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Comment by lucio | Hacker News Reader

No, and this distinction is essential: You're welcomed based on what you can do and not on what you are. "white male" is un-meritocratic, is something you "are", and not something you can "make" by talent and effort. "code" is cold, hard, unforgiving ("you can't argue with a root shell"), and meritocratic. She's saying: Nevermind who you "ARE", you're welcomed if you can "PRODUCE" (great code). That's exactly the antithesis of what you're implying with "white male" or "black female" or "$X $Y". The mere fact of using "$X $Y" or $MINORITY should give you a hint of how much this concepts are considered. If something fits in a variable, is waaay less important than the algorithm, it is just content, a parameter, "Lorem ipsum" if you like it.

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I understand what was being said. But in my experience many groups say this but in fact don't even come close to actually achieving it. Groups of white males have said this for a long time, "we are merit based, gender or ethnicity aren't considered during selection", but it just wasn't true. Much of the time it is a conscious decision to avoid the qualified diverse candidate, other times it isn't. Just because she or you say you are only choosing based on production doesn't make it so. She, you, or whomever is making the decision must look really hard at their own biases, if you can even see them (they may be obvious to anyone around you but hidden to your self).

> I understand what was being said. But in my experience many groups say this but in fact don't even come close to actually achieving it. Groups of white males have said this for a long time,

...right in front of our very noses at this moment is something very interesting:

me atleast I don't have a clue what gender most nicks here on HN belong to. And I don't care. The same way I don't care about the gender of our UX designer only that she did awesome work.

- well, maybe I actually loved the fact that we had a coding eclipse-wielding mother-of-three on our team.

And before "you" [1] come telling me that this just shows how I'm biased because I'm impressed by a mom coding, -No! I don't think they cannot, but every statistic tells us they don't usually code.

[1]: yeah I saw you coming, you are kind of predictable

That's great. If there were more people like you in positions of power we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.

I'm not implying that anyone of these particular commenters are sexist or bigots, or aren't making decisions solely based on merit. I'm saying that we as a group, be that either widely defined as humans in general or narrowly defined as a certain group of nerds, tend to not notice our biases when we make decisions. We may believe that we are making a choice based on the absolute best merit based criteria, but often we don't realize our choice was highly tinted by learned bias.

I myself try to disregard my learned biases, but often don't realize I failed until after the fact. We need more people who don't care about gender, race, social status, etc when making hiring decisions. Studies have shown that when identifying markers are removed from resumes and job applications, the considered pool of applicants become more diverse. A good start is people who are at least aware of their own biases.

Too often we use statistics to enforce our bias. "Well, moms statistically don't code, so we won't take seriously this mother who does".

Totally agree.

> I myself try to disregard my learned biases, but often don't realize I failed until after the fact.

Part of being human and why we should be very careful to judge. I'm in the same place.

Asians got in rather easily though so the effect of workplace biases can't be that hard to overcome. Why did they get accepted? Because they are awesome at tech! If women suddenly became as awesome at tech as Asians then they would get accepted as a group in a heartbeat.

Meritocracy is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It’s an illusion, a joke.

Diversity is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.

Equality is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.

See what I did there? You've got to explain why you think it's a bullshit term--because as an ideal, it's a damned sight more useful than whatever else people are pushing.

- Because the criteria of "merit" usually "just happen" to be a description of the people who get to define them and evaluate others.

- Because measuring only at the finishing line while ignoring how far people have had to come is in fact unequal, not equal treatment.

- Because the concept victim-blames those who aren’t allowed/enabled/supported to succeed according to it.

- Because it's a really astounding statistical anomaly that all those "meritocratic" communities "who don't care about gender etc." are in practice ridiculously less diverse than the population in general.

Thought exercise: reconcile concept of victim blaming with objective criteria-based meritocracy.

It's actually an ideal. Ideals also don't exist in reality. The difference is that ideals are generally held to be worth striving for in spite of that.

Actually it’s used as a bludgeon to kill all debate, not something to strive towards. The point that’s always made is that something already is this magical and perfect meritocracy with the selection process already working perfectly. The term meritocracy is thrown into the faces of those that question the selection process as a defense of the selection process. Perfectness is just assumed, not something to be strived for. Your statement makes just no sense at all when considering the context in which meritocracy is typically used when defending exclusionary selection processes. It’s downright absurd.

And that’s even ignoring all the grave moral quandaries you get into when you base who can participate on merit – if that is even possible and if you can even coherently define what the hell merit means. Merit is hard to nail down and as such can be easily used as a convenient tool for exclusion.

In light of the long and heated debates about how to best conduct job interviews (nobody knows, really!), often seen right here on HN, this all is especially absurd. It seems that put into a slightly different context (of a job interview) everyone knows that selection processes are frail, complex, complicated things, hard to get right – and even at its best you will make mistakes. Selection processes are fucking hard to get right. Doesn’t everyone know that? How, in that context, can you then turn around and claim that there is no issue because meritocracy. It sounds like a bad joke. A horrible joke, one that kills all debate about selection processes and how we can improve them (or even where selection is necessary and where not and based on what and how and how we should deal with the frailty and difficulty of evaluating human fucking beings.)

Actually the corollary to my point is that there can never be a true meritocracy anywhere on the planet. It's impossible for exactly the reasons you've outlined. It doesn't mean it's not worth striving, but I do agree that anyone who tells you that they've done it has simply quit trying and is rationalizing that fact.

People fuck up all the time. I would never claim that there's no issue because we already have a meritocracy. We don't. We will never have one. Like a lot of ideals it's something worth looking at by comparison, to decide how closely we want to model our actions on it.

So, bad example of interviews: the reason we know they are broken is because the code doesn't work.

Look, the entire hacker thing comes down to: does the code work? If it does, you're fine. If it doesn't, you're not. The computer sure as day doesn't care about the particulars of the person who generated the source code for the hack, so why should we?

Everything else is FUD, spread by people that are fools, well-meaning but not understanding, or both.

Don't try to bring in the baggage of other failed "meritocracies" into this, because we can actually, objectively, test whether or not the code works.

No, if it does work people will tell you that your code just sucks and is really awful and bad and you are terrible and suck at this …

Your perspective here is absurdly reductionist and doesn’t reflect any reality anyone lives in. It’s not that simple, it just is not.

These are the people arguing about fucking spaces vs tabs and you are going to try to honestly tell me that all that matters is whether the code works. Are you serious?! Like, actually, really serious?

I think that those people will acknowledge that the formatting of the code is secondary to its working--once it works, the whitespace is just a matter of making it more presentable.

If you had working code--and it was elegant, and easy to maintain, and fixed a real problem--I find it unlikely that you were put down by people that really grok being a hacker. I'm sorry for your experience there.

And before you point out that that definition allows me to neatly exclude the people that make hackers look bad--well, that's kinda the point. Similarly, I try not to judge all MRAs by the ones that make death threats, nor feminists by those that are rabidly opposed to transwomen.

Elegant, easy to maintain, fixes a real problem …

Wow. I mean, it’s right there. Right there! Suddenly it’s no longer black and white.

True, but I've noticed programming like some of the other STEM fields are a lot harder to fake skills than some other fields.

I'm not saying its impossible to fake development skills, just saying its harder than some other fields. I think primarily due to the fact computers are not forgiving, but require pure logic.

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