This matches my experience in IT: sometimes recruiters prefer to hire a girl, even if less qualified, just for sake of having a girl in the team, because it is "improving the morale" :)
There are tons of studies out there showing monocultures are bad for business. In your case, I'm sure your IT department had to interact with women on occasion. Having women on the team will allow the group to be aware of social considerations specific to women that they may otherwise miss.
The people who reviewed and approved the designs for our office space were all males. Guess what they forgot to put in the women's restrooms? When women complained, they put an open trash can next to the toilet with no lid...
The problem with the whole conversation around this topic is everyone pretending that women and men on average have the same level of skills and experience as each other. Then they act shocked when there are so few qualified male nurses or female mechanics.
Businesses only care about this topic, because it helps them design products and provide services that address a wider market. So, maybe they should just admit they don't always hire the absolute technically best candidate as the goal is to improve the social structure of the team.
Thank you. I have never considered this view. I always hear it’s for the team’s good to be more diverse but never why it’s good to be diverse...
I still believe quotas should not be applied everywhere but your example shows an excellent point that they are beneficial in some cases.
Where are the results of this Australian study? That news article doesn't list them.
Following through on their source [1], it says that the study outcome actually favors women and minority candidates, but it doesn't say how much, or talk about statistical signifance. It seems like the experiment design has been criticized on this one study too, and not releasing the results seems suspect.
The study also cites that blind auditions were a success for Orchestras [2]:
>In a well-known study analysing data on auditions and hiring by orchestras over this period, Goldin & Rouse (2000) found that the use of blind auditions had a major impact on gender bias in orchestras, increasing the likelihood of female musicians being selected by 25-40%.
The study states that after anonymization of resumes women were around 3% less likely to get picked and men around 3% more likely. Data were statistically significant at the 99% level.
Don't you mean, succeeded spectacularly? If the composition of candidates was changed when less biased/irrelevant information was displayed, arguably the selection could only be more meritocratic, not less.
At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias.
>> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
Seems like it did the job of removing existing bias when details were blind.
I've long suspected this was the only remotely feasible way to remove bias from recruiting (and possibly interviewing itself) -- I'm interested to see how this will go.
Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases.
I wonder how far it goes. In the USA, there are universities that have very distinctive ethnic compositions: UC Irvine is very different from Howard is very different from BYU. Do they anonymize the university name as well? Perhaps translating it to "large research university" and "liberal arts college." Though probably you can get some signals from there as well.
Personally I've never understood the importance put on degrees in the tech field. Sure it is important for your first job, but after 2 years, who cares. When reviewing resumes, if the person has been in the industry for a bit, the degree is irrelevant. And the fancy expensive school, big whoop. I rarely even read that section. I only care about their recent accomplishments and hopefully they have a good number of past ones.
They could have gone to a community college or Stanford, or been a college drop out. It's not going to sway me. What have you accomplished and will you become a productive and good person to work with is all that matters.
The idea that high school students have good habits that lead them to good colleges that lead to good work behavior is a laughable one.
I say this as someone who won the "game" on every count with this. Near-perfect SAT score, perfect high school performance, 100% acceptance rate into the Ivies (Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Cornell).
These say nothing about me other than my parenting, background and ability to win games that other people made up. Any intelligence or ability or skill or discipline that I have is in spite of those things, not because of them.
A common game bosses make up: "impress me with growth in this KPI by next quarter"
Rather than proving it is laughable, you are instead giving the exact reason why (under a certain value system) it makes lots of sense to select for this ability.
This is a fair argument and I will concede that if we're thinking about success as the getting high quality compliance for managerial games (which really does make up most entry level work in finance, consulting and tech) then hiring from a top school is highly predictive.
Going more meta, starting a median VC-backed company in the Valley is largely playing the same kind of game as in elite private schools and colleges - observing a social scene, identifying powerful players and the ladder to reach them, meticulously performing the necessary social roles in order to achieve funding, cargo cult management styles from the group.
>the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases
Bias will exist regardless of which information you present, the most you can hope for is shifting and limiting the types of bias that come into play to eliminate useless or harmful bias. Even if you grant anonymity to the applicant, recruiters can still be biased against or in favor of the school somebody went to, what they studied, the organizations they were involved in, etc.
For thia reason I hire based on anonymized data that also discards all place name locations and institutions. The result is quite effective, as you are presented with an applications that show only the bare bones of someone's experiences without context that might bias you.
Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have been to.
I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
No thanks. I am my own person. I don't need or want any "correction" mechanisms because of people I don't know and have nothing to do with. That would be ridiculous.
You bring up a certainly superficially valid point. You may be your own person, but, from a normative sense, your personage benefits from a long history of both benefits and detriments defined and in place long before you were born, and much bigger than yourself.
The goal of these bindings are to remove inherent bias. Some of that is bred into the intercept defined by unchangeable characteristics. Others by the vector field of rewards return for effort, often defined by thar initial condition. The goal with most of these (apparently feared? do I have your emotion right?) corrections is to offset at least the most damning of these.
Fear? No. It's disgust at the brazen rationalization of outright discrimination based on some holier-than-thou moral attitude by saying group X is better or worse than group Y because of history that has nothing to do with the individual. Why must people be considered as a member of a group instead of their personal character and actions that they're actually accountable for?
Perhaps what's most insidious about ascribing group victimhood is that you must also accept the converse, which is group responsibility. Are you suddenly going to be held responsible for any wrongs that your group has ever committed? Are you truly certain that's what you want?
You are ignoring that life is not fair, and never will be. We cannot control the bodies and circumstances we are born into. But every individual has the ability to make the most of their opportunity and achieve their goals, and quite a few in history have proven that they are able to accomplish far more by effort and will than any natural advantage otherwise. That is the best we can do, and unless you create some matrix world where we are all exactly equivalent clones of the same capacity, that is all that is possible.
Ah. I couldn't tell if your approach towards non-autarky approaches was fear or disgust. Thanks for clarifying.
It is important to note that the unfairness you describe doesn't affect the positive (non-normative) observations of bias-preservation that the blind hiring approach persists.
Now, pivoting to moral claims along the lines of your comment:
Discrimination has a long history, of which slavery, carting to reservations, redlining,and so forth favored certain groups consistently above others, in the past and in the present. In my view, repairing at least the present entrenched bias by any name is in order, the question is to what level. Autarky is a feasible outcome, if desired, which is to do nothing. The diffusion of favored and privileged status will always feel like discrimination to the group that had favored status. There is still a moral imperative to at least correct current entrenched bias, which in the US can show up in incarceration rates, ability to invest, etc.etc.
Unless you feel these groups that are historically and currently biased against are somehow responsible for their own situations? If that is the case, autarky or favoring your personal situation has a basis to build on. However, I fail to see how various denigrated groups through time brought their current biased outcomes. You've been shown evidence by other commentators that in the US blacks receive longer sentences than whites. Is that just how it is, or do we have as a society a moral imperative to fix at least the current system, let alone offer historical reparations?
I never said let's do nothing. I'm completely in favor of making hiring as blind as possible, especially to any physical and biological traits. I believe it's your stance that we should not do this.
Anyways, you didn't answer why people must be considered as groups instead of individuals? That seems to be the only lens you consider people, while also only choosing the group identity of the most perceived victimhood over an arbitrary time frame. And again, if you want to say that someone takes on the wrongs experienced by a group, then they must also take responsibility for the wrongs committed by the group. So in your example about US blacks, that group also commits the majority of crimes so they must acknowledge and resolve that too. Are you prepared to say that?
You're changing the argument into something about morality but the reality is that there is no cosmic justice. You can be born with missing limbs, or to a destitute family, or inside North Korea. The best we can do is make sure that if you work hard (and yes, harder than others who might be born to a billionaire US family) that you get the same exact chance to gain a position because you are actually competent and qualified for it, and what you look like and what some group in the past has done has absolutely nothing to do with that.
I think that's more of a problem of degree -- it's hard to pin down where harmful bias starts, but if you can do that, then this makes the anonymization solution even more applicable.
The question is whether the school is offering a harmful bias -- people get screened by school, GPA, etc all the time but at the point that society agrees these are harmful then you can just anonymize them out. It gets murkier on the moral/ethical side but I think that's the nature of the problem, not a problem with the solution.
It was tried in France without great success. The law was passed in 2006 but the application decree (which states how/when the law comes into effect) was never published. Consequently, this law was never upheld. Why? Field trials between 2006 and 2009 showed it didn't have a measurable effect and in some cases ended up discriminating more. The experiments' results are controversial (small sample size) but despite pushes in 2011 and 2014 the law seems effectively dead in the water.
Anecdotally, I've been on the recruiting end of "anonimized" CVs pushed by outsourcing companies. I was never fully clear on whether this was a legal requirements for them, or if it was a gesture to show inclusiveness and social responsibility on their part (take this with a pinch of salt, most outsourcing companies in France are little better than horse-dealers and will push any warm body your way if they think they can turn a profit). At any rate, most of these were hilariously badly done: using initials for the last name but leaving the first name in full, leaving telling initials (1), or other subtle or less subtle ways to hint at the contractor's origin and gender.
(1) e.g. a first name initialed J.L., J.M. or some other variation points to a Jean-something (Jean-Louis, Jean-Michel, etc.) composite first name, which is a clear indication of a "native" Frenchman (and a hint as to the person's age as well)
I really wish there was more published about why it did/didn't work -- I saw the other posts about similar studies that all seemed to fail, but the details seem really scant.
It's still unclear whether the problem was with the implementation (the experiment) or the method.
If there's spooky action/unintuitive reality at play here it's the job of a good scientific study to pull it out and lay it bare.
IME, outsourcing companies do this so you have to go through them to talk to the individual attached to the resume, not for any moral purpose. I've been on the receiving end of that one - a recruiting firm was sending out a (poorly) anonymized copy of my resume without my knowledge.
Always how they got away with that with the Eu's Data Protection laws and now GPDR.
Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to beat the BBC with.
> Anonymous recruiting entails that the ... date of birth ... are not included in the job application
If I write on my application that I have 25 years of experience, does that have to be excluded due to it revealing that my date of birth is likely more than 40 years ago? Can they really believe that the amount of experience isn't important?
To be fair, the hiring signal you can get from a description of 25 years of experience is probably comparable to the signal you can get from a description of the most recent 5 or maybe 10 years of experience.
I'm 46, and people my age talk about leaving off earlier experience, so as not to look too old. I condensed my earlier experience (the first 10 years) into a couple sentences describing the roles--not to look younger, but because with an average stint of 2.5 years, there are just too many jobs to list.
Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates.
Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience that doesn't match today's buzzwords.
I've got about 14 years of development experience and I also leave off some of my earlier experience on my resume. I do it not to conceal my age, but because the stuff I was doing 10 years ago is so much less interesting and relevant to my applications today.
Does my outlook not resonate with you/other older employees?
It does with me, but I'm less picky about traditional experience than most people. I'd prefer a list of technologies that someone knows, a list of things they want to work on, and a blurb about how they might fit in to the role I'm hiring for.
The cover letter seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I find a couple paragraphs of prose far more revealing about a person's abilities than a resume. Of course it's also more work to craft one for every position you're interested in, and doesn't help much if you're looking to put yourself into a database for recruiters (e.g. LinkedIn or any other job site), where they force you to iterate your experience in chronological order and list technologies with no context.
I think it's important to leave off things you're not interested in. I did Perl for years but there is no amount of money that would get me to do it again, so I minimize or eliminate its presence on my resume, and put extra emphasis on the technologies I want to work with now.
I have a business and tech background, I massage and prune experience and roles based on what type of position I'm applying for. Example my early years in sales and marketing are pretty irrelevant as a developer, my webGL experience does little to promote me as a business analyst
I hire with anonymous data. I would look at a statement like '25 years experience' on a CV and completely ignore it, as I have no idea how competant the candidate is based on this. I would look for the key technical words and impact statements in the CV to show depth of experience rather than general statements like this.
Competancy is assessed at interview, not at sift. The sift simply identifies that candidate meets the minimum possible spec for the role and can be interviewed. They may end up well exceeding the job spec after competancy based interview.
Finland has a national health care system where most health care workers work for the municipalities. Add to that teachers, social workers and that covers most of it.
Interestingly, Portland is roughly the same size as Helsinki and Washington, DC, but only has 10,000 city employees from what I can find (1), although there is probably much more incoming traffic into DC or Helsinki on a given day than Portland, which would require more city upkeep.
I remember reading about the Japanese area with the highest quality of life - it was an area where the government was the largest employer. That article went on to say that the government essentially managed fishing for the area, coordinating supply and demand, and that was the biggest industry. So the arguments that "private ownership" and "free market" are always better are simply ideological beliefs.
