This is not a comment on the experiences described in the article, but it makes me extremely sad that the word "meritocratic/meritocracy" is used pejoratively, almost as if it were damning in itself. To me, meritocracy is something to be cherished, being far preferable to the systems that came before it, and being inherently anti-discriminatory.
(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.
Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)
I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an
eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a
guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with
Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief
of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving
recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at
Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an
undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat
Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got
William an internship at the White House; how he talked to
friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and
secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and
how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach
at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving
what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving
replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'
I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. You can take literally anyone who hypocritically asserts a belief in an ideal and use it to huffily dismiss the concept overall. And you can find such a person for literally any ideal.
For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?
Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.
I assume you would agree with me, though, that it makes little sense in the present discussion to talk about "meritocracy" without taking into account how Github implemented the concept.
"Meritocracy" is regarded with derision in no small part because what is actually meant by it, rather than what you describe, is "this person is similar to me and I like them, so I think they do a better job."
It's the ingroup club made manifest. What you describe would be great, but it's not what "meritocracy" actually means in practice.
Then we need to call out fake meritocracy as such. I'm actually looking at this situation with some sort of confusion, because I've never seen proclaimed meritocracy to actually mean "boy's club".
But then again, I'm a white caucasian heterosexual male, so maybe I just don't notice. (Previous sentence is meant literally, not ironically.)
You're right, we do need to call out fake meritocracy that way. And people do call out fake meritocracy as such. Here's a bunch: http://istechameritocracy.com/
What often happens, though, is that responses to these claims become these backhanded dismissals. "Oh, you're just overreacting." "Well, I don't see it." I'm a straight, white, cis dude, too, so for a long time it was hard for me to notice it. I promise you, there is a point--and maybe it's not one you will ever personally see, but it exists--where it becomes too big, too obvious to ignore.
To me Meritocracy is extremely important, it's one of the very few things we have left that allow poorer people to get out of their situations. We see it all the time in the Development world and it's one of the things I love the most about it. We have people who have come from poorer backgrounds around the world putting themselves into a better life through hard work and discipline. Sometimes people don't even need a degree which can be hard to obtain without a good amount of money - it's just determination and hard work. Remove the ideas of Merit from this then you lose that and once you lose it, it's unlikely you'll ever get it back
I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it.
As for the idea of meritocracy, at least in the narrow sense of selecting people based on their (potential) skills and abilities, I don't really see any better alternatives. The issues of social stratification, lack of inter-generational mobility, unequal access to education, income inequality and self-satisfaction are very severe, but with the partial exception of the last one, I don't agree that they're exacerbated by meritocracy (and regarding the last one, people will always find a reason to be self-satisfied/self-congratulatory).
The problem of political representatives not actually being representative of the population as a whole is indeed worrying. Perhaps sortition [0] might work (???). (If sortition were shown to be functional and implemented, but "meritocracy" continued to be used everywhere else, then meritocracy would become a terrible misnomer...)
As an aside, assuming that the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book satirising the concept, as stated in the article (as well as wikipedia), why did it start being used in a positive sense?
(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.
Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)