This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in.

In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working as hard. I had a friend who moved to Japan, and despite the fact that his wife was native Japanese, because she was 31 and married, she was practically unemployable. And the best he could do was get a job at coffee shop speaking English to customers. After 10 months, they moved back to the US. He hates Japan because there is no meritocracy whatsoever. Everything is based on age.

There may not be a lot of women who are CEOs of startups, but it's getting better every day, and the corporate ladder is very rewarding to smart women and minorities, at least in Silicon Valley and probably other places like NYC, LA, etc. My wife, who is in finance, went from Senior Manager to Senior Director is 3 years because she's very, very smart and the CFO recognized this and rewarded her aptly. Her bonus was >$100,000 for the 3rd year in a row, and I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women, and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well. If she were living in any other country in the world, who knows if she would have been given as lucrative of an opportunity.

So sure, it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good meritocracy here, and as I said, getting better every year.

I think it's fair to start with, "No industries or geographies are pure meritocracies." Then it's worth asking, "Where does Silicon Valley fit in the spectrum?"

Is it more or less meritocratic than teaching? Being an actuary? A politician? A banker? A lawyer? Advertising? Writing?

I don't know all of the answers, but my impression is the market forces on startups (Can you get funding? Can you get customers?) at least pushes them towards being meritocratic. Software also is more binary than fields like writing. The program does have to compile and work.

But is it a pure meritocracy? I doubt it.

The same arguments would prove that math isn't a meritocracy. Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely. And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good. Indeed, that's what the word means in ordinary usage.

> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men?

a jewish guy and a half arab guy aren't exactly the best examples of the point this guy's trying to make.

there's also no shortage of asian and indian "key players" so ... i think this guy is trying to make one point, but accidentally making another point altogether, and then failing at it.

I am so happy that this view is being shared - so happy, in fact, that I created a HN username just so I could comment on it. I am female and graduated from MIT several years ago. While I was there, tech entrepreneurship far and away the sexiest thing to be doing. It was at the point where you felt like a loser if you didn't have your own startup.

Unfortunately, this fetishization of startups resulted in many ideas that were, to put it bluntly, stupid. I couldn't believe how many people - including investors, not just students - were obsessed with creating iPhone apps and social media networks.

I had a telling encounter a year ago with a woman who ran an incubator; it was somewhat tech-focused, but also had a creative bent and was partially funded by state money for assisting small businesses. I wanted to invest my money locally (a la Slow Money - www.slowmoney.org ) and was looking for mentors and partners. We had a long conversation during which this woman said things like, "what a great idea, I've never heard of anything like that before". At the end of it, though, she asked: "so let me get this straight. Are you an innovator, or do you just want to fund innovators?". This kind of myopia about what constitutes innovation devalues the contributions of non-tech entrepreneurs (and many others, too); furthermore, it discourages young people from attacking important problems outside of technology.

Interestingly, the Economist had an article recently about how public veneration of the tech elite may be ending: http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-.... Even though I'm part of this group, I'm glad this issue is being discussed.

' Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.'

I don't see anything male about any of these words, I know many women who can be accurately described by these words, as well as many men who cannot. Why is the author conflating being male with these descriptions? I find the assertion that those words are indeed "male-gendered" very disturbing.

So I was editing OpenStreetMap the other day, because I wanted to fill in the shops in my neighbourhood.

They have a feature where you can see all the editors that are near you. There were dozens of them, and they were all men.

Why? What could possibly be preventing women from editing OpenStreetMap? Why are men at the vanguard of this project? This project is good for society, and I saw no women.

I was actually surprised, after the Wikipedia-is-dominated-by-men articles from a few months ago. I expected that women would purposely be seeking out opportunities to contribute in other areas.

In a few years when OpenStreetMap is larger, feminists will complain that there aren't enough women editors, and that men are preventing them. But men aren't preventing them.

When there's nothing preventing your group from doing something, and your group is under-represented, it is your group's fault.

The article, like most following this formula, assume that because rewards are not distributed among a sufficiently racially/sexually diverse group, meritocracy must therefore be absent. They fail to account for the possibility that merit might not be distributed in the manner that they think.

The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired.

The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead".

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the valley, and if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection. However, if they're getting money for things that you don't think have merit, like the Nth photo sharing app, then I think it stands.

My take on this, and I have spent some time in SV working at a startup in Redwood City, is that SV does NOT attract the best and the brightest. Instead it attracts a gaggle of me-too-ers who apply cargo cultism to ape the successful companies. This actually has the effect of REDUCING innovation because the startup culture is afraid to try new things, afraid to build on something tried and tested in the MidWest or New York because they are worshiping at the temple of Sandhill Road.

