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> I've heard it so many times about people interviewing others, as "(s)he is smart, passed all test, but weird, I don't like to work with her/him". At this poin

> I've heard it so many times about people interviewing others, as "(s)he is smart, passed all test, but weird, I don't like to work with her/him". At this point, it is systemic discrimination. No, that's a misnomer. Systematic discrimination implies the system itself codifies this behaviour - but instead, what is codified is _team fit_, which is often based heavily on intuition. Humans are capable of being good judges of interpersonal compatibility, and the best interviewers employ an appropriate amount of intuition in the process because only a limited interaction is possible and every bit of information available deserves to have some chance of being factored into the assessment. Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers. It's good that small companies are often able to accomodate folks like yourself, but expecting big companies that more often than not are looking for cookiecutter, commodity employees that will fit the HR process lifecycle. If you need more input and aren't demonstrably going to produce more output than the average worker, from their perspective you're not the best choice to hire, period. Of course, I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who vehemently disagree with me, claim that it is in fact systemic discrimination to want something like "team cohesion", and will make you a protected class soon enough.

antoinevg 7y ago
> Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers. Or try it like this and see how it feels: "Let's face it: for white people, a lot of black people are very hard to get along with ..."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- core-questions 7y ago
  Hey, if you want to make it a racial thing, that's your problem. I find people "go to the well" for this sort of argument when they can't actually argue with the real premise.
  - antoinevg 7y ago
    You mistake my intent. I'm not trying to "go to the wall" because I want to win an argument with you. What I'm trying to do is use an example of another kind of discriminatory behaviour which is socially unacceptable to demonstrate to you that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them. But hey, if you don't care about that kind of thing then it's not your problem I guess.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      GP pointed out a real, existing problem, and trying to deny it by pattern-matching into a racial problem isn't helping either of them. > that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them. That probably speaks more about those people than about GP. Having worked and being friends with people who most definitely fall into the spectrum (didn't get confirmed diagnosis, though), it does present very unique challenges in terms of teamwork and workplace organization, challenges that gender or ethnic differences don't bring in. It takes special company architecture and open-minded people to make it work; your typical 9 to 5, crank out code and kill tickets off Jira software company won't.
- GhostVII 7y ago
  Race has very little influence on behavior. By definition, autism has a significant affect on behavior. You are comparing pears to grapefruit.
- cwyers 7y ago
  There is a big difference between prejudging a person and their possible behavior from a known trait of their appearance, and judging a person from their observed behavior (often without any knowledge that the person is neuroatypical).
- flukus 7y ago
  > "Let's face it: for white people, a lot of black people are very hard to get along with ..." I thought this was a silly comparison at first, but if you ask why is racial/sexual/other discrimination wrong (and not just illegal) in in hiring then it makes sense. When hiring you're judging an individual and not the group as a whole, if that person isn't at the peak of the bell curve of whatever group you're discriminating against/for then you're probably making a sub optimal decision. Women are weaker than men but in an interview the only question you need to ask is if this women is strong enough to do the job. To various degrees over various times black people had much worse k-12 education, but in an interview you only needed to know if the person in front of you has the appropriate education level. If you avoid someone neurotypical because "a lot of autists are very hard to get along with" then you're doing the same thing a racist person is doing, just with different prejudices.
antoinevg 7y ago
> Of course, I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who vehemently disagree with me ... and will make you a protected class soon enough. Not asking for special privileges or protections. Asking for the same privileges and protections afforded to everyone else.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  My understanding is that the protected classes are the only ones afforded protections related to these things.
  - antoinevg 7y ago
    Please enhance your understanding, your world will be richer for it: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Privilege#Privilege_blindness https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Privilege#Privilege_blindness
    - RHSeeger 7y ago
      Please go back and re-read what I said. I was talking about protections, not privileges. The protected classes are the only ones that are actually protected by law. The fact that other groups (white, male, etc) benefit from privileges are a reason for there being protected classes, but they are not the same thing at all.
    - MetalGuru 7y ago
      That backfired. Hopefully, your world is richer because he corrected your misunderstanding.
  - belorn 7y ago
    Protected classes as a legal concept in the US is two lists, one federal and then state law. In that context you are either on either of them or you are not, and depending on the answer you get certain protections. In EU there is no such list. Anti-discrimination law is quite a bit broader here, but so is also the exceptions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stared 7y ago
Aspies have some advantages and disadvantages. Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision. I understand no willingness to adapt (though, if it were about other aspects of a person, there will be a lot of rants; and possibly lawsuits). However, when there is a Resume, interview or recommendation letter stage that implicitly uses skills NOT RELEVANT for the job that people on the autism spectrum lack, it is a different story. It is a firewall, often not related to the actual workplace. Moreover, if it is not a procedure of a single company, but a universal standard (especially in the US), it creates a system that is unfavorable for people on the autism spectrum. Most neurotypicals get when "optional" means "required" and "required" means "optional". Or, as in the comment above, that the meaning of "truth" is different for neurotypicals (usually meaning: no outright lies, but drop things that are not favorable for you, and simplify story with the favorable ones). So, the interview process (in its very common form) is a firewall very effective against many neurodiverse people.
- anticensor 7y ago
  To the ADHD and autistic people, the definition of truth is fairly strict: no lies, no omissions, no simplification, no made-up stories.
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  > Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision. No, it isn't. It is a workplace environment problem, and if a workplace is not willing to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate the needs of a worker, or allows such unwillingness to affect the hiring decisions, then they are breaking the law.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    There are some circumstances where it might make sense, like a construction site. No tech company should be one.
- x220 7y ago
  >Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision No, that's discrimination. Autism is a disability and companies are required to make reasonable accommodations. A hipster startup wouldn't get away with being wheelchair-inaccessible because that would be discriminating against the disabled. Unless you're running a restaurant or factory or operation like that you have no reasonable excuse to discriminate against the disabled.
Nuzzerino 7y ago
I'll be happy to disagree with this post for reasons other than claims of "systemic discrimination". It celebrates behaviors that are linked with hypocrisy and arbitrary bias. The problem isn't that you're weeding out people who don't fit in with the team. The problem is that you're weeding out people as a result of invalid, inaccurate, arbitrary biases that are more likely to stem from animal-brain genetic instincts, rather than modern evidence-based research and training. It's simply another form of low mediocrity, and you're doing yourself no favors for it. Any attempt to defend using gut instinct as a target for hiring decisions (even though some bias is unavoidable due to human nature) is going to sound obnoxiously ignorant to those who know better.
- core-questions 7y ago
