4 ms·
> inclusive hiring culture and find exceptional engineering talent. Thats a contradiction in terms. Building something exceptional always involves excluding me
by realjhol 4y ago
> inclusive hiring culture and find exceptional engineering talent.
Thats a contradiction in terms. Building something exceptional always involves excluding mediocrity
- mikrl 4y agoNo it is not. You can exclude mediocrity while also being exclusionary on other axes. They are unrelated issues. In fact, I’ve even heard of exceptional people being abused/bullied for belonging to the wrong group to the point of being told “you couldn’t have done that” which itself is an assertion of their supposed mediocrity for exclusionary reasons. Don’t assume you need to be bigoted to exclude mediocrity. Discriminating, yes, but not discriminatory against groups that inclusive hiring policies attempt to protect.
- jbmsf 4y agoI'm sure that sounded smart when you wrote it. An inclusive interviewing process does not mean that you hire everyone. It means you reduce the weight of people's biases as part of identifying who you hire (because people turn out to be quite bad at prediction in hiring).
- rfrey 4y agoWell, felt smart, anyhow.
- serverholic 4y agoThat sounds nice and all but the distribution of engineers doesn’t match population distributions. This leads to organizational pressure to hire based on population distribution. Doing so inevitably means hiring based on attributes other than skill.
- jbmsf 4y agoFair, but: - The companies that make an effort get a lot closer to population baselines than the ones that just give up. - Organizational pressures are something leadership and management should be steering. I'd rather have hiring practices be an explicit choice than something that "just happens"
- serverholic 4y agoI don’t think you really understood what I said. If your goal is population distribution then you are inevitably hiring based on attributes other than skill. For example, women don’t make up 50% of the engineering talent pool so if your goal is 50% women then you have to lower standards to achieve that.
- glandium 4y agoif your goal is 50% women then you have to lower standards to achieve that. You don't have to. But you'd remove them from the job market, making the pool smaller for other companies. IOW, a few companies can target 50% women, but that'll make it that much harder for other companies.
- ipaddr 4y agoIf the % of woman developers is 10% and management creates hiring goal of 50% it detorts reality. It means hr has to work harder at filling those female roles which often reduce their checkboxes while increasing the checkboxes for everyone else. Now you have to leaving positions unfilled longer in hopes of finding a candidate who matches a gender. You've turned the hiring process into a broken mess and require 1000 times more candidates. Let's say you are successful. Let's say a class of companies are successful at this strategy. Lets use the example of faangs which are desirable places in terms of salary/brand. If faangs were successful at this that would reduce the % of female developers in other industry and assuming faangs are taking the best candidates that leaves the worst ones. Which then creates this reality where male programmers outclass female developers in these other industries. That makes it harder for women in general and makes this false impression that females are not as good as males. To help women you really need to treat them equally. Trying to reach a goal of unhealthy unnatural % industry wide means women will left holding the bag when the music stops.
- jbmsf 4y agoThat does sound frustrating, but I think you are conflating naive management practices with inclusive hiring.
- okaram 4y agoIf you think we have a perfect way to measure (or even to define) pure skill I have a bridge to sell you ... We're always hiring based on attributes other than skill. If we're lucky and purposeful, skill becomes a part of the hiring process.
- serverholic 4y ago[dead]
- photonbeam 4y agoPeople in general yes, but some particular people become reasonably skilled at it if they put effort into it over a long time
- jbmsf 4y agoSure, but if you are lucky enough to have an entire team of interviewers who have this much experience, you're probably not having the same hiring conversation that's happening in this thread.
- sophonX 4y ago[flagged]
- jbmsf 4y agoAre you trolling now? People tend to substitute their biases when evaluating skills and knowledge. Some people overcome these biases through practice but everyone has them. It's 2023, this is not new territory.
- hoverfd 4y agoThinking of it in terms of race might indicate more about how you view things. As an example, think about how frequently throughout history people in power have claimed that women "can't handle" the positions of power that men had. They cite all kinds of nonsense like "emotional" or "hysterical"... conveniently ignoring all of the hysterical and emotional men throughout history. Think about how something like that would affect how companies are formed. Things seem much better now, but I merely wanted to highlight one of many kinds of biases that are actively affecting our society, even if they are hard to qualify.
- whiddershins 4y agoIt would be sad to me to cede the concepts of bias and inclusion to only referring to one dimension.
- sethammons 4y agoInclusive hiring practices, in my experience, strive to have a diverse funnel whereby under-represented groups get to be in consideration, but you still hire the best out of the pool. It may take longer to fill that pool, but many agree that it is worth it.
- tomp 4y agoEmployment is, be definition, exclusive. More so for well-paying companies. I hate when companies lie about that, it massively lowers my respect for them.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoThey don't lie, they just call it "culture fit"
- romanhn 4y agoThis take assumes a priori that inclusive hiring results in mediocrity. Sounds more like a reflection of biases, to be honest. Inclusive hiring means expanding your search criteria beyond "hire those that look like me, speak like me, have awesome education like me, and are basically smart like me". It turns out there are plenty of exceptional people outside of that narrow band.
- pessimizer 4y ago> have awesome education like me, and are basically smart like me At least this is meritocracy, the kind of thing that people (e.g. eugenicists) can make a serious argument for. > look like me, speak like me ...is something that can't be justified except by terrible people. Even worse is "likes the same music and movies that I do" or "we coincidentally have mutual friends."
- Redoubts 4y ago> is something that can't be justified except by terrible people. I have bad news for you about the people commenting in this thread.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> Building something exceptional always involves excluding mediocrity This is wrong by definition US army was exceptional in 1970's, did you need to graduate from harvard to join? No, they drafted everyone, even your sorry ass didn't want to join. British industrialisation was exceptional, they didn't exclude anyone, even got children something to do by sending them into coal mines! Amazon is exceptional, is it hard to become a worker in Amazon warehouse? Organisation can be exceptional without any individual being exceptional. Also you could be exceptionally bad!
- WatchDog 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> Project 100,000 soldiers included those unable to speak English, those who had low mental aptitude or minor physical impairments, and those who were slightly over- or underweight. You are moving the goalpost from mediocrity to disability.
- WatchDog 4y agoSubsequently the US set a legal floor of IQ 80 to enlist. It's illegal to enlist anyone with an IQ below 80 to the military. They don't have any use for them. Approximately 1 in 10 people have an IQ below 80.