Then there is the city in Germany which controls a bunch of public companies - starting with Zepplins. My understanding is that their wealth, jobs, and social programs are all essentially controlled by the local government using company profits (I don't know if the VW emission problems have changed that.)
You have had some pretty good responses already. Few things adding to the number: Finnish municipalities often hire people with disabilities and pay them fraction of the pay a normal person would get.
Then more specific to Helsinki: city of Helsinki is notorious for inefficiency and shitloads of publicly funded feelgood projects. I've seen it from inside and the handouts that fund weird little art projects and museums that can't attract customers.. Shitshow.
Still there is relatively large amount of tax payers and relatively low municipal tax. Only because the comparison is municipalities where majority of the population is pensioners.
People are going to fake a lot more degrees and other qualifications.
When they come in for an in-person interview racial/gender/age/whatever bias is still going to be there.
Only way to prevent this would be to forbid in-person interviews before hiring/signing a conract, but then companies would presumably simply stop hiring from applications, because the qualifications are unreliable and they can't get a character impression of the applicant.
Hiring by reference from existing employees would become the norm (maybe it already is).
Why would someone do that if they know the faked degrees or qualifications won't pass the background check eventually? Just to get an onsite interview?
Yes, just to get an onsite interview. I saw this many times and it's very sad.
Also, I relate this to culture. Not to offend anyone, but from my personal experience lying in CV is much more common for some countries, that for others.
Scale maybe terrible, like multiple certifications in some field with no actual basic knowledge or skills. Like Certified Senior (sic!) Software Developer who can't tell you difference between stack and queue, or CCIE certified network engineer who has no idea what is DNS and how it works (real case).
As soon as I walk in the door I will be eliminated. But how can you interview someone without actually seeing/talking with them? Slack? Would anyone hire based only on a Slack interview?
Even if you get hired, you still have to show up for work and can be fired later due to the same bias.
If both the application and the work is completely remote and anonymous it might be possible to avoid most bias, but that's only feasible in IT and a couple other sectors and even there it's not common.
No, firing people is more expensive than rejecting them. And a lot of bias happening in the recruiting process are unconscious. So anonymous recruiting would prevent a lot those unconscious bias in the hiring process.
Does it really not bother anyone else that we are heading down a rather dystopian world of a kind of hyper-meritocracy that eschews with all other rights and privileges as it commoditizes humans to nothing but a function of their skills and abilities as put on paper, or even exhibited in practice?
It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget.
Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping.
So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability (whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst.
This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of "bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.
That's an interesting perspective! So you believe that one's race or gender or age should be a factor in predicting whether an applicant will be a good fit for a particular role?
I think this is a loaded statement. While there are, in fact, statistically proven differences for all three of those facets, the greater thrust that the OP was making seems to be that we are forced to dehumanize ourselves and others in service of an effort toward forced equalization, and that it feels very Orwellian.
There's nothing loaded about it; it's exactly what they're doing - removing specific bits of data from the person's CV.
I disagree with the whole premise that supports the first post; reducing someone to a short list of standard data points like age is the dehumanising action. It's exactly what is done when we wish to treat people as statistics.
Leaving them off is accepting that people's humanity can't be reduced to them.
Not really, no. Then again, I'm assuming that this only applies to early screenings and in-person / live interviews will allow a person's subtler characteristics come through.
Personally, back when I was in positions that participated in hiring, I didn't give a damn about a person's name, gender, race, skin color, sexuality, gender identity, age, personal hobbies, political persuasion, religion, food preferences or any other characteristic that wasn't directly related to: Can this person do the job we're hiring them to.
If we needed further consideration to distinguish between equally competent candidates, then we'd look at how motivated they are to grow, aka contribute in other areas. Not because we wanted younger people with longer (cynically: cheaper) career paths, but because the needs of companies change over time, and a flexible outlook means they might keep pace with change, and that's something anyone can do.
Agreed. When hiring for a specific position you pick the first peg that fits the hole well enough. The hiring bias problem seems like more of a hiring pipeline bias problem (E.g. sending your recruiter to Harvard instead of a state school resulting in more applications from Harvard students).
Ironically, you are totally wrong in your choice of example. Starting in 2017, Harvard admissions became majority-minority, with whites making up just under 50%, and most or all minority race students (including black) being over-represented compared to the general population.
I'll bite because I find this point of view fascinating. So you have 100 candidates of whom you know the name, date of birth, and gender as well as their first language. But unfortunately someone messed up and these 100 candidates have 0 qualifications listed. Under threat of being fired you have to pick the 10 best qualified for the job by the end of the day. How do you choose the candidates? You like the name John and people over the age of 42? Do you see now how none of it is really relevant?
the left insists there is bias against minorities and women in tech, however blind testing from interviewing.io proves that women do better when their sex is known. so if they keep insisting i propose we go incognito until they realize that there is bias against white men in the tech industry since they have a diversity officer.
That's a really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing it. Certainly it feels dystopian reduce everyone to their resumes and strip all shreds of their identity from themselves. "Entity 4571, I see that you have achieved primary qualifications and meet the requirement of 2 years of experience; we may now proceed to interrogatory verification of qualifications."
However, I pretty strongly disagree. When evaluating a resume, there's no legitimate reason to consider the name, age, address, or gender of a candidate. Contrariwise, there are significant problems with people considering that information anyway. Therefore, it seems like that information shouldn't be present.
You say "does it really seem healthy to ignore value of cross-generational achievements," but that's the same thing as saying "throw out the resumes of any young people who apply, we already have enough of them."
Now, if you're fine with the plan of explicitly deciding to hire only a man/woman/old/young/person-from-the-right-neighborhood/school, that's a different discussion, which I won't get into here, but if you're going to do that, it should at the least be done very intentionally and not in some sort of informal "eh, guessing based on their name, this is the wrong sort of candidate" way.
For what it's worth, that's a modern variant of Marx & Engels argument against equality (opportunity or outcome). They say equality is a bourgeois tool to deal with capitalism's shortcomings. They stipulated that there will be no equality (neither of opportunity nor of outcome) in a communist society, and that that was a great thing. Instead of equality (opportunity or outcome) they suggested "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" [1].
The idea behind this line of thought is that equality matters only if you don't have enough, but communist society will provide so much surplus that envy simply disappears, and equality withers. It is interesting to ponder the correctness of this line of thought, e.g. do the slim in the rich world envy the obese, despite the latter consuming more food?
Traces of this argument go back to Aristotle.
Marx & Engels erred in that they assumed capitalist modes of production cannot produce vast amounts of surplus.
The other error was assuming that envy ever goes away. People compete for status, attention and countless other intangibles even when their physical needs are met.
While all basic physical needs are certainly met in the developed world, it's questionable if most people's (or at least most men's) sexual needs (which could be classified as physical) are fully met.
It's difficult sometimes to shake off the feeling that some status competition is sexual competition that dare not speak its name.
Not that anyone will see this, but unfortunately for all of us, what is totally missing from this line of thought is the religious restraints regarding jealousy and coveting that are direct responses to the most primitive impulses of humans, that the more you have the more it's not enough, especially when you didn't work for it. It is just as true for the elite who don't work for what they have, as well as the parasitic savages that have been allowed to infest the civilized world (ironically, to enrich and empower the elite) that become ever more greedy and covetous with every bit of thing they are given without having earned or deserved it.
>From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
Unmentioned is the judgment that you don't need that, I don't need this, buy they do need that other thing. I'm being overly generic, but what counts as a need and what needs are fulfilled is still a political issue of discrimination in communism. Do you need shelter if the weather isn't lethal? Do you need food that is anything above the bare minimum to survive? Do you need emotional support? All needs are equal, but some are more equal than others.
What is wrong with meritocracy? Isn't it a system where your talent, effort and achievement are meaningful, and attributes like race, gender, wealth, sexual orientation etc. are irrelevant to your success? Isn't a meritocracy a platform that is equal to all?
Has someone redefined the terminology somehow?
I mean, I've always thought a meritocracy is a good thing. It does not matter "what" you are, it matters how good you are in what you do. And if you are not good at something, it is not due to your sex or race etc.
It bothers me a great deal. It seems that the only constructive ways that progressives have been able to come up with to equalize the unequal has been to flatten, to push down, to dehumanize and to remove the differentiation between people, by administrative fiat if necessary.
The thing is, if you decide that Applicant #42 is a good candidate, you're going to bring them in anyway. If you have a ton of biases, you still have just as much of an opportunity to enact them as you would have before, though you might have to be a bit more subtle. This doesn't solve the problem; it's a patch on top of it designed to feel good while accomplishing nothing.
> Does it really seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments
If by this you're referring to the heritability of traits, yes, it's a shame that things that are statistically and demographically visible have to be erased in the attempt to flatten everything.
> somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans
I don't know if this is the ultimate goal; my instinct is that this is the projected goal, because it is at least somewhat defensible philosophically even if I dislike it. The actual behind-the-scenes goal might be as simple as reducing people to more-manageable consumers that cause less trouble and more reliably produce the quarterly numbers we need.
Progressives have to do that because employers continue to be racist and sexist and discriminate on age, purely based on a resume. So removing that first filter is a good thing.
This is a red herring that I see a lot, especially in online discussions. Progressives (like myself) aren't "equalizing the unequal" as you put it. You're conflating our goals with those of socialists and communists from 100 years ago who were coopted by authoritarian dictatorships.
We're working to remove barriers that create inequality, such as discrimination by gender/race/creed etc. And I don't buy crocodile tears for the (generally white/male/older) people currently propped up by the status quo.
I do share your concern, however, that any policy can have ulterior motives. I see that more coming from knee-jerk and nanny state policies crafted by the far right today (that used to supposedly be a province of the far left). See: the military industrial complex growth in response to 9/11, the prison industrial complex growth in response to the war on drugs, etc.
Not only does it not bother me, I want this outcome. I want to be judged by my work, the skills that I've developed, and other things that are actually relevant to the company. I hate interview questions about my hobbies, what I'm like outside of work, what I do with my free time... You're hiring me to do a job. Judge me by whether I can do that.
a team is greater than the sum of its parts. personality and background can and do make a big impact on team dynamics and performance. I like to look up candidates and get a broader picture of what they bring to the table (e.g. leadership, sense of humor, optimist, realist, etc.)
If you're not working by yourself though, the things that make you a human really matter. I work at a company full of talented, smart developers with no focus or priority on communication or people skills. As a result we really lose out on collaboration and fail to leverage good work done by any specific team. I don't need a name or age to assess these traits but i sure need to get to know the person behind the resume facts.
In some countries, employment law has driven us to this, and it's widely seen as optimisation and culmination of what we know about employment best practice.
Some UK examples..
No longer does anyone bother getting letters from past employers as references, since none of the information in the reference can be verified as true or false employers cannot legally form a judgement based on this. Consequently all an employer is allowed to say is 'yes, they worked here, regards, x'.
Another example, every candidate at interview must be asked the same 'opening' questions, otherwise a failed candidate could bring legal action because they were not given the same opportunity as other interviewees. Candidates are also legally allowed to ask to see interviewer's notes (even during the interview) so interviewers should not be writing anything besides 'scores' for interviewee competancies, unless they want to get into legal trouble.
> cross-generational achievements and accomplishments
I think you're trying to say, "having an advantage due to your birth or family." You're really suggesting that someone's name, address, and gender should be part of the resume evaluation process? Your whole position seems like a thinly veiled endorsement of racism, sexism, and conferring advantages based on your family's accomplishments.
My point was that the "hyper-meritocracy" the parent comment referred to is antithetical to the dystopia that Diana Moon Glampers represents. There's no point in ruthlessly optimizing for the best candidates if you're going to cripple them to prevent them from outperforming the worst ones. If this is a step towards a dystopia, it's a very different dystopia than the one Harrison Bergeron depicts.
That aside, I'm less cynical about this than either you or the parent commenter. While I wouldn't want my professional skill set to be my sole defining characteristic as a person, I'm perfectly content to let it define me as an employee, keeping in mind that attributes like ambition, creativity, and passion are components of that skill set. But I acknowledge that this may be the start of a slippery slope, and you may be right to say that I underestimate that risk because I haven't lived in a Communist state.
Thank you for the friendly reply. I genuinely do appreciate it.
As for why I see things the way I do, all I'll add is that if things do go the way that all other characteristics are stripped away, leaving nothing but one's professional skill set... Ok. Who decides what qualifies for what box? You should keep a very close eye on who the final arbiters are that get to decide what, exactly, a professional skill set is, and what checks and balances are in place to prevent them from abusing their position.
You may find that suddenly characteristics that you thought had nothing to do with one's profession are added or removed as is convenient for the power structure at large, or that capabilities that you would consider core to the job at hand no longer considered worthy due to opaque political decisions. Again, I'd love to be wrong about this. We'll see, I suppose.
