I considered adding that but to be honest, the article felt too long. I'm considering hacking a quick online version together in which case it'd be necessary to disconnect betting from the value of the market.
However, I would still probably keep the game binary win/lose and not get into dividing market share. Otherwise it simply wouldn't be as fun to play.
It's not that the concept of meritocracy is inherently bad. It's just that it's impossible to implement unless all people are perfect, have an exact understanding of what "merit" is, have perfect information etc.
So I'm disagreeing with the idea that Silicon Valley (or Google) is a meritocracy and that the "level playing field" that some people use as an argument against diversity initiatives is actually inherently biased.
Also, I'm not saying all diversity initiatives are great. I know pretty much zero about what makes one initiative better or worse.
To the contrary, non-slaves produce more value than slaves, therefore slavery is not only unethical, but also un-capitalistic.
Capitalism explains many things, certainly people stopped Apartheid, but it can very well be both, slavery and segregation are unproductive, and therefore anti-capitalistic.
To the slave owner yes, but their entire productivity is lower, it's better to have a businessmen rather than someone who can just pick cotton and do basic chores.
I think capitalism has a hand to play, to ignore it is naive. I think there was not one driver that ended slavery, but many things working together.
Certainly it is a utilitarian argument, but in the capitalistic sense a business (plantation) that uses slaves is less efficient in terms of net productivity of the slave than if the slaves were free and instead workers competing to improve the business.
Note: I'm not saying there is no moral reason slavery is wrong, just that in addition it is contrary to the nature of capitalism.
That's a good point. It could be the author of the manifesto thought merit was pure coding ability and others might define it as the ability to work well in a team to achieve a collective goal.
When grading based on a metric, it's helpful to know what that metric actually is.
Furthermore, how do you even define grades or metrics for "pure coding ability" or "works well in teams"?
Both have massive subjective components, don't they?
Isn't "works well in teams" really "works well on my team"? Trying to pretend like it's an objective measure of "works well in the platonic ideal of teams" doesn't actually make it an objective measurement.
Same with "pure" in "pure coding ability": adding an objective seeming word like "pure" doesn't excuse that there is no such thing as a platonic ideal of coding ability to measure against. There's "codes well in this problem domain", there's "codes well in this environment", there's "has the baseline experience to code well quickly now", there's "has the learning ability to get up to speed quickly", etc... Where's the objective measurements?
A lot of "meritocracy" talk is built on sandcastles of wish-it-were-objective-metrics without any sort of in depth analysis to how objective the metrics can possibly be, much less actually are in pragmatic, impure reality.
I think a meritocracy can exist in the real world. Are personnel decisions made, or do we strive to make them, on the basis of a person's value to the organization? Do we strive to identify and ignore confounding factors? Does a person's productivity depend on things besides skill, work habits, or leadership ability? This would be a difficult undertaking, operating a meritocracy.
Also, it's possible that a meritocracy is doomed to be subverted in any given enterprise.
There's no objective system I know of that accurately measures a person's value to an organization. As soon as you try to reduce things to such metrics you lose sight of them as people.
Yes, it's great to strive to eliminate one's own biases and "confounding factors" to make one's organization stronger, but most "meritocracy" thinking is about finding the right magic numbers to describe people and that is its own bias/set of confounding factors.
People are often more than just "value", they are part of relationship webs, and full of complex emotions. You generally can't just assume a person is an interchangeable widget/commodity in your system and you insert paycheck and receive some magic amount of "value" in exchange.
A person's productivity absolutely depends on things besides skill, work habits, and leadership ability, however you define them and however you try to metric their value. A person's productivity might be powered by finding that random coworker's leftover cake baking experiments in the break room on those Wednesdays when they need it most. Another's might be powered by interesting gossip. Other people's are tanked by the extra buzz of the a/c on days in the Summer above 80F. You can't predict when someone might have a huge break-up that ruins their productivity for weeks and you can't predict when someone has just the right sort of vacation that their productivity is amazing for the next year... and so on and so forth.
The very term "culture fit" alone, and how often it is used in "meritocracy" contexts, is a giant neon sign that meritocracy doesn't exist in the real world and people are trying to keep themselves warm at night rationalizing that the decisions they make on semi-random metrics or gut "culture fit" decisions are the best they could make, rather than deal with messy subjective world of dealing with actual people.
I don't think you're doing a meritocracy if you use 'culture fit'. I think it's at best a cop-out.
I do share concerns with you about the ideas you are disadvocating. Such as that a person's productivity not a neat weighted sum. Such as that we could systematically find all the numbers that need to be summed. Plus concerns I'm not sure if you're getting at, such as the idea that sort of results from pushing a meritocratic view, which is that a person's value in the world is their value to some small collection of enterprises, their one job or their two jobs.
If you are paying people for their work and also providing some encouraging words, what do you then use to determine the pay packet or the words to say?
That's an interesting question and I think the big point here is to differentiate merit from meritocracy. There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, by trying to base payment/encouragement upon perceived merit. The disconnect is trying to make it systemic (meritocratic) and forgetting the subjective nature of merit, and that the only merit you reward/punish is that which you perceive.
It's very easy to build a culture based on merit metrics and tautologize that numbers are objective, this merit system is based on numbers, therefore this merit system is objective and thus this is objectively a "meritocracy". There's a number of logical fallacies wound up in that thought process, but that's how a lot of bureaucracies get formed, and a how a lot of them rationalize themselves as objective/benign.
I guess the underlying problem is that merit is great, but the illusion that "merit" scales to form benign meritocracies is something that we need to question a lot more than we do.
Totally agree with you. Meritocracy is a great ideal to strive towards, but completely unrealistic.
We wouldn't build a bridge and assume our geometry is perfect. Bridges would fall down. We have to constantly try and measure and adjust for how closely our bridge adheres to the blueprint and adjust or refactor as we go.
i've never heard meritocracy being associated with ability, to be honest. I've always heard meritocracy associated with accomplishment. I'm not attempting to validate or invalidate this argument. Just pointing it out.
But since Steve is eliminating one of the biggest team factors from his class, I doubt he'd be able to get a good vantage point.
Having a shared methodology seems to be necessary, but not sufficient, for a good team. If the team can't agree on how to judge progress towards their goal (whether that's lean startup or a "field of dreams" approach) then it's almost guaranteed to implode after the first big hurdle.
Worse still is if they don't have any mechanism for judging progress. Could be dollars raised, lines of code, written, or hypotheses validated...but there has to be something to provide the team with a shared sense of accomplishment as they struggle.
Yeah, I'm sure they didn't. I think the thing that got me riled up was that so many people retweeted and liked it without thinking about what it actually meant.
Yeah...it's a great place to meet people, but it's a bit like going to a bar and looking to get married instead of just trying to get a phone number. You're likely to be disappointed if you're expecting a diamond ring.
True... but sometimes I go to the bar just to hook up ;) But your analogy still holds true.
Managing expectations and emotions seems like an important piece to building a startup. Things like pride and ego can help fuel you, but can also get in the way of clear thinking.
However, I would still probably keep the game binary win/lose and not get into dividing market share. Otherwise it simply wouldn't be as fun to play.