It's actually an ideal. Ideals also don't exist in reality. The difference is that ideals are generally held to be worth striving for in spite of that.
Actually it’s used as a bludgeon to kill all debate, not something to strive towards. The point that’s always made is that something already is this magical and perfect meritocracy with the selection process already working perfectly. The term meritocracy is thrown into the faces of those that question the selection process as a defense of the selection process. Perfectness is just assumed, not something to be strived for. Your statement makes just no sense at all when considering the context in which meritocracy is typically used when defending exclusionary selection processes. It’s downright absurd.
And that’s even ignoring all the grave moral quandaries you get into when you base who can participate on merit – if that is even possible and if you can even coherently define what the hell merit means. Merit is hard to nail down and as such can be easily used as a convenient tool for exclusion.
In light of the long and heated debates about how to best conduct job interviews (nobody knows, really!), often seen right here on HN, this all is especially absurd. It seems that put into a slightly different context (of a job interview) everyone knows that selection processes are frail, complex, complicated things, hard to get right – and even at its best you will make mistakes. Selection processes are fucking hard to get right. Doesn’t everyone know that? How, in that context, can you then turn around and claim that there is no issue because meritocracy. It sounds like a bad joke. A horrible joke, one that kills all debate about selection processes and how we can improve them (or even where selection is necessary and where not and based on what and how and how we should deal with the frailty and difficulty of evaluating human fucking beings.)
Actually the corollary to my point is that there can never be a true meritocracy anywhere on the planet. It's impossible for exactly the reasons you've outlined. It doesn't mean it's not worth striving, but I do agree that anyone who tells you that they've done it has simply quit trying and is rationalizing that fact.
People fuck up all the time. I would never claim that there's no issue because we already have a meritocracy. We don't. We will never have one. Like a lot of ideals it's something worth looking at by comparison, to decide how closely we want to model our actions on it.
So, bad example of interviews: the reason we know they are broken is because the code doesn't work.
Look, the entire hacker thing comes down to: does the code work? If it does, you're fine. If it doesn't, you're not. The computer sure as day doesn't care about the particulars of the person who generated the source code for the hack, so why should we?
Everything else is FUD, spread by people that are fools, well-meaning but not understanding, or both.
Don't try to bring in the baggage of other failed "meritocracies" into this, because we can actually, objectively, test whether or not the code works.
No, if it does work people will tell you that your code just sucks and is really awful and bad and you are terrible and suck at this …
Your perspective here is absurdly reductionist and doesn’t reflect any reality anyone lives in. It’s not that simple, it just is not.
These are the people arguing about fucking spaces vs tabs and you are going to try to honestly tell me that all that matters is whether the code works. Are you serious?! Like, actually, really serious?
I think that those people will acknowledge that the formatting of the code is secondary to its working--once it works, the whitespace is just a matter of making it more presentable.
If you had working code--and it was elegant, and easy to maintain, and fixed a real problem--I find it unlikely that you were put down by people that really grok being a hacker. I'm sorry for your experience there.
And before you point out that that definition allows me to neatly exclude the people that make hackers look bad--well, that's kinda the point. Similarly, I try not to judge all MRAs by the ones that make death threats, nor feminists by those that are rabidly opposed to transwomen.