Can you please elaborate on how eliminating identifying info from a job resume is introducing the degenerate nature of communism. If I understand correctly Finland is trying this in an effort for the job searching process to be as fair as possible. What makes you think this is the first domino in going down that path?
> "does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments"
There is no compounding value of cross-generational achievements. You are not your ancestors. You are not responsible for anything they did, good or bad.
Yes, I want a world where your "humanity means nothing" in that I don't judge a prospective hire based on who their parents are.
That's not even the point though, personal information is disclosed in the job interview. I certainly hope I don't see anyone listing their ancestors' accomplishments on a resume.
What are you suggesting we judge a resume on if not merits? Should we be declining people for being the wrong race or having names we don't like instead?
While it's true that you're not responsible for your ancestors' actions, you usually have similar nature and nurture to your ancestors, so it's useful to take them into account when attempting to predict your behavior.
No, that is wrong, and ironically enough considering the parent post I originally replied to, dehumanizing. It's important to treat an individual as an individual. No attempt should be made to discriminate based on someone's ancestors. Nepotism is also bad.
Edit: Changed "replied to" to "originally replied to".
I'm making a statement about predicting behavior; you're making a statement about ethics.
Since we've moved into philosophy, why is it important that everyone be treated this indiscriminately? Veil of ignorance? Couldn't it be valid to protect the community from the risk that the bad behavior is heritable (genetically or socially)?
What's the alternative? Being more prone to ageism, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry e.g. anti-LGBT? Sure hyper-focusing on merit has flaws, but it's a lot less susceptible to a "good old boys" network than the current status quo.
> it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
Actually, commodification of human labor is not new. Have you seen factory worker, dock workers, manual labor. If you are able bodied then you do your work, get your pay and go home.
As for human bias, I don't sue how it eliminates the bias. I don't even get why biases makes us human. Ultimately you are hiring humans and statistically like to hire diverse set of humans.
Unfortunately parents response simply comes as rant with some intelligent sounding words rather than any thoughtful objections to the OP.
Sounds like you're thinking of isolated robotic workers.
An ideal worker in my mind has many human qualities that make them enjoyable and inspiring to be around. They make other employees happier to come to work and help them be more effective at work.
Granted, it's a lot easier to measure that Tom produces 15% more widgets per hour than it is to tell that Cindy's presence increased the entire factory's output by 5%. But still, the latter provides more value to a company so I expect improvements in evaluating that.
No. This is about judging people as individuals, on merits, character, and ability to do the job, while removing unchangeable physical characteristics that are meaningless and have been used far too often to ill-effect.
Why do you think we should continue to include those physical characteristics, especially if they have nothing to do with the actual job?
It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments...
I think I agree with your post except for this part. What did you mean by that? Are you talking about a person’s pedigree?
> it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
But for this fragment that makes it obvious, this post is a masterpiece of hiding its racism and sexism behind a veil of words the author knows HN will like. It’s almost impressive, in a way.
>It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget.
Depends if you are helped or hurt by this view. There are people who are discriminated due to no fault of their own over factors they cannot control. And not every bias is called out or even something we are socially cognizant of. If one previously benefited from this it can be worrisome but for others this will be a boon.
>simply strip humans of their humanity
What is humanity? Not in ideal, in actuality? Do beautiful people have more humanity than ugly people? The Hale Effect says that they do. When called out on it we will say that is not the case, but in our every day actions that is how we work. Mechanized equalization will be a benefit for those who have already been assigned as having less humanity for no fault of their own.
To me it seems counterproductive. Either whoever lies in CV more will win (be interviewed at least), or bias will show itself during personal interviews. You can't look at a person without realizing sex/age/race.
Of course you're going to know who you're interviewing. The whole idea is to anonymize the PRE-interview phase, specifically, selecting candidates. That selection post excludes personally identifying information.
If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no?
>> If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no?
Not really. Imagine three candidates: A, B and C. A is much better as professional, but B is good enough and has much better CV, C is trash but with great CV. If you interview B and C, you will hire B and never call A. Not optimal. If B is not good enough, you will hire A, but also waste time. If I know that B or C is from culture where lie is more common I will adjust my expectations and call A and B or C, but A will be included.
Actually I believe that some statistically proven bias is healthy thing. I conducted many interviews and I can say the following:
1) People tend to lie in CV in very specific patterns. By just reading CV, even with name and age hidden I can guess sex and age relatively easy. Not 100%, but much better than 50%.
2) Everybody lies (c) House M.D. Really, everyone. But different people lie differently, because different things are important to them and they want to look better at different things. I simply saw that many times. By knowing personal details I may adjust what I see in CV to get much more realistic picture. This is bias, yes, it is. But what can I do? Ask them not to lie? Real life does not work like that.
3) I will not, for instance, hire someone of significantly different hygiene standards. Has nothing to do with CV.
> That selection post excludes personally identifying information.
Here's the cognitive dissonance of it all. How can we achieve the goal of a "diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender, race, age, etc) when we can't select a candidate pool with these things taken into consideration? Will this have a net negative effect on at least creating an equal opportunity?
I'm not saying I'm for or against this blind screening. But I am skeptical it will work as intended. If anything, those with the most advantage due to their socioeconomic status from birth will simply advance in the system even more quickly.
>That selection post excludes personally identifying information.
How would you select a candidate this way? A CV is a document comprised entirely of personally identifying information and potential sources of bias. Would you ask for the CV when you invite them to interview, and invite everyone who applies? You certainty couldn't ask for recommendations until after the interview as well.
I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters.
The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.
Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have been to.
I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV.
I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track.
It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.
Yes, The other information is a job application, at least you can argue that somebody could make a decision based on those information. Whether decision process is just is obviously arguable. If name, age is totally irrelevant to a job, at best it will not be used for selection, while there is much risk that it will be used for discrimination consciously or not.
I agree with the cynicism about choosing based on school. But it does work to some extent. If everyone agrees that XYZ/ABC schools/companies are the best, then rationally students will try hard to get in to those schools. Therefore you can get most of the best by filtering for that history. Sucks if you didn't care about grades when younger but actually turned out smart, but most works.
That works for some cases, but not where a candidate's parents also went to the same school or where the parents can and do donate a lot to the school. At most of the schools we're discussing, both situations give the student a boost in admission and in passing classes regardless of effort.
(Disclosure: I went to a well-known school, but without either of the parental benefits I just described. My parents helped in other more indirect ways throughout my upbringing, but they didn't come from a wealthy or connected family background.)
Even assuming that there is some small enough set of great schools to use them for that signaling as Google traditionally did -- I do not think that's a rational assumption, but that's another discussion -- then at least in the USA you should also know the candidate's parents' financial situation and whether their parents went to the same elite schools.
For starters, because it's a lot easier to "get in" if you have no trouble paying for it, and you have your "legacy admissions."
If you really think XYZ is that great, you should really want to hire the people who fought to get in, fought to succeed, and did.
No suggestion, but an anecdote that illustrates a false negative like this.*
Stack Overflow's got an Azure SRE spot open, asking for experience with PowerShell DSC and Terraform, among others. The main goal for the role appears to be scaling their enterprise offering.
I've worked as both a sysadmin and a dev for years now, and used both to manage sizable deployments in public clouds, both Azure and others, mostly for enterprise software companies. This is a mildly specialized skillset (though getting less specialized by the day), and I figured I'd get at least a screening call.
I didn't even make it through the automated resume screening, and if I had to guess it's because I don't have a degree, much less a CS degree.
* On the off-chance my employer reads this, this was more of an exploratory application than me actively hunting for other opportunities.
I used to recruit for tech start ups and can confirm that school is just about always the most important thing to get you in the door, particularly early on in your career.
It's something that I fought against (I have a technical background and had the advantage of being able to evaluate technical skill somewhat independently), and did well because of it.
There were a few candidates that I brought in that I was reprimanded for - physically brought into our partners' office to be told off - only to have that candidate receive multiple job offers from our clients. The partners weren't qualified to really evaluate technical skill, but knew what candidate qualities that a start up is willing to pay a recruiter's fee for.
At the end of the day, my candidates were exceptional for having risen above their alma maters' reputations, and the Ivy league grads are more consistently good/qualified.
When hiring, time is such an important factor. Many engineering teams are unwilling to take the chance on an a candidate that graduated from unfamiliar school because their hiring process is weak and/or inefficient. Or they waited too long to hire, and need someone "yesterday". At least they're more likely to end up with a good candidate by using the school as the qualifier, even if it costs them more because of the candidate's demand.
TL;DR : The 'top' candidates' values are artificially inflated as a result of high demand, which itself is due to ill-conceived and insufficient hiring processes across most companies.
Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard wrote a fascinating book called "What Works" that you might find interesting. What I really like about the book is right from the jump Bohnet basically says all this "diversity training" and "PC culture" stuff is a waste of time and an uphill battle. We all like to pretend we're unbiased but Bohnet tells the truth from the outset: everyone has biases. The book focuses on systems that emphasize equal opportunity and remove some of those inherent biases we all have.[1] Bohnet's premise is that we'll get better results if we stop designing systems with the faulty assumption that most people/systems/institutions aren't biased in some way or another.
There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact.
One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us.
I know that as a result of diversity training and guidelines I am 10x as cautious about my behavior at work in front of women as with just men. That means there is a camaraderie that the men have that the women are left out of. When I worked on Wall Street this divide didn’t exist but there was definitely a culture of sexually hostile work environment and sexual hatrassment.
It's not being hostile, it's more than that. For example, if I invite my men co-workers to go swimming then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if I invite my women co-workers, then it could be interpreted in a bad way.
This is really interesting because I've worked on Wall Street as well and I know exactly what you mean but have never really been able to articulate the difference you've just pointed out. Working on Wall Street I had lots of male friends, not just colleagues. For the most part I felt included and was treated as competent. I also dealt with a fair amount of sexual harassment. Most of it was under the guise of joking/"locker room talk" that I just ignored. Sometimes, particularly from the older men, it was more physical and made me feel very uncomfortable.
The allegations against Google actually really caught me off guard because, in my experience, a lot of men in Silicon Valley seem like they're almost too... progressive (if that's the right word) to overtly harass their female peers the way men on Wall Street sometimes do. On the other hand I really struggle with inclusion in tech in a way that I never did in finance. I often feel dismissed by my tech colleagues. Both personally and professionally. Experiencing that sort of divide is much more difficult to explain and, to your point, much more difficult for me to navigate. Not to diminish women who have been sexually harassed at work, I'm one of them, but this silent divide takes a much bigger toll on me personally.
It’s simple - either people act however they want, or they watch their behavior. In the former they develop stronger bonds with each other. In the latter they are more respectful of each other.
As Prof. Bohnet herself points out, the HR dept. should do more A/B testing of its practices instead of relying on the gut feel.
Hence the gradual increase in the prevalence of "people analytics" (apart from allure of sucking in all the data-points you can).
But there are a few problems:
1. A/B testing in talent mgmt practices is costly in terms of time-investment.
- Final, long term impact of such experiments are not visible to the org for, well, a long while.
Sure, may be some short term impacts like increased diversity - may be visible in the short term.
But is that worth all the experimentation for all the firms except the largest ones like FANG?
The experiment cost is probably not worth the value for the smaller orgs.
2. Vetting people for skillsets and qualifications only, masking the personal details - like in the OP on Helsinki, is a good start.
But it does not address the biases on the historical disadvantages like not coming from a pedigreed organization because of not having been to a pedigreed school.
Think of being ranked lower in the applications to Netflix because you are not coming from Google because you didn't go to Stanford.
Blind -audition technique would be the best in situations like these as the focus would be on demonstrating the skill needed and not the "qualifications" (read - pedigree).
Such skill tests can probably be done easily for programming and other situations but a lot of roles do not have a strictly defined evaluation criteria as the KPIs are...well... fuzzy.
Or at least not something which can be demonstrated in a short "test".
Think sales / pro-management. You can not demonstrate in a test if you are a good enough sales person who can meet the revenue projections ("sell this pencil to me" doesn't count).
Issue here is lack of a easily reproducible and reliable signal for your future success for such roles, thereby increasing the dependency on past history - and by association, your pedigree.
Of course there will be other issues like isolating performance factors into "chance" and "skill" in a noisy dataset that is usually available, if at all.
Or hiring mindset which focuses on the required skillset (what is needed to get the job done) but the "best person" for the job which muddies the waters by adding evaluation factors which are really not material to performance on the job at hand.
But if the cost of experimentation can be reduced by devising quick tests for generating reliable signals independent from historical background, it would be awesome!