  > animal-brain genetic instincts You're discounting intuition with this dismissive label. Trusting the instincts of your team to make decisions on who they can work with is critical to maintaining cohesion on that team and keeping people happy, which is a critical competitive advantage (especially during any kind of downturn). We're not talking about "low mediocre", "animal-brain" people, we're talking about professionals who may have hired / worked with hundreds of different people. But then, you're just using ad hominems, and not actually providing any kind of evidence, or really an argument of any kind other than "you're obnoxiously ignorant", which ironically enough is _your_ intuition about _me_. Delightful! Thanks for this crass exchange.
  - h0l0cube 7y ago
    > and not actually providing any kind of evidence You might want to live up to your own standards. Looking at your posts so far, you point to no evidence that hiring 'based on intuition' (for whatever that means) ends in positive outcomes for either group cohesion, or even that fuzzy end-goal: productivity.
    - gliboc 7y ago
      You're going full circle here. He's not the one advocating for "modern evidence-based research and training", so it's not in his standards. And I'm not blaming him. Not everything is measurable, or at least measurable in ways that would enable researchers to extract meaningful answers or techniques. You said it yourself, productivity is a fuzzy end-goal. If you do not believe it is possible to empirically derive a way to interview properly, then rationalism is your best choice, i.e. Intuition/Deduction. And contrary to common belief, rationalism is not a prison. It's just a decision process, in which you're perfectly allowed to question yourself using available empiric data.
karmakaze 7y ago
How is "team fit" different from "culture fit" which basically means acts/talks/works "like me" and without explicitness can produce a discriminatory monoculture?
- core-questions 7y ago
  In my view, companies are inherently discriminatory (they choose who to hire, that's who makes up the company) regardless of any policy that is implemented. A monoculture is often the goal! Whether that's good or not depends very heavily on what that culture ends up being in practice, of course.
- MetalGuru 7y ago
  Selecting for culture fit isn’t always bad. You could be selecting for good cultural values the company has.
- RivieraKid 7y ago
  "Team fit" mostly means social skills.
stubish 7y ago
This reads almost identical to the rationales against hiring women from past decades. Women did not fit in with the male teams; ingrained misogyny was so common. And yes, they didn't behave the same, and had special needs (they were still expected to be mothers, needed separate toilets installed, customs like having the boss over for dinner prepared by wife didn't work, weekend golf and the bloke talk was unthinkable with women along), and required coworkers to adapt and change, as acceptable behavior around the work place was not acceptable around women at the time. Team fit shouldn't be the only criteria, and shouldn't be a criteria at all if you have a cultural problem. A company that has decided it needs to hire more women or fewer arseholes or has a staff burnout issue or high staff turnover does not want to keep hiring the same type of people, and that is what you get when you are hiring on team fit. Beyond ethical issues, a company can decide on purely economic grounds that it wants to be hiring neurodiverse workers, and that might mean losing people who are unable to adapt. And you probably want to lose them, given that there is more acceptance of the neurodiverse elsewhere and your team members will need to deal with them, even if you don't hire them yourself.
- shadowmore 7y ago
  > ingrained misogyny was so common Was? I wouldn't call it misogyny, because it isn't out of hate but out of the unique social dynamics between genders, but absolutely nothing has changed except one thing: it's now politically incorrect and against the rules to actually say what you think/feel, so everyone hides it. Men and women still don't work well together. The attraction dynamics between them still overpower any attempts at keeping things professional. The social differences are still all there. As a proud owner of an ADHD brain, I don't understand the victimhood narrative at all. If someone doesn't want to work with me because I feel "weird" to them, why would I want to work with them? Why should they be forced to work with me? Who says I'm entitled to a job? Who says they owe me anything? And most importantly, I would need to be sickeningly entitled and delusional to assume that society has to adapt to fit me rather than vice-versa. That's the kind of reasoning children use when throwing irrational tantrums. I've never had trouble socializing, but ADHD does produce all sorts of strange behavioral patterns. It's 100% my responsibility, as a human being with personal agency, to read the room and adapt my behavior to the society in which I'm participating, not for the entire rest of the world to cater to me.
tsimionescu 7y ago
You're discussing from a position that puts team efficiency (and company efficiency) above any other value. You may in fact be right that certain kinds of diversity can hurt team efficiency (for an obvious example, if you already have a team of white power types, hiring a black man on that mteam will lead to morale issues). However, in practice, and especially for large companies, optimizing only for efficiency is simply not acceptable behavior. Since the ability to find a place to work is so important for any individual in our society to have a chance at a decent life, companies' social responsibilities must have them potentially sacrifice some efficiency to prevent discrimination of large groups. Note: I am not in any way claiming that disadvantaged groups are less efficient at work, there is absolutely not evidence of that. I am claiming that sometimes, to accept disadvantaged groups in a workplace may create some discomfort to the people who were already in that workplace, since statistically they were likely to hold biases against that discriminated group.
- tomp 7y ago
  > Since the ability to find a place to work is so important for any individual in our society to have a chance at a decent life, companies' social responsibilities must have them potentially sacrifice some efficiency to prevent discrimination of large groups. I think about this often, so let me try to play the devil’s advocate: (1) why are we (the society) allowed (even encouraged) to discriminate for intelligence at almost every point in our lives (school, job, marriage)? (2) sure, companies are forbidden from discriminating because of certain characteristics, let’s take pregnancy; but why should companies be expected to shoulder that burden all by themselves? It’s more than reasonable for the society to cover the costs, as a sort of insurance policy - it probably doesn’t matter that much for big companies that can just statistically assume that a certain percentage of employees will be sick / pregnant / etc. but for a small company 1 missing employee is a big burden (even if the government covers parental leave salary) edit: could also include "assholeness" in (1), could even blame it on neurodiversity
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    For (1) I think the 'intelligence' that we discriminate for in all those cases is such a vague term that it essentially means 'being good at X'. If that is the case, obviously we discriminate by it, because we try to choose people who are better at X when trying to find people for X. Tether there is a single underlying characteristic that makes you better at X (a pre-determined IQ) that is discriminated for is perhaps harder to know. I certainly don't think that school for example advances students based purely on intelligence - discipline, even obedience, like-ability, sometimes teamwork, are all at least as important to what makes most good students successful. Related to 2,my answer is very simple: companies don't take the full burden, at least in most countries. In general, there is a shared burden - the employee has reduced pay, the state is paying for some or most of that, and the company is forced to keep the position open for the employee when they decide to return. In my country at least, they are also free to hire a temp to fill that position for the 1 or 2 years of maternal leave.
h0l0cube 7y ago
> Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers. They say if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. As the term 'neurodiversity' implies, it is not restricted to any particular phenotype, but speaks of a plurality of diverse behavior types. > It's good that small companies are often able to accomodate folks like yourself Their are many high-functioning autistic people all through-out the start-up scene and across the tech industry. I'm certain it isn't just small companies that employ people on the spectrum. Some mask so well, you can't even tell - and the distinction between neurodiverse and neurotypical is not as binary as you might imagine. You might want to give pause for thought.
rhizome 7y ago
>No, that's a misnomer. Systematic discrimination implies the system itself codifies this behaviour I hate to point this out when you've written a substantial comment like this, but the comment you're replying to said "systemic," not "systematic," and the difference between them isn't just a semantic quibble.

