6 ms·
Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring pe
by formercoder 7y ago
Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring people recommended to me by others that I trust.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoBecause white men that dominate those jobs already typically know white men to recommend for those jobs.
- macintux 7y agoDirector of engineering at a former employer once said in the span of 30 seconds: “we’re trying to hire more diversity” and “please reach out to your social network”. To an audience of 98% white males. The director acknowledged the incongruity, thankfully, but never solved the problem.
- gleenn 7y agoI think you're assuming white males don't know how to suggest females and non-whites. We may be statistically more likely to hang out with other white males but I'm pretty sure I can suggest people besides them.
- macintux 7y agoI can and did, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the preponderance of our collective networks were white males. That’s not a strategy for significant diversification.
- arkh 7y agoIf the only diversity you acknowledge is just skin deep you may have a lot more problems.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoReplace “don’t know how to” with “don’t know” and it would be more appropriate. I know plenty of women in the industry, but for the specialty I would recommend for, I couldn’t list more than a couple of names (of which are well employed already).
- Thiez 7y agoI can't speak for others, but I'm a white male and less than 98% of the people I know are other white males. This is also true when I limit myself to software developers (but to a lesser degree). It seems to me that reaching out to ones social network would be an improvement. At 98% white males there's not much you can do to make it worse.
- tasogare 7y agoSuper racist comment. Just replace white men by black men or jew and you will see how this line of thinking is dangerous.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoThere is nothing racist about my comment, and yes, it does apply to other races to beget similar results.
- m0zg 7y agoI must have spent the last 20 years in a parallel universe where every single hiring manager would like nothing more than to hire a minority or a woman because of corporate edicts. At Microsoft today, for instance, they have _quotas_ for hiring women (I don't know about minorities, but they probably have quotas for that, too), and if you don't meet the quota, you're kinda fucked as a manager. At Google, when the hiring committee is in doubt the official position is to make a "hire" decision if the applicant is a woman and "no" if the applicant is a man. A female hiring committee member told me she saw no issue with this policy. Yet still, very few females apply. I had interviewed 100+ people for Google. Of them IIRC 8 were women and 1 was hired. You can't get more women into the profession if they choose not to apply.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoYou can't get more women into the profession if they choose not to apply. And they can't apply if they never see your ad because of practices like the ones described in the article under discussion.
- gsich 7y agoThat's only an issue if you get applications only after ads.
- m0zg 7y agoI've never got a job in response to an ad either. Have you? Do you personally know anyone who has? Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in response to ads.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
- nitwit005 7y agoDo you actually know of any high paying jobs completely dominated by white men anymore? Plenty of non-white doctors, scientists and engineers certainly.
- kevcampb 7y ago'jobs for the boys' is a well known phrase for a reason. It's rarely used in a positive way
- BubRoss 7y agoI have literally never heard anyone say that in my life.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- collyw 7y agoIts a common phrase in the UK.
- goatinaboat 7y ago“The boys” in this context are a managers cronies, not any random person who happens to be male. In fact the phrase excludes men too, who don’t play golf or whatever.
- collyw 7y agoI would say its a bit more general than that. Family members getting jobs via a parent would also be labelled this way.
- goatinaboat 7y agoAgreed. A manager hiring their daughter over more qualified candidates would be a “jobs for the boys” situation despite her not being a literal boy.
- flukus 7y ago> Is it biased in a bad way? Probably in several ways, along with a gender bias in your network there's probably a high likelihood that there's a racial bias, a class/wealth bias and an age bias. Your network probably has a strong contingent of people you went college with, people with a shared interested in your sports (which can be a proxy for class and race) and people with a similar background.
- hinkley 7y agoThere's an awful lot of "yes but I..." going on in this thread, finishing with people not seeing their own bias, or not giving enough information to prove they don't have bias in their recommendations. Let me start by inverting something that Uncle Bob has been saying for years: If you have less than 5 years experience, then 50% of the developers out there are 'older' from your perspective. Are half of your recommendations for people over 28? Let's see how mine would stack up. If I had to recommend 10 people right now: If I'm honest, about 6 of mine will be for people over the age of 28. That should be 5. So my recommendations are biased against young devs, which I hated when I was 26. If you asked me to be fair I could come up with 1 or 2 more young developers, but unbidden it would probably be 3-4. 2 or 3 would be female. If you only consider recent grads, that's low. But there's a hole in the older generation, so 25% is probably spot on, even though I think it kinda sucks. 2 should be black, hispanic or asian. I hit that number sort of. Because I could recommend 3 Indian developers and one East Asian from recent jobs. I have to my knowledge only ever worked with two black developers, one of whom was good, and also understandably frustrated that he is a statistic. I have seen him exactly once in 10 years. I would wager that my numbers are better than most of the people who are getting rustled here (if you know your numbers are fine, you're likely not getting drawn into the conversation), but they're still biased. My recommendations don't make things better. They don't make them much worse, but they still tug the needle toward the unfair end of the gauge.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]