I didn't put this in the article, but a few hours later I think this is an interesting point, thank you.
If the post's proposition is correct and that "meritocracy" is all about minimal false positives, then we can also agree that there are people at the bottom who are qualified, but that's a cost of setting up a system optimized for minimizing false positives.
I know from many discussions about interviewing that this is one of the major families of strategy: It's better to miss out on a few good people than it is to mistakenly hire a bad one, so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s. Which means that you'll miss a few As and lots of B+ people.
This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work. I'm trying to avoid controversy, so I'll return to the straw man scenario of the post: It's as if the Lisp people said, "If Python was any good than there'd be Python people on the schedule."
> so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s
Most companies want those perfect "A"s. However, not all projects require perfect "A"s. In the startup world we like to pretend like our projects are technically demanding and require the best people.
That's not necessarily so. Your project may be the hottest thing since sliced bread, but it may actually be boring from a technical perspective, in which case I would personally trade the qualities of a an A for good hard-working B+ programmers.
Hiring bad apples can happen of course. However this can happen at all levels, regardless of background. Many superstars of our field achieved that status because they know how to market themselves. I've seen people really good at marketing, you know, walking the walk and talking the talk, with stellar resumes, but otherwise lazy and of dubious skill.
> "so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s. Which means that you'll miss a few As and lots of B+ people."
It's actually worse than that. When you exclude huge swaths of a sample like that, you have no context for the true scale.
So while you can hire the best of the sample you see, while understanding you may miss other people nearly that good, you may also be missing people who are better (perhaps wildly so) than even the best of those you chose.
Consider the case of competitive sports during times of segregation.
> This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work.
This, indeed, is where things get very dicey. Meritocracy tends to converge on winner-takes-all markets, which result in an extreme inequality of outcomes and all the socioeconomic harms that entails.
Why wouldn't it? In terms of pure merit, NOBODY deserves ANY prize except THE single best competitor.
Physical limits and other regulations even things out but, particularly in computer and digital products and services, physical limitations are less and less important.
He's saying in an absolute meritocracy, things are only awarded by merit. Given the choice between awarding a contract to company A or company B, once A has already shown to have more merit than B, all future work would logically go to A, and B would die out.
Presuming that A doesn't do something to demonstrate they don't deserve merit any longer, why would you ever go with a proven inferior (B) option, or an option that is unproven altogether (C)? Hence, a trend toward a single dominating entity.
In reality, I think things are more nuanced, of course. No one awards purely on merit, as you also have timing, capacity, and costs to balance. I'm not really aware of any market that you could consider a -true- meritocracy to the extent of the GP comment. And maybe I misread the comment altogether, but that is my understanding.
You read it correctly, thanks a lot of clarifying my terse comment. Naturally, no market is going to behave perfectly like this, but I think it's important to understand where the natural tendency points to, and what kind of elements will alleviate, smooth or otherwise disrupt the absolute winner-takes-all nature. If you are going to say deliver a new product, you need to understand that unless your product has something superior to the competition or you can subvert the meritocratic dynamics (say, through marketing & PR), it will likely die because there's no reason NOT to choose a competitor.
I disagree because this predicate doesn't take in account the backpressure of mediocracy. A mediocracy is when mostly incompetent people are dominating and pushing back people with merit to preserve their domination, culture, ... The academic example is Galileo Galilei. US citizen should also look at the history of their own country and the way they handled black people. "If they were at the bottom (slaves) it's because they deserve to be there" ? This is mediocracy !
While the Galileo example is interesting, the "black people" one is not. The application of actual force (IE whipping people, beating them, lynching them, etc) is not really something normally applied in business place itself (though there are businesses that seem to apply force to the external environment in order to make their business dominate).
For example, I can't think of any business that is having gladiator style fights to the death whose real purpose is to keep the mail room employees killing each other instead of killing the CEO. Nor can I think of a business where the mail room employees are literally being beaten or lynched in an attempt by the CEOs to keep them down.
A better example of your "mediocracy", would, IMHO, be a workplace where the CEO is grooming their child (or execs play favorites, etc) to take over despite the fact that the mail room guy may be a better choice.
However, it's not clear why in this model, after the child takes over, the business wouldn't fail relative to other, better businesses if the child is really that mediocre at it.
I didn't put this in the article, but a few hours later I think this is an interesting point, thank you.
If the post's proposition is correct and that "meritocracy" is all about minimal false positives, then we can also agree that there are people at the bottom who are qualified, but that's a cost of setting up a system optimized for minimizing false positives.
I know from many discussions about interviewing that this is one of the major families of strategy: It's better to miss out on a few good people than it is to mistakenly hire a bad one, so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s. Which means that you'll miss a few As and lots of B+ people.
This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work. I'm trying to avoid controversy, so I'll return to the straw man scenario of the post: It's as if the Lisp people said, "If Python was any good than there'd be Python people on the schedule."