5 ms·

Doesn't a policy of preferentially hiring certain groups necessarily imply that employees who are part of those groups are less capable? Like, helping folks pas

Doesn't a policy of preferentially hiring certain groups necessarily imply that employees who are part of those groups are less capable? Like, helping folks pass the bar implies that they aren't above it - otherwise, why would they need help?

hardwaresofton 9y ago
Yes, except for the case where they are already past the bar but not being considered because of biases of people doing the hiring. I think that's the case that the prevailing amount of diversity-related efforts try to solve. You're right though, and it's actually really insulting to insinuate that certain groups need help passing the bar. You can easily identify people who think like this if you ask a question (politely) like "would you hire a candidate that was more 'diverse' but less technically skilled than another candidate?". People who would choose the more "diverse" candidate but without a principled reason are probably just virtue signalling. Note that 'diverse' can mean anything -- like comparing a developer who used to work in construction before being turned on to programming to a developer who came out of an ivy school (assuming they have comparable skill levels).
freshhawk 9y ago
In an imaginary utopian meritocracy, yeah it would. Since we live in the real world however ...
- halostatue 9y ago
  Funnily…both concepts (“utopia” and “meritocracy”) were satirical before people started taking them seriously…
  - Mz 9y ago
    People also wrote fiction about traveling to the moon for a very long time before it actually happened. And Star Trek is credited with inspiring a lot of modern developments that are now ubiquitous, like cell phones and automatic doors. (The automatic doors on Star Trek were being pulled open using ropes by hidden prop guys. The actors had to walk confidently forward as if they expected them to open when this was not guaranteed. They sometimes smacked right into them)
    - smt88 9y ago
      The problem with meritocracy isn't something that technology or science can solve, though. It's that there's no reasonable, objective definition of "merit". Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence. Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else? Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard. Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
      - Mz 9y ago
        My assumption is that meritocracy would apply at work, not to society as a whole. If you assume we are talking about a country, sure, it is all kinds of fucked up and broken and will never fly. But, currently, women, people of color, etc, seem to be "last hired, first fired" plus generally paid less for reasons that appear to be something other than their objective ability to do the job. I would like to see people hired because they can do the job and paid what they are worth and not some discounted value based on skin color or gender. To me, that would be a meritocracy.
        smt88 9y ago
        What is merit at work, though? How do you measure it? There aren't many employees (outside salespeople) who have revenue explicitly tied to their performance. What if you have an employee who works in your data center and averts 3 days of downtime? Maybe that person provided $100,000 of value and no one will ever know except for her.
halostatue 9y ago
No. It’s actually a policy of no longer favouring certain groups (e.g., white men). There is systemic discrimination in favour of white men in software engineering, and only policies and procedures that change hiring away from those things which encourage such discrimination will fix the balance. You don’t have to “lower the bar” at all, because it turns out that the average “bar” is the wrong standard for anything but the most independent of programming (which is not modern software engineering, thanks). My own hiring standard looks for people who love learning, don’t mind shifting contexts and languages, and can work well in a group. Some of the “smart guys” who have interviewed with us have been poor choices because they are bad culture fits—cowboys and jerks.
- plandis 9y ago
  Well he lists several things. Why do you think that a special hiring queue for diversity hires and special classes for diversity hires is setting an equal bar? Those things seem discriminatory to me.
- hardwaresofton 9y ago
  I'm all for reducing systemic discrimination but is the way to do it discrimination in the other direction (which you construe diversity hiring as being)? If that answer to that question is no, then the only way to deal with the system discrimination is to work hard to undo biases in people who do hiring. That's a hard/unsolvable problem, due to the difficulty/impossibility of actually changing people's minds. Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
  - halostatue 9y ago
    If there is systemic discrimination in favour of group A, then the only way to fix that discrimination is to eliminate it. To the members of group A (in this case, mainly white men), that feels like discrimination. It isn’t discrimination, but that’s what the loss of power and representation feels like. Even if you step it down through affirmative action programs, group A feels like it’s being discriminated against… …which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.) By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work. People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team. And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.) If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
brown9-2 9y ago
Is anyone actually "helping folks pass the bar"?
wolfgangK 9y ago
There is no way around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