Recently was using coderpad, I believe, and after the session ended it had an advertisement for some similar scheme - a blind technical interview (with Uber, Lyft, or Facebook! it advertised) that, if you do well in, you can choose to "unmask." Was thinking about doing it, anybody else tried it? Probably would be disadvantageous to me - I generally pitch myself as a moderately skilled engineer with very good soft skills, as opposed to a tremendously skilled engineer straight up (maybe in a couple years...). Can't demonstrate soft skills anonymously.
I’d like to think I’m more skilled in soft skills than others but I always demonstrate that at the on-site interviews.
How do you market those skills on a resume?
Best I think I can do is certain descriptions for projects highlighting my role, as well as stick a little section at the bottom describing a personal experience and showing a bit of my personality and value system. Stuff like "Led hackathon team of 4 to develop a serverless app integrating several APIs." It's really quite tricky to show off your soft skills on your resume. I think the resume should be more to just get your foot in the door. If I can get on the phone, I'm usually good to go.
Based on your resume, I think you can present all of these skills anonymously as well.
Of course, there might some clear marks that will give away your gender and age, but that's up-to the interviewer to decide. All the things you have on your resume can be done by a woman or 20-year old as well as 60-year old.
So, I don't this would hurt you in any way and you can still demonstrate your soft skills.
> “A key challenge is that when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant,” the city’s resolution says.
What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".
Economist here. This will bake in bias that affirmative action and other programs seek to counter. Inequality of opportunity unfortunately isn't countered by this approach. Why? The same group(s) facing discrimination at the employment point also face discrimination earlier in life, or have baked in social discrimination (such as the US justice system overpenalizing blacks relative to whites/Asians, or Ivy League admission rates for Asians versus other groups).
It would be nice to build a group-blind world, and the more we adopt these specific approaches the better can can iterate towards. However, care should be taken to ensure the baked in biases don't further entrench.
I'm sorry, but this sounds absurd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying implies that employers should hire people that are less qualified for a job just because they belong to a group, members of which on average are more likely to be discriminated earlier in their lives than others?
Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases, because that's exactly the problem this approach solves - it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
My first paragraph I tried very carefully to avoid normative/"should" statements.
The identification of the issue is at hand. Consider Computer Science. Historically far fewer women go through the training for a variety of personal reasons and societal pressure. So, on the margin, blind/anonymous hiring ignores that upstream delta between females in population and skilled females in hiring pool. Whether this is desirable or not is not my point, only that this is "baked in bias" perpetuating down the line.
It's noble to build a society where we value blindness on characteristics irrelevant to hiring. Doing it piecemeal can result in furthering these baked in biases.
A better approach would be to split the skills validation (blind) from the move-forward decision (adhering to whatever inter-generational correction schema the society has decided upon) where the only pool of eligible move-forwards meet the established skills validation. In this way, you only get skilled candidates, and you can satisfy whatever other characteristics that need satisfaction.
We should all heavily invest in the pipeline problem through outreach and what not, but I'm genuinely curious: what happens if the underrepresented minorities don't make it past the blind skill validation?
That's a great question, and one I don't have a great and proper solution for. My splitting suggestion above I consider better than blind-only, but it certainly is not bullet-proof.
I ask because Github attempted this while organizing ElectronConf a year ago, but it turned out their blind submission review process[1] resulted in an all-male panel. Someone noticed and got upset[2], after which Github canned it. There was an HN discussion about it too[3].
Now we can speculate how many submissions were from people that don't identify as male (was it 50 or less%? Github hasn't released details to my knowledge). The issue though is that once the results (of what appears to be a fair process) didn't match the desired narrative, people screamed sexism and made mostly emotional arguments.
You've mentioned an "inter-generational correction schema" elsewhere in the thread. In most institutions, this essentially gets instated as quotas which embitters the majority in the system (including the people they target to enable because it's assumed they had to get past a "lower bar").
At what point do we decide that a difference in culture may make some careers more or less attractive to a group on average than a different population, and that that is OK?
What if it's a cultural difference that has negative effect on the population in question?
Do you respect the difference, or try to change things so that those in said population who would prosper under different outlooks can do so?
This is a serious question, and I genuinely don't have a good, general answer. I can see this line of thought being used to superficially validate any bias one cares to in a "that's just how things are" kind of manner, which helps no one.
But we also have to acknowledge that differences will lead to, well, differences. How do we differentiate between negative and neutral causality?
I think it's perfectly permissible for different cultures to value different careers; I believe the argument is that there shouldn't be any other imposed barriers (ex: due to discrimination) for them to re-calibrate their value system and have the option to pursue other things.
The way I see it is you're trying to solve this problem in the wrong place, just like you said, the real issue lies elsewhere and this is precisely where we should direct our efforts to fix it. If fewer women decide to pursue a technical career, then perhaps we should learn why and counteract. By implementing an artificial counter-bias you're merely hiding the real problem by obscuring the data, while the symptoms and root causes remain intact.
A counter-bias on the conditional step could indeed assure a correction.
Let's formalize it a bit, I think this helps clarify.
Let A be the hiring propensity, B be job preparation (education, experience, what have you), and C be the "blinding factors" Helsinki is trying to address.
As a model we would like the joint propensity for everyone to be normalized. In other words, P(A,B,C) would be about the same.
The joint propensity P(A,B,C) would be expressed as
P(A,B,C) = P(A | B,C) * P(B | C) * P(C) [0]
Helsinki is making the first term, P(A | B,C) independent of their "blinding factors", or, in other words, P(A | B,C) = P(A | B).[1]
The remaining terms P(B | C) and P(C) are unaffected. It is P(B|C) differential that many arguing for what I call non-autarky "social corrections" (we do something as a society).
Since Helsinki's decision affects _only_ the conditional probability P(A| B,C), the other factors are still at play, and P(A,B,C) remains at issue.
There is nothing that can be done by Helsinki's hiring department for P(B|C) in the short term -- people are dealt the hand they have, life isn't fair, and so on. Completely true.
By blinding themselves, they set P(A|B) to be flat on C and no "equalization" of P(A,B,C) can be observed.
A truly egalitarian society would have P(B|C) = P(B). However, we aren't there. C, what Helsinki blinds themselves to, matters for qualifying life experiences.
The model that is being argued for by you and others I believe is formalized as a conditional independence model, namely that the propensity of hiring is independent of race, conditional on life preparation:
P(A,C | B) = P(A|B) * P(C|B).[2] Note though: bias still persists: P(C|B) = P(B|C)*P(C)/P(B) -- we can't get away from that P(B|C) term in either model, and we know qualitatively that P(B|C) != P(B), hence why a correction can be positively argued for (rather than solely from emotion or duty).
Anyhow, that's the model in mind, and I'm open to being wrong/corrected. Thoughts?
--------------------
After thinking about it more, it seems that the ultimate goal of Helsinki is to make P(A|B,C) = P(A|B), not the latter model.
Thank you for formalising this, I get your point and I see what you're signalling, but I disagree with the solution you're proposing. Let me explain why. Firstly, I never said Helsinki's approach will completely solve the problem of inequality and you're right about that, nonetheless I perceive it as an improvement over the standard recruitment process. Your math makes sense, although I think the initial conditions are incorrect, because if I understand correctly your assumption is that the attributes hidden by the blinding factors would have had a positive impact on the "land a job interview or not" decision. On the other hand, I believe the opposite is far more likely, and this is precisely where we disagree. Also, I completely condemn the notion of attempting to fix the problem with affirmative action, primarily because it attempts to solve inequality(evil) with deliberate and explicit discrimination(greater evil). Don't forget that discrimination and prejudice is where it all started.
Edit: I should have been more precise when referring to blind hiring. I meant completely blind hiring, including the "on-site" interview stage(making it "blind" could be difficult). Obviously you're also correct about the earlier life experiences which could have been impacted by numerous factors, but my perception on that is the same as with law, it shouldn't be retroactive because you can't change people's past. Besides, each case is different and applying counter-biases here is like blind shooting.
>On the other hand, I believe the opposite is far more likely, and this is precisely where we disagree.
If I understand where you are coming from, "landing the job interview" are the direct factors Helsinki is choosing to be blind to, like name and so forth. Am I understanding that right? If so, let me clarify the point -- the factors that Helsinki _will_ judge resumes on -- experience and so forth -- are pre-conditioned on your name (etc.). So the fact that one makes the initial cut is still driven by the factors Helsinki chose to be blind to.
> Also, I completely condemn the notion of attempting to fix the problem with affirmative action, primarily because it attempts to solve inequality(evil) with deliberate and explicit discrimination(greater evil).
I get where you're coming from on this. The method I propose, if Helsinki uses the blinding methodology, is to impose any "corrective"/affirmative actions after the the blind evaluation of skills. That way every person is ensured to be qualified (avoiding the critique of "diversity hires"). One possible (and usually a default) "corrective" approach is autarky/doing nothing.
And... that's my whole point! I appreciate the discussion.
> Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases
Yes, it will: if you're born to a well-off family, you'll go to better schools before college. Due to this, you'll have a better chance at succeeding in college, have more resources to delve deeper into your field of study, better manage studying abroad, &c. All of these factors will make your list of skills more attractive to employers.
Compared to someone who was poor who went to worse schools, didn't study abroad, and couldn't afford to spend more time on their field of study due to having to work to pay for college. This will make your list of skills less attractive to an employer.
Right out of the gate, there is a bias against people who grew up poor in the hiring process.
> it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
It does so by devaluing repressed classes of people. This is a societal cost to benefit businesses.
The example you showed is absolutely wrong.
Based on it, the one from high class has more skills and more experience than the one from lower class. So of course, you will hire the one with more skills.
That has nothing to do with class but with the general expertise of an individual.
EDIT: I have missed the whole point of the parent comment.
> That has nothing to do with class but with the general expertise of an individual.
That expertise is a direct result of class. I feel like I've sufficiently explained how class-based biases will still slip through this system, so respond to it directly and tell me _how bias is not present_ in that system.
> Based on it, the one from high class has more skills and more experience than the one from lower class. So of course, you will hire the one with more skills.
I never said businesses ought do x, I just said that certain classes will be biased against in this attempt at a bias-less recruitment process which will produce negative outcomes for society.
This is how I mainly take it. A lot of comments about how this will make it "bias free!" and "nondiscriminatory" when really what it will do is give advantaged people even more advantage. Those who were not able to go to the better school and get more life experiences and obtain connections are going to be even further behind.
There seems to be this implied belief that there's a conspiracy in the West to hire white males above all. This simply isn't true. By having access to race and gender and even age in some cases it allows us to select for a diverse set of candidates. So although we may not (or we may!) end up with an outcome that is as diverse as the set we started with, we at least made the effort to give different people an equal opportunity.
If I'm only allowed to recruit based on the best credentials then those with a socioeconomic advantage will continue to.
You have no idea what someone's advantage in life is, and you're turning "diversity" into "diversity of race and gender" which is about nothing but immutable physical characteristics. Life is not constant. People move through various conditions all the time. Are you going to deny someone who grew up poor and then got a scholarship to Harvard?
Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting people use their abilities and become competent independently.
> Are you going to deny someone who grew up poor and then got a scholarship to Harvard?
This is the exception to the rule and not really relevant to anything I said I think? What about the kid who grew up poor and could have gotten into Harvard but didn't go because their parent was sick and couldn't afford care and they attended a local college to be home with them? This is more likely.
> Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting people use their abilities and become competent independently.
I agree - letting people use their abilities to advance themselves is best. If anything, I support blind screening of applicants. But I think the approach here has different intentions than what will very possibly occur - those with access continue to compound that.
There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer some kind of fair outcome. It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a faulty perception.
Right, which means we shouldn't cry when it turns out to be unfair as you are here.
> There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer some kind of fair outcome.
When have I even once said there should be "fair outcomes"? I don't believe in equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunities.
> It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a faulty perception
What is the "faulty perception"? I'm simply stating that if the goal is to have a diverse workforce then removing the heuristics we are told make us diverse from the recruiting process makes it difficult to achieve this goal. If I want to fill a position and my company has given us a goal of eventually having the ideal diverse workplace without sacrificing the quality of our people then I need tools to do this. I will use the, possibly arbitrary and political, heuristics they give me (age, gender, race, etc) and ask my recruiting staff to give me a group of 12 candidate for in-person interviews.
From these 12 there must be at least 1 attribute from each heuristic across the group. So maybe we say there are 3 races we optimize for, 3 age bands and 2 genders. This means that my set of 12 could have a black woman who is 41, for instance, and a white male who is 25, and an Asian male who is 55. This has all of these covered and the remaining 9 candidates can be any combination. But at least I have committed to creating an equal opportunity in the way the company and a large part of society see as "diverse". Even if I don't agree with it 100%.
Does this create far more bias when the goal is to create the ideal, diverse workforce? By systematically including certain biological features of people in the candidate pool are we at least ensuring we gave a diverse group of individuals an equal opportunity?
