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Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that tech people are less concerned with country of origin that many other industries. I'd like to believe that my experience is generalizable and that as a group we're more of a meritocracy. Perhaps it's due to the diversity of people that we routinely work with?

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I suspect you're right, but I don't think we should be patting ourselves on the back.

The legal profession has the bar. Doctors need accreditation. Builders need licenses for their jurisdiction.

But software? It doesn't matter who wrote it or where because bits are just bits, especially when you tread into opensource land.

We're a meritocracy because that's the nature of the industry, not because we're particularly benevolent.

There's nothing inherent about the industry that means it has to be that way. We deserve a little credit for not putting artificial barriers in place like other industries have.

Barriers aren't necessary artificial or terrible. Unless you'd like your "doctor" to have no accreditation or training.

I think that basic practicality is far more important than an ethos of meritocracy. Using an outstanding piece of software that is free is hardly a great moral judgement on merit. Picking services based on language, ease of billing, and time zone is hardly a rejection of merit.

I agree with the statement that tech people are less concerned with origin and would add another reason being we understand in the open source world there's nothing stopping a Russian programmer, just as an example, from contributing to Apache (which apparently Igor did). But there are plenty of work environments where it is an issue, namely gov't bureaucracies etc. etc.

I've been following the Nginx development for a while. The geographical origin of Nginx was indeed an issue. A few years back the English documentation was very sparse, if it existed at all. When searching for a specific configuration issue, all you could find where some Russian mailing lists. So it required some bravery if you really want to use Nginx a few years back.

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