On 19/09/2012 09:31 AM, David Bruant wrote:
Le 18/09/2012 19:00, John Jensen a écrit :
Hi David,
The hiring process, for various reasons
cannot be considered as a meritocracy
Could you expand on that a bit?
In answers by other people, it's been answered, but here are some elements:
First, Mozilla can only hire in places where it has a legal structure.
This is a discussion which was had before in the more general sense that
('even') the community is overrepresented in some places / social strata /
genders / ... and underrepresented in others. I would say that just because we
are practically speaking unable to completely 'level the playing field' (the
gaps are too many and too wide for Mozilla alone to fix the world, though we
should do our best to help!) before we 'measure' merit doesn't mean that we
can't consider Mozilla a meritocracy. I don't think it's useful to say we're not
a meritocracy pending such leveling of the playing field for everyone; from that
perspective, no meritocracy can exist in the current state of the world.
Parallels exist with other -cracies like democracy, which is used as a label
even though often certain subsets of 'the people' have no right to vote (minors,
criminals, non-citizen residents, etc.).
Then, if people were being hired only based on merit, only people from
the community would be hired, by definition.
That seems to imply you cannot have merit outside of the community, which seems
wrong (perhaps I'm misreading?). When people working on other open source
projects, or on open data, or on privacy protection, or on net neutrality, or on
web education, ..., apply to Mozilla, I would certainly hope such work would be
taken into account, because all of those, at least to me, would constitute
'merit' in one sense or another.
~ Gijs
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