
Is Believing in Meritocracy Bad for You? - BogdanPetre
https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you
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freedman1611
I have to wholly disagree with this. A meritocracy is extremely important in
the software development community. (especially in Open Source). If sub-par
code were accepted out of the spirit of "acceptance" and "diversity", then the
project would be seriously affected (this does happen still). People wouldn't
tolerate that mentality when engineering bridges or building automobiles.

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gcb0
You don't get the point.

The article talks about the believe in meritocracy, because true meritocracy
doesn't exist.

For example, the gnome team had tons of good contributors over time. But
nobody have time to keep going back to work they have already done. Then a new
designer leader show up, with lots of free time, and start to churn out bad
design on top of bad design, all to make gnome a mac clone.

Now, in your rosy vision of the world of open source meritocracy, who would
judge merit? in real life, nobody did, and since the new designer had more
free time than anybody else (is free time merit?) the awful designs moved on
and people adopted the new osx-clone vision, and the community voice was
mostly shunned away as not having enough merit to complain.

> People wouldn't tolerate that mentality when engineering bridges or building
> automobiles

you would be surprised how contracts for urban infrastructure are selected. In
most places of the world there is a bribe mafia. And cars are mostly marketing
for stagnant design (e.g. dashboard and bodywork design is lead by clay
sculptor on every single company. Why do you think most dashboard designs are
useless-ly round and fluid? because people want that or because the clay
sculptors like to design it that way?)

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justtopost
If we abandon being judged on the merit of our action, what is left?
Popularity? Arbitrary rule? This anti-merit philosophy is just Despotism is
new clothes.

