On Merit
It is disconcerting to see the release, with much fanfare, of a “Post-Meritocracy Manifesto” for the IT industry that contains the sentence “We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills”. On a generous reading, this sentence probably means something like “much IT-sector work involves collaboration between diverse stakeholders, and effective communication skills are necessary to bring it off”, which is broadly true of many kinds of work and perhaps especially true for “knowledge workers”. But that “as least as important” nags at me. It suggests a relationship of parity between, on the one hand, the baseline communication skills anybody needs to be effective in a collaborative creative process, and on the other hand, the specialised technical expertise required to accomplish the desired outcome of that process. I think that this is well-intentioned but wrong; and actually, on reflection, I’m not all that certain that it’s well-intentioned either.
I’m not interested in defending “meritocracy”: I think it’s a rotten idea, for many of the same reasons the manifesto does. But I’m also suspicious of the way the manifesto attempts to define and allocate “value”, a word which it seems to me is doing several different kinds of work at once. To begin with, there is the statement: “We do not believe that our value as human beings is intrinsically tied to our value as knowledge workers”. This already suggests that two distinct kinds of value are in play: the former a sort of generalised notion of human dignity and worth, and the latter something more localised: value (as a “worker”) to a particular organisation or undertaking, based on one’s ability to contribute something that is specifically needed in that endeavour. The conventional ethical wisdom is that the former should not be quantified — it’s a bad thing to have first and second-class citizens, for example. The latter is something we do try to quantify, for example in deciding whether or not to hire somebody. If we need a salesperson, we’ll evaluate somebody’s abilities in that domain when interviewing them; likewise if we need a software engineer, it’s their software engineering skills that will be of distinct interest to us.
When the manifesto says “We can add the most value as professionals by drawing on the diversity of our identities, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives”, what is the sense of “value” there? If “homogeneity is an antipattern”, then that is because it frustrates the realisation of some value. A homogenous team is less able to “add…value” than a diverse one. (I can think of cases where this is obviously true, and cases where it isn’t particularly; it’s amusing to watch the moral desideratum harden into a dogma in real time). I think that “value” here has again the sense of “local utility”, and is again inherently differential: not all teams are equally diverse, or are able to derive equal value from heterogeneity.
There is a further sense of “value” which has to do with scarcity. Market mechanisms tend to place a higher value on scarce resources. Specialised technical expertise is highly compensated partly because it is scarce, and it is scarce because it takes time, effort and sustained interest (often to the point of personal eccentricity) to acquire. In allocating time and effort to one area of specialisation, our ability to cultivate others is necessarily diminished. It’s also possible to treat interpersonal skills as an area of specialisation: to devote sustained attention and effort to becoming proficient in the arts of persuasion, conflict resolution, salesmanship, personal branding and the acquisition of political capital. Here I am talking not about the sort of general ability to get on with other people and make oneself understood which everybody needs, but about the kind of proficiency needed to be a social operator. People who are really good at this — who are socially hyper-competent — are also pretty scarce, and tend to be quite good at making their way in the world; they don’t particularly need any assistance from the rest of us.
So when the manifesto says “we acknowledge the value of non-technical contributors as equal to the value of technical contributors”, I’m not sure what sense of “value” is intended. If it’s sense 1, general human dignity and worth, then sure — but so what? (In this most general sense, the value of contributors is also equal to the value of non-contributors). If it’s sense 2, value in the sense of local utility, then I think the answer has to be: it depends. There are clearly differentials of value in play here. The value (in this sense) of a contributor is equal to the value of their contribution. Some technical contributors contribute more than others. Some non-technical contributors may contribute more than some technical contributors. If it’s sense 3, value in the sense of market value linked to scarcity, then again it depends: some “non-technical” skills are indeed valuable in this sense (like the ability to write really high-quality documentation, although this obviously has a technical component), and some are not so much. Inequality is built in to both of the latter two notions of value — they’re meaningless without it.
On a generous reading, I think what’s really intended is something like “it’s wrong for techies to look down on non-techies as doing a lesser kind of work”, along perhaps with, “techies would better understand the nature of their own work if they understood the network of dependencies in which it is embedded, and the extent to which it is enabled and facilitated by a type of labour they tend to disparage and ignore”. In this sense, what’s being said is that the contribution of non-technical contributors is equally worthy of being recognised as a contribution as that of technical contributors: that it shouldn’t be relegated to the status of background, invisible, taken-for-granted labour. I think this is a good point to uphold. So why am I kvetching?