antoinevg 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
core-questions 7y ago
Hey, if you want to make it a racial thing, that's your problem. I find people "go to the well" for this sort of argument when they can't actually argue with the real premise.
- antoinevg 7y ago
  You mistake my intent. I'm not trying to "go to the wall" because I want to win an argument with you. What I'm trying to do is use an example of another kind of discriminatory behaviour which is socially unacceptable to demonstrate to you that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them. But hey, if you don't care about that kind of thing then it's not your problem I guess.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    GP pointed out a real, existing problem, and trying to deny it by pattern-matching into a racial problem isn't helping either of them. > that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them. That probably speaks more about those people than about GP. Having worked and being friends with people who most definitely fall into the spectrum (didn't get confirmed diagnosis, though), it does present very unique challenges in terms of teamwork and workplace organization, challenges that gender or ethnic differences don't bring in. It takes special company architecture and open-minded people to make it work; your typical 9 to 5, crank out code and kill tickets off Jira software company won't.
GhostVII 7y ago
Race has very little influence on behavior. By definition, autism has a significant affect on behavior. You are comparing pears to grapefruit.
cwyers 7y ago
There is a big difference between prejudging a person and their possible behavior from a known trait of their appearance, and judging a person from their observed behavior (often without any knowledge that the person is neuroatypical).
flukus 7y ago
> "Let's face it: for white people, a lot of black people are very hard to get along with ..." I thought this was a silly comparison at first, but if you ask why is racial/sexual/other discrimination wrong (and not just illegal) in in hiring then it makes sense. When hiring you're judging an individual and not the group as a whole, if that person isn't at the peak of the bell curve of whatever group you're discriminating against/for then you're probably making a sub optimal decision. Women are weaker than men but in an interview the only question you need to ask is if this women is strong enough to do the job. To various degrees over various times black people had much worse k-12 education, but in an interview you only needed to know if the person in front of you has the appropriate education level. If you avoid someone neurotypical because "a lot of autists are very hard to get along with" then you're doing the same thing a racist person is doing, just with different prejudices.

