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I am confused about last sentence -- are you saying that requiring high-quality open source code will somehow help with "balanced racial or gender demographics"
by theamk 5y ago
I am confused about last sentence -- are you saying that requiring high-quality open source code will somehow help with "balanced racial or gender demographics"?
Because I am pretty sure this is false. Anecdotally, the women in my group do not have any public code. And web searches found confirmations for this as well [0] [1]
So if you want diversity, stay away from methods like the one described in this post.
[0] https://www.toptal.com/open-source/is-open-source-open-to-women https://www.toptal.com/open-source/is-open-source-open-to-wo...
[1] https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-a...
- nivenkos 5y agoWhy not? They have the freedom and opportunity to create FOSS code just the same as anyone else.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago1. Just generally, it's rather exploitive to require something unpaid that people do in their spare time in order for them to get a job. 2. Specifically with respect to race and gender, don't use something to guide hiring that you know skews one way. And don't excuse it by saying "but those other people had the freedom and opportunity". They did, but it still skews, and you still know it does. Don't use signals that are known to be biased.
- nivenkos 5y agoUnfortunately most take-home tests hit those two points too though.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoThey at least hit the "unpaid work in order to get a job" exploitive part. I'm not sure about the "latent discrimination part". But yes, I regard unpaid take-home tests as filtering for workers who are willing to be exploited...
- MathMonkeyMan 5y agoMy last sentence was not relevant to the topic of the article. It was my jaded summary of how much tech hiring I've seen works. Maybe an edgy non sequitur that didn't belong.