I do not know, not being in management. But it seems like it would be reasonable to think that someone who consistently meets all the obligations spelled out in their employee work plan (the document that outlines their job duties…a document that is also publicly available) to receive compensation that is at least as good as someone who consistently fails to complete their annual work plan. This is the kind of situation I’m talking about. You see a guy working crossword puzzles in his cubicle while you and your colleagues get tasked with his job duties. Are you a crazy selfish jerk for being ticked off that he gets paid twice as much as you but you work twice as hard? Or are you a human being?
I’m not talking about a situation where someone appears to be a slacker to the peons in the organization but is actually a rock star behind the scenes. I’m talking about a situation where even management recognizes there is a problem individual, but there is institutional resistance to do anything about it.
I don’t think a meritocracy has to be cut-throat and hyper-competitive to be a meritocracy. To go back to the band chairs thing: Just because one person plays one piece better one day doesn’t mean they are the better musician. I honestly have no idea how band works: is “chairs” just a status thing, or do you need a designated “best person” for everyone else to follow? Are there responsibilities beyond producing music? So maybe it’s good for the band to be a meritocracy, but the “challenge” method is kinda dumb.
SAT is the same way. Shorting people on time is a totally artificial way to make a nice smooth curve. Say you have Jordan and Taylor. Jordan consistently outperforms Taylor–but if the time limits were cut by 10%, Taylor would consistently outperform Jordan. This is entirely plausible. So is one of those kids more meritorious than the other? Of course not.
At work, I am at times frustrated by people who no longer pull their weight. This story seems to play out a lot: A person is getting tired, thinking of retirement. Plans to retire in 2-3 years. They start stepping back from commitments. They quit learning new things, like new technology we adopt or new web platforms we use. All this is fine. It’s totally earned. Other people step in to take up the slack–they take on the commitments, they take care of whatever has to be done with the technology. No one minds, because it’s temporary, it’s a transition. Often, the plan is to take on the senior responsibilities along with your own, and then, when the senior retires, hand off some of your junior stuff to the new entry level person that will be hired.
Then, the person who was going to retire discovers that their job isn’t so hard anymore. They can handle this. This is kinda fun. So they don’t retire, and it’s like they don’t notice that the people that took on their portfolio are drowning. It is very hard to go back to the senior and say "Hey, if you are sticking around, you needs to take A, B, and C back, and learn to do your own [software thing]. I do resent this.
Yes. Happens all the time for people employed by federal, state, and local governments. Taxpayers pay the salaries for these people, and so they have a right to know exactly how their tax dollars are being spent. See Freedom of Information Act for more information. Various media/watchdog organizations have made FOIA requests to obtain salary data in the past, and I think it’s become routine now for such information to be made available without a fight.
Pretty sure there’s going to be such a database for every state in the US, and probably a lot of cities and other entities, e.g. the University of Michigan.
You definitely want the first stand (first and second chairs) to be strong players, because the weaker players behind them will be (consciously and subconsciously) taking their cues from them. This is especially true in non-professional orchestras where ability varies tremendously among players. If you’ve got weak players sitting at first stand, then they can screw up everyone in the section even if there are strong players sitting behind them. So I don’t think all challenges are dumb. Conductors can be biased in how they evaluate chair auditions. A performer can goof their audition for whatever reason and end up scoring low despite being the best player. Challenges enable the correction of these wrongs.
But they can be dumb. There are qualities you want in the section leader (first chair) that aren’t tied to musicianship. Like, if you’ve got someone who can’t be arsed to come to most of the rehearsals, they aren’t going to make a good section leader even if they are a virtuoso. Neither is the virtuoso who goofs around during sectionals (when sections break off to rehearse by themselves, without being under the watchful eye of the teacher) and doesn’t keep order. A high school orchestra teacher may decide to put the “very good” player in first chair and the “best” player in second chair because the former is more mature and responsible than the latter. Allowing the goofball to usurp the role of leadership based solely on a single test is fool-hardy, IMHO.
The part I was calling “dumb” was letting one short portion of a piece be the test: it doesn’t seem like a representative sample, especially if the two students are relatively close in ability, and if the challenger can pick a day they know they are at their best, or when they have observed the one they are challenging is having a bad day.
Sounds like a Union job or you work with the owner’s family. I think a pure meritocracy can be problematic however I am not a fan of entitlement culture.
This is true, but it would be dumb for a challenger to challenge someone whose ability is close to theirs. Because let’s say they outplay their rival and win their seat. There would be nothing to deter their rival from seeking revenge and retaking the throne. And around and around the two go until both are exhausted.
This may explain why challenges were so rare in my orchestra. You may think Becky sitting in the chair ahead of you is a weaker player than you, but it would only make sense to go after her if she were substantively weaker and not the revenge-seeking type. An arrangement like that might happen way back of the section, where the players tend not to give a fuck about chair positions. But it would be rare to find that kind of blatant unfairness towards the front of the section, where the more competitive types are.