antoinevg 7y ago

> Of course, I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who vehemently disagree with me ... and will make you a protected class soon enough. Not asking for special privileges or protections. Asking for the same privileges and protections afforded to everyone else.

RHSeeger 7y ago
My understanding is that the protected classes are the only ones afforded protections related to these things.
- antoinevg 7y ago
  Please enhance your understanding, your world will be richer for it: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Privilege#Privilege_blindness https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Privilege#Privilege_blindness
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    Please go back and re-read what I said. I was talking about protections, not privileges. The protected classes are the only ones that are actually protected by law. The fact that other groups (white, male, etc) benefit from privileges are a reason for there being protected classes, but they are not the same thing at all.
  - MetalGuru 7y ago
    That backfired. Hopefully, your world is richer because he corrected your misunderstanding.
- belorn 7y ago
  Protected classes as a legal concept in the US is two lists, one federal and then state law. In that context you are either on either of them or you are not, and depending on the answer you get certain protections. In EU there is no such list. Anti-discrimination law is quite a bit broader here, but so is also the exceptions.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stared 7y ago

Aspies have some advantages and disadvantages. Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision. I understand no willingness to adapt (though, if it were about other aspects of a person, there will be a lot of rants; and possibly lawsuits). However, when there is a Resume, interview or recommendation letter stage that implicitly uses skills NOT RELEVANT for the job that people on the autism spectrum lack, it is a different story. It is a firewall, often not related to the actual workplace. Moreover, if it is not a procedure of a single company, but a universal standard (especially in the US), it creates a system that is unfavorable for people on the autism spectrum. Most neurotypicals get when "optional" means "required" and "required" means "optional". Or, as in the comment above, that the meaning of "truth" is different for neurotypicals (usually meaning: no outright lies, but drop things that are not favorable for you, and simplify story with the favorable ones). So, the interview process (in its very common form) is a firewall very effective against many neurodiverse people.

