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Discussion on: #bestofdev on Inclusion

 
tux0r profile image
tux0r

You seem to think meritocracies should be gender-, race-, sexuality-, etc.-blind.

Yes, because in a working meritocracy, no gender and no race and no sexuality and no etc. :-) will decrease anyone's ability to make awesome contributions. I never prevented anyone with good ideas to participate in my projects, regardless of their personality. And that's all that I can do: not be in anyone's way.

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veraticus profile image
Josh Symonds

Yes, because in a working meritocracy, no gender and no race and no sexuality and no etc. :-)

That's unfortunately just not true; your meritocracy is composed of people, not cogs. And those people have race and gender and sexuality (and psychology and feelings and children). And they will have issues about them that it will be up to you, as meritocracy-manager, to properly address. Punting on it ("not being in anyone's way") is one form of addressing those issues, but your meritocracy will suffer as a result.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

And those people have race and gender and sexuality (and psychology and feelings and children).

And none of that are relevant for any IT job. (Yes, I know that other jobs might be different on that.)

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veraticus profile image
Josh Symonds

And none of that are relevant for any IT job. (Yes, I know that other jobs might be different on that.)

How is this not special pleading? There's nothing different about IT jobs compared to any other jobs, especially with regards to people having requirements to succeed.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

Because IT jobs deal with computers, not with people. That's why I like mine, to be honest. Because of that, you can succeed in them with any personality. And I personally think it is wrong that some "modern" team building techniques ignore this very special advantage and try to impose marketing rules on non-marketing jobs.

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veraticus profile image
Josh Symonds

Because IT jobs deal with computers, not with people.

Meritocracies are composed of people, not computers, even in IT. If you want people to succeed in them, you can't treat them as if they're the same as the things they're working on. People require management; meritocracies require effort.

Because of that, you can succeed in them with any personality.

This is obviously untrue. People are fired from IT jobs all the time for meshing poorly with their superiors, coworkers, and reports -- Google trivially provides thousands of reports of exactly this. I'm not saying that the people who are fired are guilty or have a bad personality, but I am saying personality is 100% a factor in an IT job.

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sublimemarch profile image
Fen Slattery

Also, yes we use computers to do our jobs, but the whole point of our jobs is making things for other people. We build tools for people to use. To say that our jobs don't "deal with" people is a mistake.