3 ms·

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. And it's not

by dgudkov 10y ago

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. And it's not necessarily wrong.

geofft 10y ago
It's not necessarily wrong, and quite justifiable, at the individual level. It creates significant inequities when everyone does it at scale. Leaving aside all questions of legality and punishment (the only reason you care about punishment is if something goes wrong), what is the right way to solve this? How, in an ideal world, do we fix the significant inequity that many people today happen to have homogeneous networks, and hiring from your network means that you perpetuate any homogeneity, while also saying it's totally okay and encouraged to found a startup with a close friend instead of with someone who passes an exam? And how do we get from here to there?
- existencebox 10y ago
  Let me ask an incendiary question (I feel not great that I even have to qualify this, but I'm admittedly nervous of talking about these sorts of issues in certain lights given social context nowadays); but you're clearly thinking about this comprehensively enough that I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I don't necessarily have an answer either. Is some amount of inequality at scale _necessarily_ a bad thing, if it arises from a fundamental systemic property of the socio/business/economy context we've bought into? I'll make a rather absurd parallel; look at money itself. To have more money enables gaining more with less effort, (citing the common "boots" theory of economics, basic laws of investing returns, etc) Therefore, enabling anyone to have more money than someone else creates significantly compounding inequality. Should we ensure that can't happen? I acknowlege it's a bit of a strawman but I would hope it also conveys a point both of implicit systemic cycles and tradeoffs of redressing them. As you concede, there's a tangible benefit towards hiring known entities and cohesive teams, even though at scale it tends to favor the incumbent majority. Rather than ask if the inequality is in itself bad, I'd try to look at the funnel and see if there are any truly improper barriers to the out-group, and focus on rectifying those. Like in CS I'm always wary of KPI based iteration since it can cause "overfitting"/ignoring transitive effects, and "raw diversity numbers" to me is a very opaque KPI. (Whether the systems that lead to these patterns is good is a totally separate discussion and one so huge I don't think I have the background to speak on it well, but I'm trying to question pragmatic steps to be taken that don't involve a burn-it-down-and-rebuild or throwing the baby out with the bathwater)

by dgudkov 10y ago

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. And it's not necessarily wrong.

geofft 10y ago

It's not necessarily wrong, and quite justifiable, at the individual level. It creates significant inequities when everyone does it at scale. Leaving aside all questions of legality and punishment (the only reason you care about punishment is if something goes wrong), what is the right way to solve this? How, in an ideal world, do we fix the significant inequity that many people today happen to have homogeneous networks, and hiring from your network means that you perpetuate any homogeneity, while also saying it's totally okay and encouraged to found a startup with a close friend instead of with someone who passes an exam? And how do we get from here to there?

existencebox 10y ago
Let me ask an incendiary question (I feel not great that I even have to qualify this, but I'm admittedly nervous of talking about these sorts of issues in certain lights given social context nowadays); but you're clearly thinking about this comprehensively enough that I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I don't necessarily have an answer either. Is some amount of inequality at scale _necessarily_ a bad thing, if it arises from a fundamental systemic property of the socio/business/economy context we've bought into? I'll make a rather absurd parallel; look at money itself. To have more money enables gaining more with less effort, (citing the common "boots" theory of economics, basic laws of investing returns, etc) Therefore, enabling anyone to have more money than someone else creates significantly compounding inequality. Should we ensure that can't happen? I acknowlege it's a bit of a strawman but I would hope it also conveys a point both of implicit systemic cycles and tradeoffs of redressing them. As you concede, there's a tangible benefit towards hiring known entities and cohesive teams, even though at scale it tends to favor the incumbent majority. Rather than ask if the inequality is in itself bad, I'd try to look at the funnel and see if there are any truly improper barriers to the out-group, and focus on rectifying those. Like in CS I'm always wary of KPI based iteration since it can cause "overfitting"/ignoring transitive effects, and "raw diversity numbers" to me is a very opaque KPI. (Whether the systems that lead to these patterns is good is a totally separate discussion and one so huge I don't think I have the background to speak on it well, but I'm trying to question pragmatic steps to be taken that don't involve a burn-it-down-and-rebuild or throwing the baby out with the bathwater)