anticensor 7y ago
To the ADHD and autistic people, the definition of truth is fairly strict: no lies, no omissions, no simplification, no made-up stories.
mnw21cam 7y ago
> Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision. No, it isn't. It is a workplace environment problem, and if a workplace is not willing to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate the needs of a worker, or allows such unwillingness to affect the hiring decisions, then they are breaking the law.
- gbear605 7y ago
  There are some circumstances where it might make sense, like a construction site. No tech company should be one.
x220 7y ago
>Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision No, that's discrimination. Autism is a disability and companies are required to make reasonable accommodations. A hipster startup wouldn't get away with being wheelchair-inaccessible because that would be discriminating against the disabled. Unless you're running a restaurant or factory or operation like that you have no reasonable excuse to discriminate against the disabled.

Nuzzerino 7y ago

I'll be happy to disagree with this post for reasons other than claims of "systemic discrimination". It celebrates behaviors that are linked with hypocrisy and arbitrary bias. The problem isn't that you're weeding out people who don't fit in with the team. The problem is that you're weeding out people as a result of invalid, inaccurate, arbitrary biases that are more likely to stem from animal-brain genetic instincts, rather than modern evidence-based research and training. It's simply another form of low mediocrity, and you're doing yourself no favors for it. Any attempt to defend using gut instinct as a target for hiring decisions (even though some bias is unavoidable due to human nature) is going to sound obnoxiously ignorant to those who know better.

core-questions 7y ago
> animal-brain genetic instincts You're discounting intuition with this dismissive label. Trusting the instincts of your team to make decisions on who they can work with is critical to maintaining cohesion on that team and keeping people happy, which is a critical competitive advantage (especially during any kind of downturn). We're not talking about "low mediocre", "animal-brain" people, we're talking about professionals who may have hired / worked with hundreds of different people. But then, you're just using ad hominems, and not actually providing any kind of evidence, or really an argument of any kind other than "you're obnoxiously ignorant", which ironically enough is _your_ intuition about _me_. Delightful! Thanks for this crass exchange.
- h0l0cube 7y ago
  > and not actually providing any kind of evidence You might want to live up to your own standards. Looking at your posts so far, you point to no evidence that hiring 'based on intuition' (for whatever that means) ends in positive outcomes for either group cohesion, or even that fuzzy end-goal: productivity.
  - gliboc 7y ago
    You're going full circle here. He's not the one advocating for "modern evidence-based research and training", so it's not in his standards. And I'm not blaming him. Not everything is measurable, or at least measurable in ways that would enable researchers to extract meaningful answers or techniques. You said it yourself, productivity is a fuzzy end-goal. If you do not believe it is possible to empirically derive a way to interview properly, then rationalism is your best choice, i.e. Intuition/Deduction. And contrary to common belief, rationalism is not a prison. It's just a decision process, in which you're perfectly allowed to question yourself using available empiric data.

karmakaze 7y ago

How is "team fit" different from "culture fit" which basically means acts/talks/works "like me" and without explicitness can produce a discriminatory monoculture?

core-questions 7y ago
In my view, companies are inherently discriminatory (they choose who to hire, that's who makes up the company) regardless of any policy that is implemented. A monoculture is often the goal! Whether that's good or not depends very heavily on what that culture ends up being in practice, of course.
MetalGuru 7y ago
Selecting for culture fit isn’t always bad. You could be selecting for good cultural values the company has.
RivieraKid 7y ago
"Team fit" mostly means social skills.

stubish 7y ago

This reads almost identical to the rationales against hiring women from past decades. Women did not fit in with the male teams; ingrained misogyny was so common. And yes, they didn't behave the same, and had special needs (they were still expected to be mothers, needed separate toilets installed, customs like having the boss over for dinner prepared by wife didn't work, weekend golf and the bloke talk was unthinkable with women along), and required coworkers to adapt and change, as acceptable behavior around the work place was not acceptable around women at the time. Team fit shouldn't be the only criteria, and shouldn't be a criteria at all if you have a cultural problem. A company that has decided it needs to hire more women or fewer arseholes or has a staff burnout issue or high staff turnover does not want to keep hiring the same type of people, and that is what you get when you are hiring on team fit. Beyond ethical issues, a company can decide on purely economic grounds that it wants to be hiring neurodiverse workers, and that might mean losing people who are unable to adapt. And you probably want to lose them, given that there is more acceptance of the neurodiverse elsewhere and your team members will need to deal with them, even if you don't hire them yourself.