Because it doesn’t say exactly that, and its way of not saying exactly that is to say exactly something else, and there’s an equivocation between what a “generous reading” will take it to be saying and what it actually does say. Equivocations of this kind are sometimes merely the result of careless phrasing, but they are also a means of political subterfuge: of advancing strong but not altogether defensible claims under the cover of weaker and relatively uncontroversial ones.
What’s the strong claim I’m worried about? In effect, it’s that entrenched inequalities of representation, status and remuneration within the IT industry will best be remedied by raising non-technical abilities and activities to parity of esteem with technical ones. Perhaps even further: I have seen it argued that technical ability is a trivial component of the skillset of an effective software developer, and that the most important thing is to be a good team player. For certain sorts of software development, which are mostly about keeping collective morale up while nailing endless features into the creaking exterior of an ageing monolith, this may actually be true. The person monitoring your “velocity” while you engage in this activity may well be doing as valuable and difficult a job as you are. But that’s not particularly something for either of you to be proud of.
Stated baldly, the claim that the way to get more “people who are not like us” into tech is to increase the esteem given to non-technical activities looks a bit…off, somehow. As if what made “people like us” like us was our technical focus after all, rather than all of the other attributes that we mysteriously seem to have in common. I think this is a mis-step for at least two reasons. Firstly, it tacitly underwrites our sense that what makes us exceptional — only in a bad way this time — is our technical ability. We can wring our hands about how important it is to value other things and be inclusive towards others who don’t share our disordered enthusiasms, but we still won’t be confronting the fact that our real exclusiveness comes from having a fairly narrow range of life experiences and life expectations, and not being particularly well-prepared to support the flourishing — as fellow technical adepts, in a technical industry — of people who haven’t trodden a similar path. It’s much easier to hear “you need to stop being such a snob about programming languages” than “you need to do something about racism”.
Secondly, I don’t believe it’s possible to get skilled people working in a skilled industry to really seriously believe that the skills they have spent their adult lives honing are no more significant or valuable than their capacity for performing social agreeableness. People will falsify their preferences, and learn to make the right sorts of noises, but I don’t believe the underlying attitude will budge — I don’t think it should budge — because it is constantly reinforced by their consciousness that the greatest utility they are able to realise in their professional lives is realised through the judicious employment of those talents. That’s how they make the contributions that make them feel valuable and valued; that’s what they recognise and esteem in the work of their peers. You can tell them that they’re wrong to do so; you can get them to tell each other that they’re wrong to do so; but I don’t think you can get them to really feel it, when the work that earns them their monthly paycheque tells them that it isn’t really so.
Ultimately, I don’t think you can win a fight against meritocracy by undermining (or blurring to the point of indistinctness) the notion of merit. The latter is indispensable, in every walk of life. It corresponds, roughly, to “consensus perception of local utility”, and it’s how we measure our own usefulness to others, to the shared projects we’re engaged in, to the values we care about and want to realise in our lives together. When we ask ourselves “does what I am doing or saying here have merit?”, we are always asking a question, in some context, about whether we’re being of use, making a positive difference, doing something that would be recognised by others in the same context as a valid and effective contribution.
Meritocracy is what happens when we decide that a wider hierarchy of status and compensation should be built around one group of people’s evaluations of merit. It’s a transposition of local utility into global utility: what I and my peers esteem and find useful should become the basis on which everything is ranked and ordered. In the technology industry, multiple contexts overlap: there are multiple communities of practice at work, and multiple notions of merit in play. Some people are trying to optimise compilers, and some are trying to build communities around web frameworks. Some are trying to make money selling consultancy around database technologies, and others are trying to make money selling Agile training and certification. It is unreasonable to expect them all to value the same things in the same ways.
Meritocracy is pernicious because it is a mechanism for one community of practice to dominate all the others by setting the measure of value for everything they do, in a way that is naturally to the advantage of those who are most successful at realising the values of the dominating group. It is tempting for techies who have been subject to the dominion of those who do not share their values, and have had their work and their value as employees evaluated according to criteria which are meaningless and irrelevant to them, to promote their own meritocratic order as just and rational (“only the code matters!”). I am wholly in agreement with the authors of the manifesto that this is not a fair way to treat people, and that we should understand that there are multiple systems of value in play in any complex shared activity. But I am nevertheless on my guard lest one high-handed and obliviously exclusionary system of values should simply be replaced with another.
