Whenever I see "meritocracy" used like this, my hair stands on end. From Wikipedia:

"Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" is relatively new. It was used pejoratively by British politician and sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else, being the combination of the root of Latin origin "merit" (from "mereō" meaning "earn") and the Ancient Greek suffix "-cracy" (meaning "power", "rule")... In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group."

Meritocracy starting out as leftist satire doesn't mean the concept doesn't have merit.

Yes, it does. Unless its defenders have shown good reasons as to why the points raised by the satirists are inapplicable. Which they haven't.

The assignation of "quality" in people is a corrupt and folkloric reflection of the preferences of those in power, and that phenomenon is becoming ever more pronounced as industries consolidate.

The fact that a person can just study programming on their free time for a few years and then get a job paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is proof that at least in some cases meritocracy works. All you need is proof that you are great at programming, doesn't have to know anyone or have any kind of prestigious background to do it.

That is what I did. I studied programming for a bit, started getting among the top in online programming competitions, applied to Google and got a really high salary. Anyone who is intelligent enough can do it if they have a computer with internet access.

People sometimes counter with something along the lines of:

> Just because you could do it doesn't mean others can do it, you are just an exception!

Yeah, exactly, other people are dumb so they can't become among the best of the world in these competitions within a year. If they could they would easily get similar jobs as I did though, there was no luck or privilege in what I did just talent. So the problem isn't that meritocracy doesn't work but that merit for these tech jobs is so unevenly distributed.

Remember this post the next time there is a 500 post thread about how hiring is bs or promotions are all politics. That cannot possibly jive with the system being a meritocracy.

I don't think everything is perfect but striving for meritocracy isn't problematic in itself. The ideal should always be "given what we know of each candidate who is expected to deliver the most value in this position?". I don't see how anyone can disagree with that. And in general it seems like companies and countries with more meritocratic systems tend to do better, so as a system it seems to work great.

"Meritocracy" as a word is sometimes used by corrupt people, but that is like North Korea calling itself a democracy, it isn't a problem with meritocracy.

"Meritocracy was meant as a satire" is brought up as a rebuttal frequently but it's somehow never accompanied by an explanation of how the negatives Young brings up are relevant to the topic at hand. Based on a cursory search, a summary of Young's point in his satire seems to be that meritocracy had the undesirable consequences of demeaning/devaluing those who scored poorly on measures of merit and also triggering a societal arms race as people did whatever they could to improve their own and their children's measured merit, neither of which is salient to this discussion. He doesn't seem to say that meritocracy itself was ineffective. (Somebody please correct me if I am in error here.)

It's also worth noting that the same Wikipedia article that the parent poster points to says that the concept of meritocracy predates Young's coining of the word by centuries and also details its history of successful application by many societies in various eras.

Some unions negotiate practices regarding seniority for good and bad reasons. Others don't. A software workers union wouldn't necessarily do that, unless its membership voted for it. Which might make sense, because of rampant age discrimination - but there's nothing inherently tying that to promotion.

If you think professional sports leagues and the movie business base opportunities and compensation on seniority I don't know what to tell you. Those fields are almost completely unionized. There's no obvious reason to think that the market for high skilled technical workers would be substantially different.

If you don't think the UAW or ILWU bases opportunities and compensation on seniority I don't know what to tell you

Why would an SWE union be forced to follow the trends set by other unions? I thought tech was supposed to march to the beat of its own drum. Think different.

Of course they do.

The difference is between commodity labor and creative, talent-driven, or IP based production, and it seems clear which is a better metaphor for software engineers.

> Unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy. Try promoting based on seniority over merit in a tech.

Tech is absolutely not a meritocracy.

While your personal anecdote may vary, my personal anecdote does seem to indicate that tech is a pretty meritocracy directed industry. Maybe this is a Silicon Valley / CA trait given thing like non-compete clauses being non-enforceable.

Tech is often more of a meritocracy than other fields/industries.

It is quite possible for a talented engineer to rise quickly out of university but nearly impossible for a talented surgeon or industrial engineer without a decade+ of effort.

The tech industry has a bias for youth, which is mutually exclusive with experience. I don't know much about the medical industry, but I wager surgeons face less ageism once the gray hairs start coming in. With that age comes experience younger surgeons simply couldn't have.

Maybe that makes them better surgeons, or maybe not. But it seems to me that ageism in tech complicates comparisons to fields which value experience instead of youth.

My point was that the OPPOSITE is true in most other fields.

If you don't have grey hairs, you simply are not considered for the top jobs at all in certain industries. YOE (years of experience) is nearly everything for some professions, tech is surprisingly quite robust in that regard.

Tech is more like "reverse ageist" instead of being egalitarian.

Personally, I would be more amenable to a statement like "tech is not an absolute meritocracy". Many industries are however, roughly meritocratic. While talent may not be perfectly recognized or rewarded, it often eventually is - simply because it makes good business sense. When you have easy to recognize signals of merit and value, like in the tech industry where work can be more objectively evaluated, it makes it easier to implement a meritocratic culture.