You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender, irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character. You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.
There is no "ideal diverse workforce". By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity. You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
> You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender
I didn't make the definition. The company leadership makes it based on internal feedback, advice and general societal beliefs in what "diversity" means.
> irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character
I agree - everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. However, it is difficult to judge someone's character alone from a CV.
> You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.
Every person I'd hire deserves to be hired. There are no bones thrown to fill a quota (which doesn't exist). However, to help achieve the goal of a "diverse workplace" a systemic method needs to be incorporated to ensure that a diverse set of candidates were given an opportunity to join the interview pool. With a large enough pool we can reasonably assure that every hire is hired on merit alone as they will be competing with other people that have different immutable physical characteristics. This also means if the hires tend to all look a certain way I can reference the systemic method used to ensure that in fact we actually removed bias from the selection process by ensuring certain attributes were included in the overall pool.
> There is no "ideal diverse workforce".
Ask 1000 people and you'll get 1000 answers.
> By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity.
No, you are creating a pool that is defensible in terms of who you end up hiring. No one is guaranteed a job because they are in the candidate pool. They will compete with their cohort on equal grounds.
> You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
See, this is where you're making a mistake. The specific heuristic across the group includes everyone. It doesn't say "not white males in their 20's" - in fact 9 out of 12 candidates could be just that so long as the other 3 candidates somehow cover every other enumeration of attributes. But with a large enough pool you can ensure that each characteristic the company determines is "diverse" is somehow included in the candidate pool without diluting it in terms of merit. This doesn't mean the outcome looks anything like the candidate pool.
> This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
Fair enough - I don't know your thoughts but it could be from the point of view you're looking at if from. To me, you sound like someone who thinks a systematic method of candidate pool selection sounds like exclusion of certain people. And it would be if we excluded certain candidates because they didn't possess an arbitrary diversity attribute. However, this process is inclusive because it demands that each enumeration of each diversity attribute be included at least once. And with a large enough candidate pool (this is key - you need to do the work here interviewing enough people) this means there are still very many seats for the dominate attribute enumeration - white guys that are youngish as it happens to be.
However, it would be an illegitimate candidate pool if there wasn't a white person in it, or a male in it, or a young person in it as well! That would be exclusionary.
This is a pragmatic approach to fulfilling a diversity goal (regardless of if my personal beliefs are different) while ensuring that there is no exclusion, that the quality of hires remains at the level desired and most importantly that nobody who is hired or anyone they work with has...
Regardless of who made the definition, that's the definition you're following.
We're going in circles here as long as you fundamentally believe diversity of physical and biological details is important. If that's what you want to enforce in your workforce, even though it is meaningless to the job, then you're designing for an outcome, and not opportunity. Inclusive does not exist in a vacuum; to include some means to exclude others.
Not the parent commenter, but for what it's worth, I appreciate you taking the time to write your responses in this thread. I am honestly baffled (and a little alarmed) that more people don't understand the points you are making.
Disagree I'm fine with- hashing things out together is how we all move forward. What concerns me is how quickly a full moral judgement appears to have been passed on what is a sticky, thorny issue.
> What concerns me is how quickly a full moral judgement appears to have been passed on what is a sticky, thorny issue.
I think this is quite valid. Especially from the progressive side I guess I'd say, there's a certain moral altruism that has no regard for other ideas or even the questioning of certain ideas and ideals. And to me, a lot of it is certainly a feeling of moral superiority that self legitimizes certain values from the authority of a middle and upper middle class socioeconomic position with complete disregard for the working and lower classes. The classes which served the progressive side so well until they became inconvenient.
My points are only trying to find a balance such that we can still live in a world with merit; where we can compromise a bit by ensuring there is a measurable opportunity available but yet the outcome is up to the individual.
To be frank, my dissenters here are people I probably agree with more from an idealist vantage. But I also understand that when working in a larger social system we need to be considerate of other points of view and to create systems that the reasonable people on "both sides" can live with. It's when we play to the unreasonable that extremism gains foothold.
I think your first paragraph in particular really nails one of the big problems of the modern left in the US. If you haven't, yet, I recommend reading I Can Tolerate Anything but the Outgroup:
It raises, I think, some very interesting points. Not so much in the way you may agree with it or not, but in terms of how to frame the problem itself.
From my perspective what makes sense is we have large groups of people that believe diversity as defined by certain attributes is important. We also have large groups of people that don't. And both groups have some good and some poor reasons for their beliefs. Both "sides" are legit. So how do we reconcile this?
To me, the most agreeable aspect of each side is that:
1) We live in a diverse society whether we like it or not, which has a history of certain exclusion and we should try and improve on that to make all of our lives more peaceful.
2) Not everyone has an advantage or disadvantage because of certain immutable attributes and we should be conscious of this as well. Social engineering is less engineering than politics.
The idealist approach is to optimize one way or the other; mainly for political reasons which results in resentment and bitterness. The pragmatic approach is to try and create a system that is defensible one way or another - even if it is flawed in both regards. The perfect system is impossible anyhow and a matter of opinion.
So, you design a system that takes into account both points above. You ensure you interview across certain enumerative attributes generally agreed upon as important. But you don't optimize across it as it can turn into an exclusionary system in its own right with awful side effects such as legit resentment, meritless and simply political. You don't exclude any of the apparent important diversity attributes - they all are important. You also create a reasonable metric around what this means. This ensures you, in some way, have at least given the opportunity to a vast range of of people. It doesn't mean you've given an outcome to anyone.
The trick becomes in keeping it honest - that you don't assume that a certain set of attributes is more important than another. Where a lot of similar systems get it wrong is they define that a certain subset of attributes must be included. They should demand that over the entire pool all attributes must be included. And only to a limit and after that it's fair game.
I'm only saying that we should at least try and ensure we speak with everyone in terms of various individual attributes that are generally accepted, albeit arbitrary, when opening an opportunity. And that's it. What is alarming about this? How is this not pragmatic? Who is this stealing from? How is this bad for anyone?
I've repeated it several times. Your presented idea of diversity is about physical characteristics. Things we cannot change and yet define us forever. Diversity defined by how you look is not diversity that matters in any sense, and people who believe it does (which is a loud minority) are either ignorant or willingly malicious.
Inclusion and exclusion are two sides of the same thing. If you forcefully include group X, then you are by definition excluding group Y as a reaction. Therefore, the only truly fair design is to not preference anyone by any physical attribute, and in this case only judge for positions based on competence and merit.
First, and most importantly, thank you for the friendly reply.
Regarding your questions, I can't think of a clearer explanation that the comment that I initially replied to. Fundamentally, the core argument is that the moment you start using immutable characteristics as part of your heuristic, you've already lost- there will be resentment, because now, by definition, you've given something to someone that they did nothing to earn, and that position is coming from someone else.
That these exact things happened in the past, and happen now, doesn't mean that reversing the arrow makes things better- it just breeds a new generation of the same thing.
In terms of how do we move forward as a society, and speaking strictly as just my own opinion: we need to focus on what our commonalities are, not our differences, and go from there.
I had the great luck of growing up as the child of a diplomat, and thus getting to see a much wider variety of countries and ways of life than most people do. One of the most important lessons I took from the experience is that people are far more alike than different, even in areas that have had little previous cultural exchange. It takes some time to find out how to translate across different givens, but once you understand the shared local model of how things work, people's decisions make sense.
The catch is that if you don't agree with some of the base assumptions, then some decisions will seem utterly abhorrent, and the same is true in reverse. Some are mutually exclusive, in that there is no such thing as a middle ground. That is the problem of diversity, and it is a very real one.
So, moving forward- these schisms exist because the world used to be far more closed off from itself than it is today. I'm only in my mid-40's, and yet when I was a child, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip. Now I can hop on any of a dozen free webcams if I felt so inclined and look at who is walking down the street where I used to live. All we can do is start talking to those now so close, find out what we can agree on, and try to forge something we can all live with.
(I realize this is a bit further afield than the original subject of applying for jobs, but I think a friendly reply deserves an honest answer.)
> really what it will do is give advantaged people even more advantage.
Small quibble: it will persist the existing advantage through the offer stage. Then income differentials could/would apply. The blind approach is not a guaranteed proximate cause towards increasing bias, but rather an entrenchment of existing bias.
But, agree that amplification begins shortly after point of offer.
Obviously. That's the entire point of hiring, as a business owner I want to hire the candidate that will deliver the best results. There is no doubt that certain people are privileged early in their lives, that's how it has always been, is and will be. The world is not a utopia where everyone is wealthy, healthy and equal, people in China are politically oppressed, children all over the world are starving and Russia gradually invades Ukraine leading to another all-out war. Doing worse in a job interview doesn't mean you were discriminated, it means that you need to revise the material and reapply.
Your comments do a good job of articulating the emotional arguments people use to support affirmative action. But the problem with affirmative action is that it seeks to counter bias by introducing more bias. It's a form of damage control in that it ignores the root causes of the problems it tries to address.
You argue that removing identifying marks unfairly tips the balance toward those who will be better prepared for the job (i.e. those who did not grow up poor). But assuming a particular test is the best measure of one's on-the-job performance, how can changing that test for some (based on things that identify them as "repressed") create any societal good? You're only pushing the problem out in front of you, and you'll eventually meet it again, but in a different form.
The problem is that people grow up poor, and that poverty creates severe disadvantage. Let's fix that problem at the source (there are a lot of NPOs that try to do this - free after-school programs, etc.) and keep hiring standards constant and unbiased.
Poverty can't be solved by changing admissions and hiring standards to avoid rejecting poor-performing people who grew up poor. That approach only creates new problems.
> Your comments do a good job of articulating the emotional arguments people use to support affirmative action.
This is unfair: I never said anything about affirmative action, made normative claims, or appealed to emotion. I stated why this test would still have bias towards poorer classes.
The narrative I was concerned with pointing out was that class characteristics could be biased in similar ways to physical characteristics and that mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.
By emotional argument I meant an argument whose strength lies in its effect on emotions, as opposed to its rational strength. Perhaps that's a weasel term. But I tried to back up my assertion that introducing bias can't remove bias.
> mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.
If by "bias for class characteristics" you mean "objective standards", I call that nonsense. By definition, an objective standard will cease to be objective once a subjective-based alteration is introduced.
If an objective standard happens to favor one class over another, it's not the standard's problem. The problem lies in whatever caused that class to do worse.
Yeah, I don't get that approach either. Is the parent comment suggesting that employers need to assess the opportunities given to a particular applicant and then weight them accordingly? Like if they come from a poor/disadvantaged background and still have 90% the skills and experience of another candidate, well that's more impressive? How does the parent expect an interviewer to come up with these valuations of opportunity?
"Like if they come from a poor/disadvantaged background and still have 90% the skills and experience of another candidate, well that's more impressive" - Potentially, yes.
Correct. However, the problem is the existing discrimination is not remedied, and is instead perpetuated, under a fully blind approach.
Inequality is another discussion than bias and discrimination, in my view. Inequality is solved by implementing encouraging measures. Discrimination is resolved by removing entrenched barriers.
Explain how inequality of opportunity is not countered by this approach?
Of course people are a sum of everything that happened in their life, but this is a way to make a particular job application much more fair, based on capability to do the job rather than irrelevant physical details. This is not meant to solve everything at once.
The very examples you post are about situations that would be helped if there was blind judgement.
Yes, it would be much better if we are able to remove discrimination earlier in life.
But this is not a either/or solution between affirmative action and equal opportunity.
But if the assumption that positive reinforcement make a better just society for future generation then doesn't it mean equal opportunity will make also have the same positive effect albeit a little less ?
I think what the GP is stating is that if we only assess accomplishments and we do it at this stage (later in life after many different phases) those systematically disadvantaged will not be competitive (example: If you went to a crummy public school you have a harder time getting into an ivy league, harder time getting a prestige internship, getting a premium job, etc)
Affirmative action laws were introduced to address this, but the trend toward meritocracy counters them.
My guess; we end up with the worst of both worlds: One stream blind to these factors and a bunch of regulated exceptions.
It is being pointed out, but it's not solely pointing out the symptom.
The goal of Helsinki here is to make the hiring decision independent of direct factors they blind themselves to (name, sex, etc.). However, the factors they condition on (education, experience) are impacted by these factors, so the hiring decision won't be independent of the factors.
The "best" thing to do is to correct the inherent bias, as you're pointing out as the real problem. We agree. This isn't something Helsinki can do in a vacuum, so if they want to achieve their goal of true "blindness" to the above factors, they have to take into account their impact on their "seen" factors somehow.
I put the formalized model I have in mind in another comment on this thread, which walks through my thought process here.[0]
> the name, date of birth, address, mother’s tongue, gender and any other personal information [are] not included
[...]
