I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the &quot;real&quot; world simply doesn&#x27;t work like that.<p>One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining &quot;society&quot;. In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background.<p>The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do.<p>But I still very well remember when I graduated from &quot;the annoying kid that doesn&#x27;t know shit&quot; to &quot;the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity.<p>In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.