the group does not have enough consensus on what mission is or what is in service of the mission, then group cannot advance anywhere and can only be disbanded.

>>If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission.

If only.. Maybe we could call it hmmm a Mission Statement... Yea that would work...

Now let see what Mozilla's mission statement [1] is

>>>Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

Seems like it pretty easy to understand that the mission of Mozilla is and from that it would be fairly easy to say if a person is working for or against said mission.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

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