> when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant
So they base their assessment of know-how and capabilities on age, gender, mother's tongue, and other personal information that has been hidden? I feel like I must reading this wrong.
I don't think you are reading that wrong. People use all sort of pseudo science to make inferences on people's competencies. Like if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent. Or when hiring for a leadership position an older candidate may be subconsciously preferred over a younger one with more experience. It's all generally bunk and this is imo, an admission that they have been using the wrong criteria to judge candidates.
See also: If your mother's tongue isn't also the local native/dominant language, you must be an immigrant, which may be positive or negative depending on the circumstance.
> if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent
In my experience it's the opposite. Like with small countries: the odds they produce someone extremely good at a certain sport is just smaller than in large countries, so large countries are more likely to win some world cup or the Olympics. I know only a handful of women in IT to begin with, but most of them aren't great at it.
But that's not your point. You're saying that there are biases in hiring, and I agree. What I'm surprised by is that the article quotes them saying that they now find it very hard to judge someone. Who would say, alongside a press release about anonymous applications, that they find it difficult to base their judgement solely on only relevant information?
No, GP is essentially saying: It's clear one accomplishes more in a smaller amount of time. That's far different from all else being equal. Granted, using age has less value than using time-in-field, but they are often proportional. Also, granted, you could argue that amount accomplished is a poor metric to use, especially when joined with speed.
Maybe the older candidate only recently started to do the work. And this just the first thing the young person did?
I always get weird when people make a big deal about things people do at some young age. Most of the time the age is not important for the things we praise young people for doing. Most of the time it was just something their parents pushed them into to doing that any of many kids could have done had they just had the right parents.
I don’t really see how you can hide (a rough idea of) age in an anonymous cv though. I’m guessing you still have the dates in front of the diplomas and previous jobs, or at the very least how long was spent at each previous job. It stands to reason that someone boasting 10+ years of experience is at least 30, and probably around 35.
Affirmative action could be made compatible with anonymous recruiting. Set up a point system. After all the subjective points are set in stone, unmask the applicant and apply any modifiers.
So the worst of both worlds? You're trying to both eliminate irrelevant bias and emphasize it. Your result will be "we hire the least white, white males"
The problem is you think you can judge who is repressed, usually based on group identity, but that never ends well.
Life isn't fair, some will be rich. Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. People move between classes all the time, and in the US you'll see many people going in both directions.
"Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied."
The concept of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools alone.
It turns out that we can, in fact, make general statements about large populations.
> Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual.
Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
It seems you just proved my point. Wouldn't it be great if we could finally remove demographic physical characteristics from judgement so these biases from race and legacy are gone?
>> Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
> Wouldn't it be great if we could finally remove demographic physical characteristics from judgement so these biases from race and legacy are gone?
Why do you think that the biases from both race and legacy aren't still there whenever an applicant is effectively just a number tied to a varying skill set?
It's rather disappointing and yet enlightening that you choose to attack character instead of engaging in the discussion. It's certainly not evidence that you are somehow more "equipped" to have this conversation.
Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, refrain from flamewars, and don't do this again, regardless of how wrong someone else is.
The blind vetting process removes it in the conditional. In that: conditional on having requisite experience and education, you pass a bar.
It does nothing to the joint distribution, in that the conditional distribution ignores that systemic bias has already been applied, this full independence at that point perpetuates the accumulated, extant bias.
As first stated, it's not about solving the entirety of your life but about removing that obstacle in that certain situation.
You mention an iterative process and yet are seemingly against even the 1st step. Bias is not a one-time thing. It's not just applied and then you live with it forever. Life is a constant stream of dynamic decisions and improving opportunity in one scenario is a positive step forward to improving it elsewhere, and perhaps even countering any earlier biased treatments.
So, "social correction" items mentioned earlier could include autarky, where no change gets implemented. This is the system you've argued for across multiple comments. If society agrees, why not.
I am for a bit of redistribution, myself, but the positive claim made about perpetuation of bias is simply a systemic fact. Blinding means that, conditional on prior experience and work, your likelihood of landing the job should be constant. That means prior bias gets perpetuated (is built into the factors that generate prior experience and work).
I never said "autarky" and I'm not sure where you came to that interpretation across comments. I'm for making hiring practices blind, and making similar progress for equality of opportunity across society.
Can you please tell me how that comment does so? Is it the use of the word "you" in the first sentence? If so it was meant as generic pronoun, but I guess that can be misunderstood.
I was referring to the entire subthread, in which you posted several flamewar comments. You did it elsewhere too. Please don't—it's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN, as you surely know.
The GP comment wasn't so bad, but the problem is that generic comments about ideological topics usually lead to flamewars.
If employers are looking for a radical utopian reform, I'd rather see them do away with the interview. Interviews slant hiring toward personal charm, and toward the cultural uniformity of the workplace, at the expense of competence.
Which is both the objective and a net positive for the workplace.
I get that everyone who's bad at interviews want to do away with them. But you could likely find charming individuals who want to do away with technical requirements because they feel their great personality is more important than what their gradepoint average was. Neither of those groups are right to discard the "other side" of the equation.
You need both, and hiring blindly based strictly for technical competence will have you feeling like you're managing a daycare center. Trust me, the interview is not a problem.
Interviews are valuable. Being able to communicate effectively about your work, especially to a stranger, is competence. Going off of pure resume and cover letter fluff, lots of candidates can clearly do the job, but only in the interview do you see if a candidate can confidently leverage their experiences to solve new problems.
If you want an interview to favor a higher level of competence, do away with the hiring managers. Have candidates interviewed by their equally titled peers, or members of the group the candidate would be working most closely with. People who not only have a technical background, but an understanding of how the specific job actually works day to day.
What if you replace age with "experience?" A candidate who has been working for 10 years as a software engineer but is worse at it than a candidate who has been working for 2 years is a worse candidate, if you're looking to hire someone who can grow. However, I don't think it should matter at what age those candidates' years of experience started.
Is it impressive that a 22 year old has 6 years of professional experience? Yes, certainly. Does it mean that they'll be better than a 40 year old with 6 years of equivalent experience? It's possible, but I suspect it'd be a weak signal at best.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
The people who reviewed and approved the designs for our office space were all males. Guess what they forgot to put in the women's restrooms? When women complained, they put an open trash can next to the toilet with no lid...
The problem with the whole conversation around this topic is everyone pretending that women and men on average have the same level of skills and experience as each other. Then they act shocked when there are so few qualified male nurses or female mechanics.
Businesses only care about this topic, because it helps them design products and provide services that address a wider market. So, maybe they should just admit they don't always hire the absolute technically best candidate as the goal is to improve the social structure of the team.
Following through on their source [1], it says that the study outcome actually favors women and minority candidates, but it doesn't say how much, or talk about statistical signifance. It seems like the experiment design has been criticized on this one study too, and not releasing the results seems suspect.
The study also cites that blind auditions were a success for Orchestras [2]:
>In a well-known study analysing data on auditions and hiring by orchestras over this period, Goldin & Rouse (2000) found that the use of blind auditions had a major impact on gender bias in orchestras, increasing the likelihood of female musicians being selected by 25-40%.
[1] http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-...
[2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715
http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/p...
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And if it's not true, arguably what you've done is removed the adjustment variables that could correct the bias, rather than the bias itself.
At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias.
Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?
>> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
Seems like it did the job of removing existing bias when details were blind.
Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases.
I say this as someone who won the "game" on every count with this. Near-perfect SAT score, perfect high school performance, 100% acceptance rate into the Ivies (Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Cornell).
These say nothing about me other than my parenting, background and ability to win games that other people made up. Any intelligence or ability or skill or discipline that I have is in spite of those things, not because of them.
A common game bosses make up: "impress me with growth in this KPI by next quarter"
Rather than proving it is laughable, you are instead giving the exact reason why (under a certain value system) it makes lots of sense to select for this ability.
Going more meta, starting a median VC-backed company in the Valley is largely playing the same kind of game as in elite private schools and colleges - observing a social scene, identifying powerful players and the ladder to reach them, meticulously performing the necessary social roles in order to achieve funding, cargo cult management styles from the group.
Bias will exist regardless of which information you present, the most you can hope for is shifting and limiting the types of bias that come into play to eliminate useless or harmful bias. Even if you grant anonymity to the applicant, recruiters can still be biased against or in favor of the school somebody went to, what they studied, the organizations they were involved in, etc.
I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
Adhere hiring decisions to defined generational imbalance correction mechanisms (in the US, "affirmative action"/EEOC/similar state laws).
The goal of these bindings are to remove inherent bias. Some of that is bred into the intercept defined by unchangeable characteristics. Others by the vector field of rewards return for effort, often defined by thar initial condition. The goal with most of these (apparently feared? do I have your emotion right?) corrections is to offset at least the most damning of these.
Perhaps what's most insidious about ascribing group victimhood is that you must also accept the converse, which is group responsibility. Are you suddenly going to be held responsible for any wrongs that your group has ever committed? Are you truly certain that's what you want?
You are ignoring that life is not fair, and never will be. We cannot control the bodies and circumstances we are born into. But every individual has the ability to make the most of their opportunity and achieve their goals, and quite a few in history have proven that they are able to accomplish far more by effort and will than any natural advantage otherwise. That is the best we can do, and unless you create some matrix world where we are all exactly equivalent clones of the same capacity, that is all that is possible.
It is important to note that the unfairness you describe doesn't affect the positive (non-normative) observations of bias-preservation that the blind hiring approach persists.
Now, pivoting to moral claims along the lines of your comment:
Discrimination has a long history, of which slavery, carting to reservations, redlining,and so forth favored certain groups consistently above others, in the past and in the present. In my view, repairing at least the present entrenched bias by any name is in order, the question is to what level. Autarky is a feasible outcome, if desired, which is to do nothing. The diffusion of favored and privileged status will always feel like discrimination to the group that had favored status. There is still a moral imperative to at least correct current entrenched bias, which in the US can show up in incarceration rates, ability to invest, etc.etc.
Unless you feel these groups that are historically and currently biased against are somehow responsible for their own situations? If that is the case, autarky or favoring your personal situation has a basis to build on. However, I fail to see how various denigrated groups through time brought their current biased outcomes. You've been shown evidence by other commentators that in the US blacks receive longer sentences than whites. Is that just how it is, or do we have as a society a moral imperative to fix at least the current system, let alone offer historical reparations?
Anyways, you didn't answer why people must be considered as groups instead of individuals? That seems to be the only lens you consider people, while also only choosing the group identity of the most perceived victimhood over an arbitrary time frame. And again, if you want to say that someone takes on the wrongs experienced by a group, then they must also take responsibility for the wrongs committed by the group. So in your example about US blacks, that group also commits the majority of crimes so they must acknowledge and resolve that too. Are you prepared to say that?
You're changing the argument into something about morality but the reality is that there is no cosmic justice. You can be born with missing limbs, or to a destitute family, or inside North Korea. The best we can do is make sure that if you work hard (and yes, harder than others who might be born to a billionaire US family) that you get the same exact chance to gain a position because you are actually competent and qualified for it, and what you look like and what some group in the past has done has absolutely nothing to do with that.
The question is whether the school is offering a harmful bias -- people get screened by school, GPA, etc all the time but at the point that society agrees these are harmful then you can just anonymize them out. It gets murkier on the moral/ethical side but I think that's the nature of the problem, not a problem with the solution.
Anecdotally, I've been on the recruiting end of "anonimized" CVs pushed by outsourcing companies. I was never fully clear on whether this was a legal requirements for them, or if it was a gesture to show inclusiveness and social responsibility on their part (take this with a pinch of salt, most outsourcing companies in France are little better than horse-dealers and will push any warm body your way if they think they can turn a profit). At any rate, most of these were hilariously badly done: using initials for the last name but leaving the first name in full, leaving telling initials (1), or other subtle or less subtle ways to hint at the contractor's origin and gender.
(1) e.g. a first name initialed J.L., J.M. or some other variation points to a Jean-something (Jean-Louis, Jean-Michel, etc.) composite first name, which is a clear indication of a "native" Frenchman (and a hint as to the person's age as well)
It's still unclear whether the problem was with the implementation (the experiment) or the method.
If there's spooky action/unintuitive reality at play here it's the job of a good scientific study to pull it out and lay it bare.
Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to beat the BBC with.
If I write on my application that I have 25 years of experience, does that have to be excluded due to it revealing that my date of birth is likely more than 40 years ago? Can they really believe that the amount of experience isn't important?
Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates.
Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience that doesn't match today's buzzwords.
Does my outlook not resonate with you/other older employees?
The cover letter seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I find a couple paragraphs of prose far more revealing about a person's abilities than a resume. Of course it's also more work to craft one for every position you're interested in, and doesn't help much if you're looking to put yourself into a database for recruiters (e.g. LinkedIn or any other job site), where they force you to iterate your experience in chronological order and list technologies with no context.
