8 ms·

I'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

• rfrey 4y ago
  Well, felt smart, anyhow.
• serverholic 4y ago
  That 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 ago
    Fair, 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        if 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 ago
      If 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 ago
        That does sound frustrating, but I think you are conflating naive management practices with inclusive hiring.
        • slt2021 4y ago
          ipaddr is right that he described the actual situation with FAANGs scooping up all of high caliber underrepresented minority candidates (think black/women ivy league comp sci grads with high GPA). But this also creates a positive feedback loop when more and more women decide to switch industries and pursue IT/Engineering jobs via bootcamps, college degrees, etc. I noticed the number of female candidates in UX/UI, fullstack, QA, Data Analytics - has increased in last several years. Partly because the demand is still high for these professionals, partly because there is entire cottage industry of bootcamps churning out IT specialists en masse, partly these diversity hiring practices that opened up doors for women
          • sirsinsalot 4y ago
  • okaram 4y ago
    If 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 ago
  People in general yes, but some particular people become reasonably skilled at it if they put effort into it over a long time
  • jbmsf 4y ago
    Sure, 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 ago
    Are 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 ago
    Thinking 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 ago
    It would be sad to me to cede the concepts of bias and inclusion to only referring to one dimension.
  • sethammons 4y ago
    Inclusive 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 ago
  Employment 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 ago
    They don't lie, they just call it "culture fit"