>There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability.
You're using an overly restrictive definition of "merit". When you hire the best person for the job you're hiring based on merit. How they got there isn't really that important from your perspective as an employer. That's a meritocracy.
So could we then say based upon your comment and the parent that a meritocracy is antagonistic to diversity. Not trying to be argumentative, just more of a thought exercise. If a meritocracy chooses the best, and the wealthiest tend to have the resources and opportunity to make themselves better, then always choosing based upon merit means favoring less diverse backgrounds. Additionally, we tend to always view ourselves as ‘having merit.’ So we will also be predisposed to choose people like ourselves further hindering diversity. I personally have always favored the idea of being meritocratic, but am also leaning more toward purely favoring diversity, not diversity of superficial attributes, but the diversity of peoples background. I feel it helps to expand the breadth of knowledge of the team and avoid blindspots.
>So could we then say based upon your comment and the parent that a meritocracy is antagonistic to diversity.
Yes, I would say that's the bias. It's human nature to allocate your resources to give your children the best possible start in life. In poor societies that may be as simple as feeding them when you yourself go hungry. In our society it means scheming to get them into the best college or giving them seed money to start a business.
I would note that making alterations to promote diversity don't change that, either. They just distort the system such that people with resources game the system in unproductive ways. A good example is all those "women and minority owned" businesses that get preferential treatment in government contracting. From what I can tell nearly all of them are headed (wink wink) by the wife of a white guy with a relatively upper class upbringing.
What I said is if you define merit as merely "the best person for the job" you are only really selecting for wealth in the end. Let me direct you to a little cartoon that explains it very succinctly.
No, I don't think so. Wealth is part of it, sure. But so is intelligence. So is looks. So is ambition. You're focusing on wealth because it's the easiest thing to measure, but wealth, especially wealth alone, isn't destiny.
Everybody knows people who grew up poor and "made it", and also people who had all the advantages but can't seem to make anything of themselves.
I never meant to convey a polemic about wealth alone. What I'm saying is wealth is the strongest correlation to a "meritocracy", not the only one. There are always examples of outliers in both rich and poor camps.
You're using an overly restrictive definition of "merit". When you hire the best person for the job you're hiring based on merit. How they got there isn't really that important from your perspective as an employer. That's a meritocracy.