I think it's important to leave off things you're not interested in. I did Perl for years but there is no amount of money that would get me to do it again, so I minimize or eliminate its presence on my resume, and put extra emphasis on the technologies I want to work with now.
"The City of Helsinki is Finland’s biggest employer with around 38,000 employees."
Is this common for governmental organizations to be such large employers? Even in Europe, this is surprising to me.
http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/
38,000 for a capital city in a country with real health care, public schools and developed public services is not that much.
(1) https://www.portlandoregon.gov/oehr/article/595121
Then there is the city in Germany which controls a bunch of public companies - starting with Zepplins. My understanding is that their wealth, jobs, and social programs are all essentially controlled by the local government using company profits (I don't know if the VW emission problems have changed that.)
Then more specific to Helsinki: city of Helsinki is notorious for inefficiency and shitloads of publicly funded feelgood projects. I've seen it from inside and the handouts that fund weird little art projects and museums that can't attract customers.. Shitshow.
Still there is relatively large amount of tax payers and relatively low municipal tax. Only because the comparison is municipalities where majority of the population is pensioners.
When they come in for an in-person interview racial/gender/age/whatever bias is still going to be there.
Only way to prevent this would be to forbid in-person interviews before hiring/signing a conract, but then companies would presumably simply stop hiring from applications, because the qualifications are unreliable and they can't get a character impression of the applicant.
Hiring by reference from existing employees would become the norm (maybe it already is).
Also, I relate this to culture. Not to offend anyone, but from my personal experience lying in CV is much more common for some countries, that for others.
Scale maybe terrible, like multiple certifications in some field with no actual basic knowledge or skills. Like Certified Senior (sic!) Software Developer who can't tell you difference between stack and queue, or CCIE certified network engineer who has no idea what is DNS and how it works (real case).
If both the application and the work is completely remote and anonymous it might be possible to avoid most bias, but that's only feasible in IT and a couple other sectors and even there it's not common.
It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget.
Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping.
So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability (whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst.
This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of "bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.
It's a lack of privacy that sounds Orwellian to me.
I disagree with the whole premise that supports the first post; reducing someone to a short list of standard data points like age is the dehumanising action. It's exactly what is done when we wish to treat people as statistics.
Leaving them off is accepting that people's humanity can't be reduced to them.
Personally, back when I was in positions that participated in hiring, I didn't give a damn about a person's name, gender, race, skin color, sexuality, gender identity, age, personal hobbies, political persuasion, religion, food preferences or any other characteristic that wasn't directly related to: Can this person do the job we're hiring them to.
If we needed further consideration to distinguish between equally competent candidates, then we'd look at how motivated they are to grow, aka contribute in other areas. Not because we wanted younger people with longer (cynically: cheaper) career paths, but because the needs of companies change over time, and a flexible outlook means they might keep pace with change, and that's something anyone can do.
Precisely. It's hard enough to find qualified people as it is, without disqualifying them for characteristics that don't even impact ability.
However, I pretty strongly disagree. When evaluating a resume, there's no legitimate reason to consider the name, age, address, or gender of a candidate. Contrariwise, there are significant problems with people considering that information anyway. Therefore, it seems like that information shouldn't be present.
You say "does it really seem healthy to ignore value of cross-generational achievements," but that's the same thing as saying "throw out the resumes of any young people who apply, we already have enough of them."
Now, if you're fine with the plan of explicitly deciding to hire only a man/woman/old/young/person-from-the-right-neighborhood/school, that's a different discussion, which I won't get into here, but if you're going to do that, it should at the least be done very intentionally and not in some sort of informal "eh, guessing based on their name, this is the wrong sort of candidate" way.
The idea behind this line of thought is that equality matters only if you don't have enough, but communist society will provide so much surplus that envy simply disappears, and equality withers. It is interesting to ponder the correctness of this line of thought, e.g. do the slim in the rich world envy the obese, despite the latter consuming more food? Traces of this argument go back to Aristotle.
Marx & Engels erred in that they assumed capitalist modes of production cannot produce vast amounts of surplus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
It's difficult sometimes to shake off the feeling that some status competition is sexual competition that dare not speak its name.
Unmentioned is the judgment that you don't need that, I don't need this, buy they do need that other thing. I'm being overly generic, but what counts as a need and what needs are fulfilled is still a political issue of discrimination in communism. Do you need shelter if the weather isn't lethal? Do you need food that is anything above the bare minimum to survive? Do you need emotional support? All needs are equal, but some are more equal than others.
What exactly does this mean? Giving someone credit for their ancestors' achievements sounds like nepotism
True, but we also punish groups for the actions of their ancestors as well as credit them.
Which is particularly ironic considering that most of these schemes are proposed to fight _against_ meritocracy.
What is wrong with meritocracy? Isn't it a system where your talent, effort and achievement are meaningful, and attributes like race, gender, wealth, sexual orientation etc. are irrelevant to your success? Isn't a meritocracy a platform that is equal to all?
Has someone redefined the terminology somehow?
I mean, I've always thought a meritocracy is a good thing. It does not matter "what" you are, it matters how good you are in what you do. And if you are not good at something, it is not due to your sex or race etc.
The thing is, if you decide that Applicant #42 is a good candidate, you're going to bring them in anyway. If you have a ton of biases, you still have just as much of an opportunity to enact them as you would have before, though you might have to be a bit more subtle. This doesn't solve the problem; it's a patch on top of it designed to feel good while accomplishing nothing.
> Does it really seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments
If by this you're referring to the heritability of traits, yes, it's a shame that things that are statistically and demographically visible have to be erased in the attempt to flatten everything.
> somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans
I don't know if this is the ultimate goal; my instinct is that this is the projected goal, because it is at least somewhat defensible philosophically even if I dislike it. The actual behind-the-scenes goal might be as simple as reducing people to more-manageable consumers that cause less trouble and more reliably produce the quarterly numbers we need.
We're working to remove barriers that create inequality, such as discrimination by gender/race/creed etc. And I don't buy crocodile tears for the (generally white/male/older) people currently propped up by the status quo.
I do share your concern, however, that any policy can have ulterior motives. I see that more coming from knee-jerk and nanny state policies crafted by the far right today (that used to supposedly be a province of the far left). See: the military industrial complex growth in response to 9/11, the prison industrial complex growth in response to the war on drugs, etc.
Some UK examples..
No longer does anyone bother getting letters from past employers as references, since none of the information in the reference can be verified as true or false employers cannot legally form a judgement based on this. Consequently all an employer is allowed to say is 'yes, they worked here, regards, x'.
Another example, every candidate at interview must be asked the same 'opening' questions, otherwise a failed candidate could bring legal action because they were not given the same opportunity as other interviewees. Candidates are also legally allowed to ask to see interviewer's notes (even during the interview) so interviewers should not be writing anything besides 'scores' for interviewee competancies, unless they want to get into legal trouble.
I think you're trying to say, "having an advantage due to your birth or family." You're really suggesting that someone's name, address, and gender should be part of the resume evaluation process? Your whole position seems like a thinly veiled endorsement of racism, sexism, and conferring advantages based on your family's accomplishments.
That aside, I'm less cynical about this than either you or the parent commenter. While I wouldn't want my professional skill set to be my sole defining characteristic as a person, I'm perfectly content to let it define me as an employee, keeping in mind that attributes like ambition, creativity, and passion are components of that skill set. But I acknowledge that this may be the start of a slippery slope, and you may be right to say that I underestimate that risk because I haven't lived in a Communist state.
As for why I see things the way I do, all I'll add is that if things do go the way that all other characteristics are stripped away, leaving nothing but one's professional skill set... Ok. Who decides what qualifies for what box? You should keep a very close eye on who the final arbiters are that get to decide what, exactly, a professional skill set is, and what checks and balances are in place to prevent them from abusing their position.
You may find that suddenly characteristics that you thought had nothing to do with one's profession are added or removed as is convenient for the power structure at large, or that capabilities that you would consider core to the job at hand no longer considered worthy due to opaque political decisions. Again, I'd love to be wrong about this. We'll see, I suppose.
There is no compounding value of cross-generational achievements. You are not your ancestors. You are not responsible for anything they did, good or bad.
Yes, I want a world where your "humanity means nothing" in that I don't judge a prospective hire based on who their parents are.
That's not even the point though, personal information is disclosed in the job interview. I certainly hope I don't see anyone listing their ancestors' accomplishments on a resume.
What are you suggesting we judge a resume on if not merits? Should we be declining people for being the wrong race or having names we don't like instead?
Edit: Changed "replied to" to "originally replied to".
Since we've moved into philosophy, why is it important that everyone be treated this indiscriminately? Veil of ignorance? Couldn't it be valid to protect the community from the risk that the bad behavior is heritable (genetically or socially)?
> it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
I feel you're making my point for me.
As for human bias, I don't sue how it eliminates the bias. I don't even get why biases makes us human. Ultimately you are hiring humans and statistically like to hire diverse set of humans.
Unfortunately parents response simply comes as rant with some intelligent sounding words rather than any thoughtful objections to the OP.
I would only be concerned about this if I lacked merits.
An ideal worker in my mind has many human qualities that make them enjoyable and inspiring to be around. They make other employees happier to come to work and help them be more effective at work.
Granted, it's a lot easier to measure that Tom produces 15% more widgets per hour than it is to tell that Cindy's presence increased the entire factory's output by 5%. But still, the latter provides more value to a company so I expect improvements in evaluating that.
Why do you think we should continue to include those physical characteristics, especially if they have nothing to do with the actual job?
I think I agree with your post except for this part. What did you mean by that? Are you talking about a person’s pedigree?
But for this fragment that makes it obvious, this post is a masterpiece of hiding its racism and sexism behind a veil of words the author knows HN will like. It’s almost impressive, in a way.
Depends if you are helped or hurt by this view. There are people who are discriminated due to no fault of their own over factors they cannot control. And not every bias is called out or even something we are socially cognizant of. If one previously benefited from this it can be worrisome but for others this will be a boon.
>simply strip humans of their humanity
What is humanity? Not in ideal, in actuality? Do beautiful people have more humanity than ugly people? The Hale Effect says that they do. When called out on it we will say that is not the case, but in our every day actions that is how we work. Mechanized equalization will be a benefit for those who have already been assigned as having less humanity for no fault of their own.
If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no?
Not really. Imagine three candidates: A, B and C. A is much better as professional, but B is good enough and has much better CV, C is trash but with great CV. If you interview B and C, you will hire B and never call A. Not optimal. If B is not good enough, you will hire A, but also waste time. If I know that B or C is from culture where lie is more common I will adjust my expectations and call A and B or C, but A will be included.
Actually I believe that some statistically proven bias is healthy thing. I conducted many interviews and I can say the following: 1) People tend to lie in CV in very specific patterns. By just reading CV, even with name and age hidden I can guess sex and age relatively easy. Not 100%, but much better than 50%. 2) Everybody lies (c) House M.D. Really, everyone. But different people lie differently, because different things are important to them and they want to look better at different things. I simply saw that many times. By knowing personal details I may adjust what I see in CV to get much more realistic picture. This is bias, yes, it is. But what can I do? Ask them not to lie? Real life does not work like that. 3) I will not, for instance, hire someone of significantly different hygiene standards. Has nothing to do with CV.
Here's the cognitive dissonance of it all. How can we achieve the goal of a "diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender, race, age, etc) when we can't select a candidate pool with these things taken into consideration? Will this have a net negative effect on at least creating an equal opportunity?
I'm not saying I'm for or against this blind screening. But I am skeptical it will work as intended. If anything, those with the most advantage due to their socioeconomic status from birth will simply advance in the system even more quickly.
That's not a good goal. Diversity of what you look like is absolutely terrible.
How would you select a candidate this way? A CV is a document comprised entirely of personally identifying information and potential sources of bias. Would you ask for the CV when you invite them to interview, and invite everyone who applies? You certainty couldn't ask for recommendations until after the interview as well.
The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.
"eh, midwestern state school"
"what even is an HBCU are those accredited?"
"fortran though?"
the initiatives are at least conscious of sensitivities in the space, but we have a long way to go
I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV.
I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track.
It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.
(No I didn't go to a famous school)
(Disclosure: I went to a well-known school, but without either of the parental benefits I just described. My parents helped in other more indirect ways throughout my upbringing, but they didn't come from a wealthy or connected family background.)
For starters, because it's a lot easier to "get in" if you have no trouble paying for it, and you have your "legacy admissions."
If you really think XYZ is that great, you should really want to hire the people who fought to get in, fought to succeed, and did.
Stack Overflow's got an Azure SRE spot open, asking for experience with PowerShell DSC and Terraform, among others. The main goal for the role appears to be scaling their enterprise offering.
