Wonder why math is such a problem. Growing up in the Ukrainian school system I was doing very well in math for 3 years and was doing double exams in the span of one.
Moved to the US, math was easier and it kinda fell off. Was back to Ukraine for some time, but it was never the same afterwards, and now I have the same math anxiety many other people do.
Yeah, I'm never too impressed by these. Once I have control over my depressive states, I can start looking at things like exercise or diet. But if I'm highly depressed, those things end up on the back burner and I'm much more interested in solutions to _that_.
Hmm, yeah. If I'm sufficiently depressed, things like diet become very negligible. Sense of belonging is much, much more important. I don't recall if anyone ever did a study for that in particular.
From what I've seen this attitude often actually creates and reinforces this harsh reality, though.
Most of our reality is composed of humans doing things, and if you dig deep enough into why humans are doing various bad things, you'll find a lot of confused, closed up people chasing odd status markers because they need it to survive against other parties chasing odd status markers. It's an error that endlessly feeds itself, and the only escape is to cancel it somewhere - do something else.
The point is kind of moot when the people you are supposedly protecting against are of your own kind.
It IS a meritocracy problem. If you are unable to measure who has the most merit, if you're not concerned with this problem, how can you possibly be having a meritocracy?
Connections and the ability to play politics seem to be much more important for getting to the top. Current systems, managers, etc., are just not setup to evaluate skill from what I've seen, you have to sell yourself, which means "ability to sell yourself" is how the system is stratified, and that's not merit.
So when you say "the best", often what you get is "best at selling self", which is not actually the best.
Only if your definition of "best developer" is extremely narrow, maybe, since a typical "best developer" would want someone around they could learn from, no? And why would this issue be more common among "best" developers over the, err, non-"best" developers.
*ample use of scare quotes because I found "different developers work well in different situations or best with certain people" to be more true than "there's this 'best' developer let's clone them".
Love the [citation needed] and lack of clarity in that second paragraph.