shadowmore 7y ago
> ingrained misogyny was so common Was? I wouldn't call it misogyny, because it isn't out of hate but out of the unique social dynamics between genders, but absolutely nothing has changed except one thing: it's now politically incorrect and against the rules to actually say what you think/feel, so everyone hides it. Men and women still don't work well together. The attraction dynamics between them still overpower any attempts at keeping things professional. The social differences are still all there. As a proud owner of an ADHD brain, I don't understand the victimhood narrative at all. If someone doesn't want to work with me because I feel "weird" to them, why would I want to work with them? Why should they be forced to work with me? Who says I'm entitled to a job? Who says they owe me anything? And most importantly, I would need to be sickeningly entitled and delusional to assume that society has to adapt to fit me rather than vice-versa. That's the kind of reasoning children use when throwing irrational tantrums. I've never had trouble socializing, but ADHD does produce all sorts of strange behavioral patterns. It's 100% my responsibility, as a human being with personal agency, to read the room and adapt my behavior to the society in which I'm participating, not for the entire rest of the world to cater to me.

tsimionescu 7y ago

You're discussing from a position that puts team efficiency (and company efficiency) above any other value. You may in fact be right that certain kinds of diversity can hurt team efficiency (for an obvious example, if you already have a team of white power types, hiring a black man on that mteam will lead to morale issues). However, in practice, and especially for large companies, optimizing only for efficiency is simply not acceptable behavior. Since the ability to find a place to work is so important for any individual in our society to have a chance at a decent life, companies' social responsibilities must have them potentially sacrifice some efficiency to prevent discrimination of large groups. Note: I am not in any way claiming that disadvantaged groups are less efficient at work, there is absolutely not evidence of that. I am claiming that sometimes, to accept disadvantaged groups in a workplace may create some discomfort to the people who were already in that workplace, since statistically they were likely to hold biases against that discriminated group.

tomp 7y ago
> Since the ability to find a place to work is so important for any individual in our society to have a chance at a decent life, companies' social responsibilities must have them potentially sacrifice some efficiency to prevent discrimination of large groups. I think about this often, so let me try to play the devil’s advocate: (1) why are we (the society) allowed (even encouraged) to discriminate for intelligence at almost every point in our lives (school, job, marriage)? (2) sure, companies are forbidden from discriminating because of certain characteristics, let’s take pregnancy; but why should companies be expected to shoulder that burden all by themselves? It’s more than reasonable for the society to cover the costs, as a sort of insurance policy - it probably doesn’t matter that much for big companies that can just statistically assume that a certain percentage of employees will be sick / pregnant / etc. but for a small company 1 missing employee is a big burden (even if the government covers parental leave salary) edit: could also include "assholeness" in (1), could even blame it on neurodiversity
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  For (1) I think the 'intelligence' that we discriminate for in all those cases is such a vague term that it essentially means 'being good at X'. If that is the case, obviously we discriminate by it, because we try to choose people who are better at X when trying to find people for X. Tether there is a single underlying characteristic that makes you better at X (a pre-determined IQ) that is discriminated for is perhaps harder to know. I certainly don't think that school for example advances students based purely on intelligence - discipline, even obedience, like-ability, sometimes teamwork, are all at least as important to what makes most good students successful. Related to 2,my answer is very simple: companies don't take the full burden, at least in most countries. In general, there is a shared burden - the employee has reduced pay, the state is paying for some or most of that, and the company is forced to keep the position open for the employee when they decide to return. In my country at least, they are also free to hire a temp to fill that position for the 1 or 2 years of maternal leave.

h0l0cube 7y ago

> Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers. They say if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. As the term 'neurodiversity' implies, it is not restricted to any particular phenotype, but speaks of a plurality of diverse behavior types. > It's good that small companies are often able to accomodate folks like yourself Their are many high-functioning autistic people all through-out the start-up scene and across the tech industry. I'm certain it isn't just small companies that employ people on the spectrum. Some mask so well, you can't even tell - and the distinction between neurodiverse and neurotypical is not as binary as you might imagine. You might want to give pause for thought.

rhizome 7y ago

>No, that's a misnomer. Systematic discrimination implies the system itself codifies this behaviour I hate to point this out when you've written a substantial comment like this, but the comment you're replying to said "systemic," not "systematic," and the difference between them isn't just a semantic quibble.