For the workplace, I assumed "meritocracy" just means trying to hire the best people, which seems the most common strategy? What else should hiring decisions be based upon?
That measurements of merit are flawed is another problem. Does that mean you should never try to determine anybodies skills? What else besides completely random hiring would be possible?
No, that's not what 'meritocracy' means.
Obviously, you want to hire the best people you can. There is a significant difference between "we try to hire good people" and "we objectively determine who the best people are."
And furthermore, there's a huuuuge difference etween "we try to hire good people" and "the people who currently occupy a particular place in the social sphere are there purely because of merit, and those who do not sit in places of power are there because they do not have merit." See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406566
I don't think any company believes they have a truly objective system for hiring good people (besides they all want company fit - what does objectively best even mean, is it well defined? Objectively best for what?).
And I severely doubt for example GitHub put the carpet there to justify that they didn't hire some people ("see, we didn't hire you because you were not good enough, ktx bye"). They seem to be more driven by idealism, which would speak for the "we try to hire good people" interpretation.
I suppose they might also refer to open source in general. Again, what other criteria than merit would work in open source? Should sub-par merge requests be accepted out of a sense of fairness?
Sorry, I am really trying to understand...
Btw that carpet article claims women are being kept out of the tech meritocracy. I just want to note that these women probably have perfectly fine other jobs (for example in medicine, law, journalism, whatnot). So they are not really being kept stupid and un-elite.
(Edit: I meant this article http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug#awesm... and this quote: "The tech industry isn’t still predominantly white and male because white men are better at their jobs than everyone else, it’s because many white men have had more opportunities to succeed than their minority and female counterparts." which seems unfounded to me).
Reading the article you linked to (not the carpet article), I have to say one of my criticisms of democracy is also that it exploits the stronger members of society. I guess some middle ground has to be found, but it doesn't seem just to me to demand that people who contribute the most should also be made to pay the most. The issue of incentives is also there (why perform if it only generates more demands?).