It is not just an issue with women (who the article quite rightly points out, have a great track record of starting successful businesses) but it is also an issue with age and with experience. SV often rejects people who are not young enought purely for ageist reasons but it also rejects those who are too experienced, too educated. The kind of people that built NASA are persona non grata in SV.

There are still some smart people coming out of SV because of Stanford and UC Berkeley being there, but if those two schools moved away, the whole house of cards would collapse.

>Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.

What a load of feminist rubbish on the front page.

I agree with most of what this article is saying, but the existence of YC is a perfect counter-argument. Although I've disagreed with PG regarding his opinions on "Zuckerberg-likeness" being important in founders, I know that YC selects for merit above all else.

How do I know this? Because PG has stated many times that he is excited about founders from the University of Waterloo in Canada, which used to be unknown on the international level. Clearly, after having met some incredibly talented founders, the YC team has calibrated its "prestige" ranking to match their observations based upon UW founder success.

To me, this is as close as one can get to a merit based system. Hire based on reputation, but adjust your reputation based upon the data you collect in real time. And most importantly, give everyone a fair chance. Never disqualify anyone preemptively without viewing their application.

Furthermore, as far as VCs are involved, there can be no better stamp on your resume than having gone through a program like YC.

Now, the counterpoint to all this is that, ideally, you should be able to crowd source/bootstrap this whole thing as a solo founder because you have merit. I think we are definitely moving in that direction, but some ventures will always be more capital intensive in terms of burn rate. As such, incubators and VCs will still be the "safe" path for fast growing and/or very ambitious companies.

I think it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy

The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. It holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy where what you do, not who you are, matters.

Thus is the straw man constructed. The dismantling of that poor fellah is absolutely breathtaking to behold. He had it coming.

Who actually makes absolute claims like those except for in a feel good, keep your glass half full if you want to succeed kind of a way?

Anyone writing an article like this should also write what would change their opinions and a plan to fix it. Imagine you've won me over completely and SV is an elitist boy's club. Now what do we do to change it? When is your standard met? Of course defining those views would be harder to defend. It's much easier to have arbitrary standards of fairness and point out how others don't live up to it.

I don't agree with many of the author's assumptions (do most people working at startups in SV really think that their web/mobile app will "change the world"? do everybody in SV think that tech entrepreneurship is a solution to everything ?).

I would say that most people just want to work on something they like, having an alternative lifestyle to a 9-5 job and possibly taking the chance of making it big.

I agree that there is a excessively romatic view in some circles, but is it the real representation of what people in SV think ? Or is it the most appealing view for the media ?

Regardless, some points are valid. The fact that most (all?) entrepreneurs come from middle/upper class rings true, and the "white male" argument as well (although less so, imho).

But to the credit of tech entrepreneurship, there ARE proyects that are helping to close the gap, offering education to everybody, I think about Khan's Academy, Coursera, Udacity...

I think it's too convenient to classify tech entrepreneurs as a single group, with the same vision and ideals.

Effort does not correlate exactly with results, but the chances of success are high if one tries and is capable.

In both tech and hustle, it's easier with wealth, privilege, connections, luck, and/or friends.

But large swaths of tech and hacking can be done on a $200 netbook or a lab of $100 used notebooks.

The hustle part... That's easier if you have hustle. If you are a geek, make a tool that's needed and sell it to another geek.

I've seen male, female, black, white, mongrel, rich, poor, and those with role models and without success at tech and business. It's harder without but still possible.

And I think SV may indeed be the best place in the country to succeed in - in gambling terms, the result converges faster with the expected value given effort and application.

Particularly (in my opinion) because past failures are discounted and companies, especially startups, are willing to give startups a try without as much suspicion.

tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.

I look at companies like Everpix with users, revenue, and growth and then companies like Albumatic.

Albumatic raised 4.1 million dollars and pivoted 3 months later.

Everpix was building a product that users loved and they had the trajectory to be great.

One question we must ask is: "What do we define as merit in silicon valley?"

here is the problem with the concept of "meritocracy". What constitutes "merit"? And if you have two orthogonal, meritorious qualities, which is more deserving of advancement, one who is 100%A, 0%B? Or another who is 0%A, 100%B? Who gets to decide?

Not sure when it became ok to call something a myth without emperical evidence.

It's who you know, not what you know.

Things are nuanced rather than binary.

Pretty vapid.

Author doesn't seem to be that knowledgable on the valley.

Nothing that people do could possibly be a meritocracy, because people are fucks. In fact, every social problem is easily explained by the fact that people are fucks. Q.E.D.