David Bruant <[email protected]> wrote: > I've had discussions with several employees who shared with me that they > felt somewhat guilty to be there, because they hadn't been a volunteer > contributor before being an employee. They felt that in a way, they > didn't deserve to be there, or at least deserved less than other people > to be there.
I am curious about this. Do you mean that they felt that there were other, more qualified, people in the community that were looking for a job? Or, do you mean that they simply felt odd that they were being paid to work on Mozilla even though they hadn't ever contributed to it as a volunteer? > Being an employee, by the fact that it allocates so much time to work on > Mozilla projects de-facto provides some authority over the direction of > the project(s) being worked on. The hiring process, for various reasons > cannot be considered as a meritocracy, so Mozilla is not really a > meritocracy. I agree with this in that the hiring process is based on resumes and interviews, both of which try (and probably mostly fail) to establish the merit of incoming candidates. It's also true that hiring decisions are made by people and there are social considerations taken into account when we decide whether or not to hire someone. So, it's always going to be possible that we don't hire someone who is well-qualified and do hire someone who is going to crash and burn. The best we can really hope for is to minimize this as much as possible. Hiring out of the community definitely helps in that we have a much better idea of what someone is capable of, given that we've already seen their work. > I would like to note that although on paper a meritocracy sounds like a > goal to achieve, it may not be so. From what I have seen, meritocracies > tend to attract like-minded people and consequently drive themselves > against diversity. Why is this specific to meritocracies? It seems like this is a pretty natural problem for any community. -- Blake Kaplan _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