hardwaresofton 9y ago

Yes, except for the case where they are already past the bar but not being considered because of biases of people doing the hiring. I think that's the case that the prevailing amount of diversity-related efforts try to solve. You're right though, and it's actually really insulting to insinuate that certain groups need help passing the bar. You can easily identify people who think like this if you ask a question (politely) like "would you hire a candidate that was more 'diverse' but less technically skilled than another candidate?". People who would choose the more "diverse" candidate but without a principled reason are probably just virtue signalling. Note that 'diverse' can mean anything -- like comparing a developer who used to work in construction before being turned on to programming to a developer who came out of an ivy school (assuming they have comparable skill levels).

freshhawk 9y ago

In an imaginary utopian meritocracy, yeah it would. Since we live in the real world however ...

halostatue 9y ago
Funnily…both concepts (“utopia” and “meritocracy”) were satirical before people started taking them seriously…
- Mz 9y ago
  People also wrote fiction about traveling to the moon for a very long time before it actually happened. And Star Trek is credited with inspiring a lot of modern developments that are now ubiquitous, like cell phones and automatic doors. (The automatic doors on Star Trek were being pulled open using ropes by hidden prop guys. The actors had to walk confidently forward as if they expected them to open when this was not guaranteed. They sometimes smacked right into them)
  - smt88 9y ago
    The problem with meritocracy isn't something that technology or science can solve, though. It's that there's no reasonable, objective definition of "merit". Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence. Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else? Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard. Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
    - Mz 9y ago
      My assumption is that meritocracy would apply at work, not to society as a whole. If you assume we are talking about a country, sure, it is all kinds of fucked up and broken and will never fly. But, currently, women, people of color, etc, seem to be "last hired, first fired" plus generally paid less for reasons that appear to be something other than their objective ability to do the job. I would like to see people hired because they can do the job and paid what they are worth and not some discounted value based on skin color or gender. To me, that would be a meritocracy.
      - smt88 9y ago
        What is merit at work, though? How do you measure it? There aren't many employees (outside salespeople) who have revenue explicitly tied to their performance. What if you have an employee who works in your data center and averts 3 days of downtime? Maybe that person provided $100,000 of value and no one will ever know except for her.

halostatue 9y ago

No. It’s actually a policy of no longer favouring certain groups (e.g., white men). There is systemic discrimination in favour of white men in software engineering, and only policies and procedures that change hiring away from those things which encourage such discrimination will fix the balance. You don’t have to “lower the bar” at all, because it turns out that the average “bar” is the wrong standard for anything but the most independent of programming (which is not modern software engineering, thanks). My own hiring standard looks for people who love learning, don’t mind shifting contexts and languages, and can work well in a group. Some of the “smart guys” who have interviewed with us have been poor choices because they are bad culture fits—cowboys and jerks.

plandis 9y ago
Well he lists several things. Why do you think that a special hiring queue for diversity hires and special classes for diversity hires is setting an equal bar? Those things seem discriminatory to me.
hardwaresofton 9y ago
I'm all for reducing systemic discrimination but is the way to do it discrimination in the other direction (which you construe diversity hiring as being)? If that answer to that question is no, then the only way to deal with the system discrimination is to work hard to undo biases in people who do hiring. That's a hard/unsolvable problem, due to the difficulty/impossibility of actually changing people's minds. Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
- halostatue 9y ago
  If there is systemic discrimination in favour of group A, then the only way to fix that discrimination is to eliminate it. To the members of group A (in this case, mainly white men), that feels like discrimination. It isn’t discrimination, but that’s what the loss of power and representation feels like. Even if you step it down through affirmative action programs, group A feels like it’s being discriminated against… …which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.) By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work. People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team. And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.) If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.

brown9-2 9y ago

Is anyone actually "helping folks pass the bar"?

wolfgangK 9y ago

There is no way around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox