Alexandr Wang got straight to the point: “Today, we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale,” he posted. “We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.”

The CEO of the San Francisco-based AI and software company went on to post the entirety of the email that he shared with his team. “No group has a monopoly on excellence,” it read. “We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on… Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.”

The reception to Wang’s announcement perfectly illustrated the vibe shift: aside from two head-scratching pieces from TechCrunch (one that read, in part, "I would invite [Wang] — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off"; the passage was stealth-deleted in the middle of the night, the day it was published) there were no apoplectic hit-pieces written like there were when, in 2020, Brian Armstrong announced that Coinbase would be mission-first.

Instead, Wang was praised, perhaps because founders and power players across tech are increasingly joining him in the view that hiring should be merit-based, and that it’s time to move past the post-Floyd days of anti-racism training and diversity quotas.

At this point, you could probably fill an entire website with quotes from influential tech figures who have recently come out for mission-first and meritocracy over DEI. And in fact, Balaji Srinivasan did just that: he recently dropped meritocracy.com, a site whose homepage is just a grid of pro-meritocracy tweets from tech leaders.

“Merit should be the only reason for hiring,” says one from Elon.

David Sacks frames it as advice: “Startup tip: you’re not required to have DEI. Firing this team will immediately save costs and improve performance.”

Bill Ackman cites Martin Luther King.

When I spoke with him via Signal last week, Balaji put it bluntly. “Meritocracy is our strength,” he said. “With wings basically falling off Boeings, we thought this might be important to reiterate. So we collected posts from a number of CEOs in favor of merit-based hiring.”

That grid of quotes is also accompanied by a landing page for a job board of available positions at companies that are solely mission-oriented (3,439 positions at 29 different companies, as of this writing).

To underscore how much of a pivot Balaji’s site is from the status quo in tech not even a few years ago, it’s worth looking back at how far we’ve come. Just last year, IBM was credibly accused of rewarding hiring practices that discriminated against asians and whites. Uber factored in diversity targets as one of their criteria for bonuses. And “diversity and inclusion”-related jobs had surged on Glassdoor in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd.

A shift from the explosion of Silicon Valley’s ZIRP era, DEI-related initiatives to Balaji’s anti-DEI, pro-merit job board — one featuring testimonials from the top players in tech, no less — is significant. But to declare this development a permanent victory would be premature.

Look again to the reception of Wang’s MEI tweet. While the Scale boss was praised by his peers, there were still a few who called his efforts to fight workplace racial discrimination “virtue signaling at the peak.” Meanwhile in the courts, for every victory we’ve seen over DEI (e.g. the ‘Black women only’ grant program recently ruled unconstitutional by an appeals court), there are still others who rule in favor of the diversity initiatives when ‘specific individuals’ who would be disadvantaged by the measures aren’t identified (as was the case in this suit over Pfizer’s diversity fellowship program). And in Silicon Valley, the evidence doesn’t support a broader right-wing vibe shift.

A recent Washington Post article poured cold water on the notion that we’re witnessing an anti-DEI vibe shift when they declared that “Most Americans approve of DEI,” citing a study that polled Black Americans and a “partially-overlapping survey of U.S. adults overall,” though the racial breakdown of this other group is unclear. TechCrunch also argued that Silicon Valley leaders are wrong for believing that meritocracy is a good thing. They go on to cite “all the data and research,” but cite just one article: a piece in Princeton Press that isn’t so much a study as it is a general musing on sort-of-related topics like the dichotomy between success and luck.

Here’s the reality: in the past, pieces like TechCrunch’s effectively served as a sort of social pressure, reinforcing compliance to the status quo that would be difficult for a founder to resist. With meritocracy.com’s quotes and job board, though, it’s clear founders and tech are breaking free of the former paradigm, shifting more and more towards merit-based hiring — hit-pieces be damned.

–Riley Nork