4 ms·

Since your coworker liked that problem domain I'm sure you thought it was fun. But what about candidates? Ever have one like the poster in this same thread who

by jzwinck 14y ago

Since your coworker liked that problem domain I'm sure you thought it was fun. But what about candidates? Ever have one like the poster in this same thread who doesn't like sports? What about female candidates? Would you agree there are likely to be gender and ethnicity biases in an interview question that discusses American sports? This of course assumes the actual job is not about sports.

hugh4life 14y ago
"What about female candidates? Would you agree there are likely to be gender and ethnicity biases in an interview question that discusses American sports?" Don't you agree there are gender and ethnicity biases in posing these questions?
yummyfajitas 14y ago
Programming is about learning enough about a problem domain to model it with code. My last job involved women's fashion, which I (and my unfashionable male coworkers) don't give a crap about. My current job involves delivering local news to middle aged female suburbanites, which I (and most of my brooklyn hipster colleagues) are similarly uninterested in. My lack of interest in school closings in long island doesn't prevent me from making postgres reject articles without a title. If a developer can't ask questions and figure out enough about football to model the data reasonably well, he/she is a solid NO HIRE. (I'm also curious what you mean by "gender and ethnicity biases". Are hispanics/women incapable of understanding sports or something?)
- brazzy 14y ago
  > Are hispanics/women incapable of understanding sports or something? No, but many of them will lack prior knowledge about American Football and will have to work on understanding it at the same time as they work on understanding the application requirements. That means: given the same amount of intelligence and design skills, they'll take longer and probably appear less smart than someone who has that prior knowledge. It's exactly the kind of thing that creates cultural biases in IQ tests and makes them invalid: http://www.wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.html http://www.wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBia...
  - btilly 14y ago
    I believe that you are massively over-estimating the value of detailed sports knowledge for this question. If someone claimed that they knew nothing, I'd give something like the following hint. The main things that you need to know is that there are teams, with players, who play games with each other. During the games the players do things we want to track. And each game belongs to a season. When you need to know more than that, we'll tell you more. Was it gender biased? I don't think so. I never saw that detailed sports knowledge was a significant advantage. Furthermore in my time interviewing at that company, we had a total of 2 women in that interview. Neither had trouble on understanding the problem domain sufficiently well for modeling purposes. We hired one of them. We were on the fence about the other and decided not to. That was better than the average for men who reached that stage of the interview process. However the sample size is sufficiently small that it is not really evidence of a difference. So both on first principles, and from the limited direct data that I have, the question does not appear to be gender biased.
    - brazzy 14y ago
      Obviously, a lot rests on the interviewer, in this particular case and any other. But I'd say that there's a definite risk that some interviewers would subconsciously consider a candidate less intelligent after having to give them an explanation like in your hint, of facts they themselves consider absurdly basic.
btilly 14y ago
For the record I don't like sports. In the time we gave that question, being a fan of sports did not generally help on that question. The necessary domain information is small, the relational design skills tested are not. In fact we had one candidate who said up front that he didn't know anything about sports. He wound up doing well on that question and being hired.

by jzwinck 14y ago

hugh4life 14y ago

"What about female candidates? Would you agree there are likely to be gender and ethnicity biases in an interview question that discusses American sports?" Don't you agree there are gender and ethnicity biases in posing these questions?

yummyfajitas 14y ago

Programming is about learning enough about a problem domain to model it with code. My last job involved women's fashion, which I (and my unfashionable male coworkers) don't give a crap about. My current job involves delivering local news to middle aged female suburbanites, which I (and most of my brooklyn hipster colleagues) are similarly uninterested in. My lack of interest in school closings in long island doesn't prevent me from making postgres reject articles without a title. If a developer can't ask questions and figure out enough about football to model the data reasonably well, he/she is a solid NO HIRE. (I'm also curious what you mean by "gender and ethnicity biases". Are hispanics/women incapable of understanding sports or something?)

brazzy 14y ago
> Are hispanics/women incapable of understanding sports or something? No, but many of them will lack prior knowledge about American Football and will have to work on understanding it at the same time as they work on understanding the application requirements. That means: given the same amount of intelligence and design skills, they'll take longer and probably appear less smart than someone who has that prior knowledge. It's exactly the kind of thing that creates cultural biases in IQ tests and makes them invalid: http://www.wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.html http://www.wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBia...
- btilly 14y ago
  I believe that you are massively over-estimating the value of detailed sports knowledge for this question. If someone claimed that they knew nothing, I'd give something like the following hint. The main things that you need to know is that there are teams, with players, who play games with each other. During the games the players do things we want to track. And each game belongs to a season. When you need to know more than that, we'll tell you more. Was it gender biased? I don't think so. I never saw that detailed sports knowledge was a significant advantage. Furthermore in my time interviewing at that company, we had a total of 2 women in that interview. Neither had trouble on understanding the problem domain sufficiently well for modeling purposes. We hired one of them. We were on the fence about the other and decided not to. That was better than the average for men who reached that stage of the interview process. However the sample size is sufficiently small that it is not really evidence of a difference. So both on first principles, and from the limited direct data that I have, the question does not appear to be gender biased.
  - brazzy 14y ago
    Obviously, a lot rests on the interviewer, in this particular case and any other. But I'd say that there's a definite risk that some interviewers would subconsciously consider a candidate less intelligent after having to give them an explanation like in your hint, of facts they themselves consider absurdly basic.

btilly 14y ago

For the record I don't like sports. In the time we gave that question, being a fan of sports did not generally help on that question. The necessary domain information is small, the relational design skills tested are not. In fact we had one candidate who said up front that he didn't know anything about sports. He wound up doing well on that question and being hired.