Even if for some reason, individual’s names and pay* for a given public entity don’t appear in a database open to the public ( not necessarily maintained by the government) , coworkers at a public employer will still often have a very accurate degree of each other’s pay. For example, there are two others in my office with the same title as me. All three of us have been in-title for more than 7 years, so we are all at the top of the grade and have the same salary. And the same goes for some private employers with rigid pay scales.
But I don’t know of any US law that would prevent a private company from publishing people’s name and pay . Companies often don’t publish pay rates specifically because they don’t want employees to know how much coworkers earn - even to the point of prohibiting employees from discussing pay with each ohther , even though such a prohibition is generally illegal.
not salary, pay . Including overtime, shift or location differentials, back pay for aprior fiscal year , etc
I think basically everyone has thought about this at least implicitly, except some small number of people who assume (correctly or not) they’ll always win out in competition, or the even smaller number whose feelings aren’t hurt by losing.
For everyone else I think it’s human nature 101. Almost nobody likes to lose competitions and the more extensive the competition is toward finding ‘the top’ person, the higher a % who have to lose. And most people are lazy at least sometimes, part of almost all of us would like to be carried along painlessly in life just phoning it in.
OTOH a society without competition would be a poorer less advanced one. Some might knee jerk to dispute that statement but I think it would have to be either an unthinking knee jerk, or assumption that it was very unfair competition or some kind of cut throat set up that was actually counterproductive, though either of those is entirely possible in a given case. But it’s hard believe anyone could seriously argue that there isn’t any gain from the pain of making people compete.
As far as who deserves what pay at what workplace that’s much too subjective. I would just stick with politely agreeing with whoever is complaining, at a workplace I don’t know about: ‘I’m sure you’re right’ (but in one ear and out the other, how do I know?). And any system of humans is flawed. You can’t realistically set the criterion as ‘competition/meritocracy is fine as long as it’s completely fair’. Of course it never will be, or even close to. That doesn’t mean the alternative of not spurring people’s efforts via competition is preferable.
On publishing people’s compensation, that’s also true of the top several executives at publicly traded companies (it’s in their SEC filings you can bring up online), there’s a lot of downside to that. It has a populist appeal in both those cases, public workers and top corporate people, but can have some significant negative side effects. In high executive/CEO case there’s argument and evidence it tends to increase CEO pay since every one of them wants to be above average, so it spirals upward. For public employees I would just take the general position it’s hard to have real competition in that sector, so just take it for granted it’s not going to be very efficient and that’s one reason try to limit the role of public sector workers in the economy as much as possible. Though certain things need to be done by public employees, and I guess it’s a tangential discussion anyway.
This is it in a nutshell. Most people who push for “meritocracy” do so because they believe that, based off of some criteria, they themselves (or at least, other people that they like) would rise to the top. You don’t see black people arguing that the NBA ought to be a representative sample of society; they’re fine with it being 80% black. Many Asians are opposing affirmative action because it negates (to some extent) the higher Asian scores in standardized testing. You don’t see handsome/beautiful/wealthy/charismatic people who have a lot of success in dating, arguing that dating and relationships ought to be a level playing field.
And that also encompasses some people who inflate and over-estimate their own merit. When they are not selected for a desired position, they will claim that the system isn’t a meritocracy, rather than self-examining to see if they really had enough merit themselves in the first place.
Meritocracy works for me because I’m not a naturally competitive person. Seems like a lot of work just for the privilege of always being a target. In a monkey world I’d be perfectly willing to let some other schlub be the alpha–and defend that position constantly–while I’m enjoying peaceful relationships and making it with all the lady monkeys because I’ve got time for them. Seniority is where I find myself at work these days. I don’t have the highest output in terms of volume compared to the young’uns, but I also have a more accurate and useful work product because I made a lot of mistakes back when I was younger and more energetic. I spend a nontrivial amount of time double checking and avoiding the pitfalls you really only learn about by falling into them. I suppose it’s a tradeoff in the quantity vs. quality balance. Even in situations where there old timers whose work product is neither better nor more than many of their counterparts, they often have value as experience resources. And then there’s environments that are just poorly managed where the leeches are allowed to just suck because nobody has the moxie to crack the whip on them.
Ratings are based on the results of matches, right? Not how someone thinks you move your rook? That’s a case of a quantitative measure, and meritocracy works.
Ditto for sports where players are measured on stats.
For public employees I would just take the general position it’s hard to have real competition in that sector, so just take it for granted it’s not going to be very efficient and that’s one reason try to limit the role of public sector workers in the economy as much as possible. Though certain things need to be done by public employees, and I guess it’s a tangential discussion anyway.