gruntmaster9000

(My other reply is dead, apparently?)

The point is we can’t be truly meritocratic. It’s a utopic ideal that doesn’t hold up in the real world. Those who are deciding what merit is are the ones who already have power. Also, there are many barriers to entry before supposed meritocratic judging can even take place. The goal isn’t to completely abandon the idea of judging people based on their accomplishments, but to recognize that the supposed ideal of meritocracy is a harmful fantasy, and to think more critically and about how we evaluate people.

Selenda Deckelmann’s on meritocracy in the Postgres community:

“[…] in a truly meritocratic organization, privilege wouldn’t matter. But the truth is, not everyone can join the Postgres project. […] So, ending the pursuit of a mythical meritocracy doesn’t mean that we start accepting code which doesn’t meet high standards, or that all of the sudden we’re going to include more code from people in the bottom 1% of the world in terms of salary. It means that we take a look at different aspects of our project and see what is within our means to open up and make accessible to people who aren’t exactly like us.” — http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2011/03/30/where-meritocracy-fa...

Everything else here is very much worth reading: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meritocracy

Missing the point. Meritocracy is not something to aspire to. In practice it masks and reinforces power structures, increasing inequality:

> The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward.

From: http://asq.sagepub.com/content/55/4/543.short

Which was recognized by Chris Wanstrath when they removed it:

> @defunkt: We thought ‘meritocracy’ was a neat way to think of open source but now see the problems with it. Words matter. We’re getting a new rug.

https://twitter.com/defunkt/status/426104782894284800

Negative reaction to “meritocracy” is hardly knee-jerk. In fact, the word was coined as criticism of the concept: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

I read this as an apology for not having the preventative processes or environment in place. Despite no legal wrong doing, they still failed miserably when faced with this situation. To their credit, they know this and are working to fix it.

> I suspect that what founders really fear is being misunderstood in their motivations as their companies grow. They fear that employees view them as disconnected and only trying to build empires of gold.

These are the fears of a bad founder. Their job is to set the vision of the company. If the founder fears the employees feel they are disconnected, the founder probably is disconnected. If a founder should fear anything, they should fear not creating a safe environment where the employees can feel comfortable bringing their concerns to superiors — about any aspect of the company — instead of that self-centered fear of being “misunderstood”.

> We aren't that far off from the Egyptians that were using hundreds of thousands of slaves per pyramid. It's a good thing that we've transcended the necessity for hundreds of thousands of slaves when raising buildings, don't you think?

False, they were skilled, paid laborers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...

Apologies for being irrelevant to the main point, but this is a tired myth.

Of course not. But don’t use meritocracy as an excuse to not be proactive about diversity.

Death by a thousand cuts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality

> For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it.

Not at all true in a professional environment. And that statement doesn’t even correspond with the story. The specifics of the hula hooping anecdote are all but immaterial anyway. The men failing to acknowledge how it was problematic was just the point at which she saw the GitHub culture had not really changed. It won’t change without action by the leadership, which was questionable given all the other events.

This response from Chris Wanstrath is a step in the right direction, but, as he acknowledges, they still have work to do.

Meritocracy as an ideal may not be intrinsically sexist or racist, but declaring an organization a meritocracy doesn’t automatically eliminate existing sexism, racism, etc, and instead masks it. That’s the problem. It’s not unlike the “structureless organization”. It’s not really structureless — there are always informal social dynamics in play — and acting as if it is structureless results in avoiding problems instead of confronting them. Everything was all rainbows and unicorns at GitHub until the informal structure apparently resulted in an institutional inability to deal with certain issues. Valve has seen similar problems.

Organizing people is the fourth hard problem.

No, it’s “X isn’t really Y, despite what we say, and it’s actually harmful, so let’s stop reinforcing problems by pretending that it is Y”. As being discussed elsewhere in this thread, the problem with meritocracy is that it’s dependent on value judgements by those already in power. Simply, it is a fine ideal, but in practice it is unachievable, utopic. Establishing an organization or community as “meritocratic” means ignoring the role of existing dynamics.

Horvath mentioned on Twitter they supported her coming forward about her experience:

  nrrrdcore: I'm thrilled to be joining a new team in just
  a few weeks and they completely support me coming forward.

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444881221865054208

The BitBucket issue tracker is clunky garbage by comparison, and its general UI doesn’t feel as well thought out. GitHub as a tool is really great.

That said, company values matter.

Sort of. “Merit” is more a measure of those groups’ definitions of success. Calling it a meritocracy overly simplifies the circumstances for that success, often reinforcing the power relationships.

It’s not “get rid of meritocracy” but rather “recognize that it isn’t really meritocracy and it’s preserving problems”.

Steve Klabnik explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7405881

In short, it’s a not-really-present ideal that’s often used to mask the existing power relationships that are really responsible for people being promoted/demoted to where they are.

Gross attempt at rationalizing inappropriate behavior. Plus, the male developer in your story would also be considered unprofessional.

Sass by default sets UTF-8 encoding.

Yes exactly. It’s the host’s job to talk to the audience. Unless you have something to specifically say to those watching, you’re better off focusing on the host and letting the director do their thing. It’s awkward when guests look at the camera but are responding to a question from the interviewer.

Because someone thought it was interesting enough to submit, and others thought it was interesting enough to vote up. Pretty simple, really.

The blog theme was made by a Chinese developer, which is probably why that is set the way it is.

It’s seen wider acceptance. Some argue even more so than LESS. Sass is very popular in the Drupal community, for instance.

Leak is the wrong term, and it’s doubtfully a deliberate marketing move either. More like, “suddenly being noticed because a bunch of GitHubbers followed the @AtomEditor account on Twitter”.

Also, despite the plethora of repositories, the actual editor is not available. It could be many of the public repos are public so they can be installed using their Atom Package Manager, which would likely have to jump through hoops if they were private.

Ideas are valueless, not worthless. Obligatory link to Derek Sivers’ ideas being multipliers: http://sivers.org/multiply

Not a lot, and that’s the point. If the company can’t dedicate resources to train these people, they aren’t worth sticking with.

Doubtful. The Times has been moving away from pageviews as a metric (see their recent redesign).

Gender identity is not at all the “grammatical expression of a sex within an environment’s constraints”. It is ‘a person's sense of self as a member of a particular gender.‘ — http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gender_identity

> All else other than male (primary masculine) and female (primary feminine) are imaginary, and not based on biological reality. Those things do not merit being taken seriously no more than any religion or superstition.

Complete and utter bullshit, evidenced by how the ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” vary between and even within societies. These ideas are hardly the same “all over the world in varying civilizations”. Please, please read the Wikipedia article on Gender Identity, especially the section on non-western gender identities. It is such a different concept than classifying nouns.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Non-Western_gen... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

Even grammatical gender is hardly consistent or strict with its being informed by sex. In Spanish, a man’s shirt would still be “la camisa”, a feminine noun. A female cheetah would still be called “el guepardo”. This insistence on adhering to biological sex — which itself isn’t even always binary — as a strict basis for gender makes no sense.

You are confusing grammatical gender with gender identity. It is also informed by sex, but that is only one influence.

Gender != sex.