3 ms·

This reminds me of a story about hiring (from a book which name I can't remember offhand). The author was hiring a team in India, and facing an onslaught of tho

by beat 9y ago

This reminds me of a story about hiring (from a book which name I can't remember offhand). The author was hiring a team in India, and facing an onslaught of thousands of basically identical resumes. How to filter them? So he added "Ruby" as a requirement - not because it was required by the project, but because at that time, only programmers who really cared about their craft learned Ruby. This got rid of 99% of the junk resumes.

jldugger 9y ago
So, I think we need to discuss the legal concept of 'disparate impact.' We've decided that, as an employer of 15 or more people, it's your duty to avoid even accidental racial bias without justification. Normally this isn't a problem as screening criteria like experience in language X is a bona fide job requirement, so even if such criterion filtered out minorities disproportionately, it's not a liability. Tacking on filters like 'must know programming language not used at this company' is going to be a huge stretch, and if your African American candidate pool is filtered out more regularly, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. So yes, crafting heuristics is hard, but manager's paychecks are larger for a reason.
- beat 9y ago
  If I ever get to the point where I'm in charge of a large-scale hiring process, I absolutely want to use name-free resumes, to reduce gender and racial bias, plus other steps that are effective as I learn them. That said, the African-American candidate pool in America is so vanishingly small that subtle tech bias at hiring time isn't the issue - the heuristics to filter them out started before they ever finished high school. (This has actually been a point of interest for me for a long time. I mentioned elsewhere a friend who has terrible spelling but a very successful career. He also happens to be black, which has been something else to overcome. We've talked for years about ways to encourage more black students to go into IT, which we both believe is a route to middle-class success with substantially less racial animosity than they'll face in other fields.)

by beat 9y ago

jldugger 9y ago

So, I think we need to discuss the legal concept of 'disparate impact.' We've decided that, as an employer of 15 or more people, it's your duty to avoid even accidental racial bias without justification. Normally this isn't a problem as screening criteria like experience in language X is a bona fide job requirement, so even if such criterion filtered out minorities disproportionately, it's not a liability. Tacking on filters like 'must know programming language not used at this company' is going to be a huge stretch, and if your African American candidate pool is filtered out more regularly, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. So yes, crafting heuristics is hard, but manager's paychecks are larger for a reason.

beat 9y ago
If I ever get to the point where I'm in charge of a large-scale hiring process, I absolutely want to use name-free resumes, to reduce gender and racial bias, plus other steps that are effective as I learn them. That said, the African-American candidate pool in America is so vanishingly small that subtle tech bias at hiring time isn't the issue - the heuristics to filter them out started before they ever finished high school. (This has actually been a point of interest for me for a long time. I mentioned elsewhere a friend who has terrible spelling but a very successful career. He also happens to be black, which has been something else to overcome. We've talked for years about ways to encourage more black students to go into IT, which we both believe is a route to middle-class success with substantially less racial animosity than they'll face in other fields.)