"Objective" means "different people applying the procedure will get the same answer". This is a property held by standardized tests and carefully defined interview processes. "Merit" is defined as "what will make me the most money".

I don't know why you believe I'm pretending to do "social justice". I'm not. I'm trying to make money, just like IBM in the mainframe era. Hiring based on coding ability is profitable because a software business is about turning code into money, it has nothing to do with "historical oppression".

Incidentally, I'm opposed to "social justice". Social justice is based on the premise that certain subsets of humanity [1] deserve special rights (mostly statistical equality), but the other 2^{6 billion} subsets of humanity do not.

If that's a moral axiom I don't share it. If it's derived from some other moral principle, I have not heard a coherent derivation [2].

(To fully grasp the philosophical issue I have, explain why you care about "women and minorities", but not "children of murder victims and people who's SSN ends with 3847".)

[1] Typically women, lgbt, blacks, hispanics, but not asians.

[2] The closest I've ever heard is basically "everybody cares about race/gender/lgbt so we do too".