The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea.
The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.
One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system.
Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.
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.
> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree.
And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are smart and hard working people. But they're also generally very privileged. Not in a "my daddy is a hedge fund manager" privileged (though often that privileged), but almost always in a "my daddy was upper middle class, so I had all the educational support I ever needed, could afford to do extensive community service instead of working in HS and get into an Ivy league school, never had money distracting me from my grades, etc."
> Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.
And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc.
When I hear this, I can't help but wonder if the poster is taking an overly narrow view of the "world of companies out there that one could work for". I mean, yeah, if your view of the world is just the big, famous, hugely important companies that everyone has heard of, then maybe that's true. maybe. But... if you consider that outside of the Fortune 500 there are thousands, tens of thousands, hell, maybe millions, of other, smaller companies, I'm not convinced that the statement above holds water.
OK, I mean, I'll admit I could be wrong, and I haven't done a scientific study on this or anything. But I strongly suspect that if you went out and, say, studied all the textile manufacturers with 200-1000 employees, in NC, VA, GA and SC, you'd find a LOT of CEOs, VPs, managers, etc., that did not work for McKinsey, did not go to Harvard, and generally don't fit this picture that is being painted. You also largely won't read about these companies in the WSJ, see them advertise on TV, or really even know about them unless you go looking. But they're out there, doing business and making money, and they're just as real as the "big boys".
> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree.
And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others.
See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion...
In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped out of college, $9.4 billion, is approximately triple that of billionaires with Ph.D.s, $3.2 billion. Even if you remove the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, who left Harvard University and is now worth $66.0 billion, college dropouts are worth $5.3 billion on average, compared to those who finished only bachelor's degrees, who are worth $2.9 billion. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's millionaires never attended college."
But that latter is a bullshit statistic. The number of dropout billionaires is so low (32 out of 1400) that a factor of 2 difference in average wealth is not statistically significant.
That really is one of the great ironies of the English language. And this is not well known - I didn't know this until a few years ago (maybe on HN?).
I guess the reality is that "meritocracy" is a goal that in practice is hard to achieve. But does that make it the wrong goal? What are better alternatives? How can we fix it? I think it is very, very hard to actually improve on this but I would love to hear suggestions.
Meritocracy is the best -ocracy there is. Which unfortunately isn't enough for human liberation.
In its ideal form meritocracy guarantees that ruling institutions will choose people who maximize some kind of merit function: there are many ideals, however, that aren't incorporated into that. Equality of outcome (an ideal I don't desire, but many people do) inherently contradicts it. Equality of opportunity is a vague and slippery ideal, but whatever it is the absence of it is very compatible with meritocracy. In the end all that ideal meritocracy guarantees is some kind of global merit function that organizations will use to maximize their effectiveness: individuals per se aren't guaranteed anything. And even that weak guarantee ignores huge and intractable political economy issues about whether different interests have commensurable merit functions, the measurability of individual merit, and whether the people implementing the merit function actually implement it according to spec. But those issues aren't going to go away, whatever -ocracy you choose.
And since meritocracy's fundamentally focused on social and organizational needs instead of individual ones, it's plenty compatible with systems that are horrible violations of the principles of the world we want to live in. Imperial China was, supposedly, quite meritocratic: whoever you were, if you did well on imperial exams, you were selected (if you were male and not Miao). The Soviet Union was similar (though those practical issues I mentioned earlier made it de facto more a clientele system). None of us would want to live in either of those systems, though, despite their meritocratic underpinnings.
Assuming that we have to have an -ocracy, though, is a failure of the imagination. If we want something better, I'd say trying to build a decentralized, self-organized, fault-tolerant society without hierarchy is the way to go. Any given organization can fuck up, and most people will end up fine, living in the interstitial spaces between organizations. If someone is unfairly passed over (according to some imagined meritocratic standard), well, it might have wasted a couple hours of their life but isn't the end of the world, because the zero-sum game of having power over other people just isn't played.
The etymology of the term is not the same as the etymology of the idea. The idea goes back at least centuries, if not millennia. That popularized term was coined in a work satirizing the idea, doesn't intrinsically make the idea satirical or a bad idea always deserving of satire.
The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system.
Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.