3 ms·

> author-blind reviews Should I ever be in a position to hire a colleague, I wouldn't ever do so without having a chat with them. I spend 8hrs a day in an off

• moate 8y ago
  You'll also get people who (rightfully) point out that "plays nice with others" is a nice to have and not a must have. Certain people have skills so valuable they don't need to be liked (the productivity lost due to internal politics/people complaining is < the productivity gained by having them hired). It's great when everyone can coexist perfectly. However, that might not be the best business decision. There's no such thing as "objectively best" just a list of pros and cons to any candidate, and a company's internal preferences.
• electrograv 8y ago
  I’m not saying that all candidates should be interviewed without ever meeting or interviewing the candidate face-to-face; rather, I was speaking specifically of the coding interview portions. In these segments, face-to-face doesn’t really matter IMO, since it’s all about the candidate’s problem-solving ability. Yes there’s a lot of “bias hysteria” out there, as you put it, but I would dispute that advocating “author-blind meritocracy” falls into that category. Quite the contrary: An author-blind review process would actually make any bias impossible — either for or against any particular identity group. It seems to me most people should be able to get behind that, but maybe I’m wrong. In fact, the main opposition to author-blind meritocracy is the “post-meritocracy” movement which is slowly making its way into open-source projects codes of conduct.
  • stef25 8y ago
    You're totally right in that coding tests can and probably should be done "blind". When it gets to the "let's meet" stage, it could be possible that the bias just comes back. Yes this woman made a perfect score on the coding but she's a woman and I'm not going to hire her for reason X that just bubbled up out of my biased brain. I can totally see that happening, unfortunately.
• cthalupa 8y ago
  >I spend 8hrs a day in an office with my colleagues (sometimes more than with my wife & kid) and the ones I can't stand is about the only thing wrong with my job. There's plenty of people I would never ever spend time with outside of work, and try to minimize my time with at work. But that's fine, because 'cthalupa would like to have a beer with you after work' isn't part of the requisites for doing a job on my team. The 'Finding people that fit in with the culture'/'Finding people that I don't mind being around' is how you get monocultures and a lack of diversity in your team. >If we can't even see the person's face over some gender bias hysteria then I wonder how the hell we got here. Gender bias is a real thing, a big deal, and certainly not hysteria. There's a lot of ways to reduce it. It doesn't necessarily require never seeing someone's face - though I think automating "skills" related interviews could be a good thing - because you can start with having a structured interview program where you have specific questions to ask and a specific rubric to grade against. Making sure you have solid, unbiased questions, and measure the answers evenly against the same rubric solves the majority of the problem. >People should just get over the fact that men and women are different. Well, of course men and women are different. But even for jobs that involve heavy labor, this isn't actually significant - while the average woman has less physical strength than the average man, the type of woman who applies for that sort of job has self-selected into it, and is almost certainly more capable of doing that sort of work than the average woman - meaning it's still not a good indicator even for areas where the differences are largest. For a white collar job, like the type we're discussing? It's even less relevant. There are extremely few times where you should ever care about gender when it comes to hiring.