I've worked as both a sysadmin and a dev for years now, and used both to manage sizable deployments in public clouds, both Azure and others, mostly for enterprise software companies. This is a mildly specialized skillset (though getting less specialized by the day), and I figured I'd get at least a screening call.
I didn't even make it through the automated resume screening, and if I had to guess it's because I don't have a degree, much less a CS degree.
* On the off-chance my employer reads this, this was more of an exploratory application than me actively hunting for other opportunities.
It's something that I fought against (I have a technical background and had the advantage of being able to evaluate technical skill somewhat independently), and did well because of it.
There were a few candidates that I brought in that I was reprimanded for - physically brought into our partners' office to be told off - only to have that candidate receive multiple job offers from our clients. The partners weren't qualified to really evaluate technical skill, but knew what candidate qualities that a start up is willing to pay a recruiter's fee for.
At the end of the day, my candidates were exceptional for having risen above their alma maters' reputations, and the Ivy league grads are more consistently good/qualified.
When hiring, time is such an important factor. Many engineering teams are unwilling to take the chance on an a candidate that graduated from unfamiliar school because their hiring process is weak and/or inefficient. Or they waited too long to hire, and need someone "yesterday". At least they're more likely to end up with a good candidate by using the school as the qualifier, even if it costs them more because of the candidate's demand.
TL;DR : The 'top' candidates' values are artificially inflated as a result of high demand, which itself is due to ill-conceived and insufficient hiring processes across most companies.
There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact.
One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us.
[1]https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
The allegations against Google actually really caught me off guard because, in my experience, a lot of men in Silicon Valley seem like they're almost too... progressive (if that's the right word) to overtly harass their female peers the way men on Wall Street sometimes do. On the other hand I really struggle with inclusion in tech in a way that I never did in finance. I often feel dismissed by my tech colleagues. Both personally and professionally. Experiencing that sort of divide is much more difficult to explain and, to your point, much more difficult for me to navigate. Not to diminish women who have been sexually harassed at work, I'm one of them, but this silent divide takes a much bigger toll on me personally.
Thank you for pointing it out.
But there are a few problems: 1. A/B testing in talent mgmt practices is costly in terms of time-investment. - Final, long term impact of such experiments are not visible to the org for, well, a long while. Sure, may be some short term impacts like increased diversity - may be visible in the short term. But is that worth all the experimentation for all the firms except the largest ones like FANG?
2. Vetting people for skillsets and qualifications only, masking the personal details - like in the OP on Helsinki, is a good start. But it does not address the biases on the historical disadvantages like not coming from a pedigreed organization because of not having been to a pedigreed school. Think of being ranked lower in the applications to Netflix because you are not coming from Google because you didn't go to Stanford. Blind -audition technique would be the best in situations like these as the focus would be on demonstrating the skill needed and not the "qualifications" (read - pedigree).Such skill tests can probably be done easily for programming and other situations but a lot of roles do not have a strictly defined evaluation criteria as the KPIs are...well... fuzzy. Or at least not something which can be demonstrated in a short "test". Think sales / pro-management. You can not demonstrate in a test if you are a good enough sales person who can meet the revenue projections ("sell this pencil to me" doesn't count).
Issue here is lack of a easily reproducible and reliable signal for your future success for such roles, thereby increasing the dependency on past history - and by association, your pedigree.
Of course there will be other issues like isolating performance factors into "chance" and "skill" in a noisy dataset that is usually available, if at all. Or hiring mindset which focuses on the required skillset (what is needed to get the job done) but the "best person" for the job which muddies the waters by adding evaluation factors which are really not material to performance on the job at hand.
But if the cost of experimentation can be reduced by devising quick tests for generating reliable signals independent from historical background, it would be awesome!
Best I think I can do is certain descriptions for projects highlighting my role, as well as stick a little section at the bottom describing a personal experience and showing a bit of my personality and value system. Stuff like "Led hackathon team of 4 to develop a serverless app integrating several APIs." It's really quite tricky to show off your soft skills on your resume. I think the resume should be more to just get your foot in the door. If I can get on the phone, I'm usually good to go.
Of course, there might some clear marks that will give away your gender and age, but that's up-to the interviewer to decide. All the things you have on your resume can be done by a woman or 20-year old as well as 60-year old.
So, I don't this would hurt you in any way and you can still demonstrate your soft skills.
What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".
But I applaud the concept. I'd be interested in the results.
It would be nice to build a group-blind world, and the more we adopt these specific approaches the better can can iterate towards. However, care should be taken to ensure the baked in biases don't further entrench.
Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases, because that's exactly the problem this approach solves - it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
The identification of the issue is at hand. Consider Computer Science. Historically far fewer women go through the training for a variety of personal reasons and societal pressure. So, on the margin, blind/anonymous hiring ignores that upstream delta between females in population and skilled females in hiring pool. Whether this is desirable or not is not my point, only that this is "baked in bias" perpetuating down the line.
It's noble to build a society where we value blindness on characteristics irrelevant to hiring. Doing it piecemeal can result in furthering these baked in biases.
A better approach would be to split the skills validation (blind) from the move-forward decision (adhering to whatever inter-generational correction schema the society has decided upon) where the only pool of eligible move-forwards meet the established skills validation. In this way, you only get skilled candidates, and you can satisfy whatever other characteristics that need satisfaction.
Now we can speculate how many submissions were from people that don't identify as male (was it 50 or less%? Github hasn't released details to my knowledge). The issue though is that once the results (of what appears to be a fair process) didn't match the desired narrative, people screamed sexism and made mostly emotional arguments.
You've mentioned an "inter-generational correction schema" elsewhere in the thread. In most institutions, this essentially gets instated as quotas which embitters the majority in the system (including the people they target to enable because it's assumed they had to get past a "lower bar").
[1] https://archive.is/8SsNp#selection-381.122-494.0 [2] http://archive.is/NrLqE [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
Applying the selection quota to the hiring pool that passes skills would get around the "quota-implies-less-skilled" issue.
What if it's a cultural difference that has negative effect on the population in question?
Do you respect the difference, or try to change things so that those in said population who would prosper under different outlooks can do so?
This is a serious question, and I genuinely don't have a good, general answer. I can see this line of thought being used to superficially validate any bias one cares to in a "that's just how things are" kind of manner, which helps no one.
But we also have to acknowledge that differences will lead to, well, differences. How do we differentiate between negative and neutral causality?
Let's formalize it a bit, I think this helps clarify.
Let A be the hiring propensity, B be job preparation (education, experience, what have you), and C be the "blinding factors" Helsinki is trying to address.
As a model we would like the joint propensity for everyone to be normalized. In other words, P(A,B,C) would be about the same.
The joint propensity P(A,B,C) would be expressed as
P(A,B,C) = P(A | B,C) * P(B | C) * P(C) [0]
Helsinki is making the first term, P(A | B,C) independent of their "blinding factors", or, in other words, P(A | B,C) = P(A | B).[1]
The remaining terms P(B | C) and P(C) are unaffected. It is P(B|C) differential that many arguing for what I call non-autarky "social corrections" (we do something as a society).
Since Helsinki's decision affects _only_ the conditional probability P(A| B,C), the other factors are still at play, and P(A,B,C) remains at issue.
There is nothing that can be done by Helsinki's hiring department for P(B|C) in the short term -- people are dealt the hand they have, life isn't fair, and so on. Completely true.
By blinding themselves, they set P(A|B) to be flat on C and no "equalization" of P(A,B,C) can be observed.
A truly egalitarian society would have P(B|C) = P(B). However, we aren't there. C, what Helsinki blinds themselves to, matters for qualifying life experiences.
The model that is being argued for by you and others I believe is formalized as a conditional independence model, namely that the propensity of hiring is independent of race, conditional on life preparation: P(A,C | B) = P(A|B) * P(C|B).[2] Note though: bias still persists: P(C|B) = P(B|C)*P(C)/P(B) -- we can't get away from that P(B|C) term in either model, and we know qualitatively that P(B|C) != P(B), hence why a correction can be positively argued for (rather than solely from emotion or duty).
Anyhow, that's the model in mind, and I'm open to being wrong/corrected. Thoughts?
--------------------
After thinking about it more, it seems that the ultimate goal of Helsinki is to make P(A|B,C) = P(A|B), not the latter model.
--------------------
[0] Chained conditional probabilites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_rule_(probability)
[1] Independent variables definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_(probability_theo...
[2] Conditional independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence
Edit: I should have been more precise when referring to blind hiring. I meant completely blind hiring, including the "on-site" interview stage(making it "blind" could be difficult). Obviously you're also correct about the earlier life experiences which could have been impacted by numerous factors, but my perception on that is the same as with law, it shouldn't be retroactive because you can't change people's past. Besides, each case is different and applying counter-biases here is like blind shooting.
If I understand where you are coming from, "landing the job interview" are the direct factors Helsinki is choosing to be blind to, like name and so forth. Am I understanding that right? If so, let me clarify the point -- the factors that Helsinki _will_ judge resumes on -- experience and so forth -- are pre-conditioned on your name (etc.). So the fact that one makes the initial cut is still driven by the factors Helsinki chose to be blind to.
> Also, I completely condemn the notion of attempting to fix the problem with affirmative action, primarily because it attempts to solve inequality(evil) with deliberate and explicit discrimination(greater evil).
I get where you're coming from on this. The method I propose, if Helsinki uses the blinding methodology, is to impose any "corrective"/affirmative actions after the the blind evaluation of skills. That way every person is ensured to be qualified (avoiding the critique of "diversity hires"). One possible (and usually a default) "corrective" approach is autarky/doing nothing.
And... that's my whole point! I appreciate the discussion.
Yes, it will: if you're born to a well-off family, you'll go to better schools before college. Due to this, you'll have a better chance at succeeding in college, have more resources to delve deeper into your field of study, better manage studying abroad, &c. All of these factors will make your list of skills more attractive to employers.
Compared to someone who was poor who went to worse schools, didn't study abroad, and couldn't afford to spend more time on their field of study due to having to work to pay for college. This will make your list of skills less attractive to an employer.
Right out of the gate, there is a bias against people who grew up poor in the hiring process.
> it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
It does so by devaluing repressed classes of people. This is a societal cost to benefit businesses.
EDIT: I have missed the whole point of the parent comment.
That expertise is a direct result of class. I feel like I've sufficiently explained how class-based biases will still slip through this system, so respond to it directly and tell me _how bias is not present_ in that system.
> Based on it, the one from high class has more skills and more experience than the one from lower class. So of course, you will hire the one with more skills.
I never said businesses ought do x, I just said that certain classes will be biased against in this attempt at a bias-less recruitment process which will produce negative outcomes for society.
You're right. I've missed your point. You're correct that this will have negative results.
On average, it's important to note.
There seems to be this implied belief that there's a conspiracy in the West to hire white males above all. This simply isn't true. By having access to race and gender and even age in some cases it allows us to select for a diverse set of candidates. So although we may not (or we may!) end up with an outcome that is as diverse as the set we started with, we at least made the effort to give different people an equal opportunity.
If I'm only allowed to recruit based on the best credentials then those with a socioeconomic advantage will continue to.
Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting people use their abilities and become competent independently.
This is the exception to the rule and not really relevant to anything I said I think? What about the kid who grew up poor and could have gotten into Harvard but didn't go because their parent was sick and couldn't afford care and they attended a local college to be home with them? This is more likely.
> Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting people use their abilities and become competent independently.
I agree - letting people use their abilities to advance themselves is best. If anything, I support blind screening of applicants. But I think the approach here has different intentions than what will very possibly occur - those with access continue to compound that.
There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer some kind of fair outcome. It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a faulty perception.
Right, which means we shouldn't cry when it turns out to be unfair as you are here.
> There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer some kind of fair outcome.
When have I even once said there should be "fair outcomes"? I don't believe in equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunities.
> It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a faulty perception
What is the "faulty perception"? I'm simply stating that if the goal is to have a diverse workforce then removing the heuristics we are told make us diverse from the recruiting process makes it difficult to achieve this goal. If I want to fill a position and my company has given us a goal of eventually having the ideal diverse workplace without sacrificing the quality of our people then I need tools to do this. I will use the, possibly arbitrary and political, heuristics they give me (age, gender, race, etc) and ask my recruiting staff to give me a group of 12 candidate for in-person interviews.
From these 12 there must be at least 1 attribute from each heuristic across the group. So maybe we say there are 3 races we optimize for, 3 age bands and 2 genders. This means that my set of 12 could have a black woman who is 41, for instance, and a white male who is 25, and an Asian male who is 55. This has all of these covered and the remaining 9 candidates can be any combination. But at least I have committed to creating an equal opportunity in the way the company and a large part of society see as "diverse". Even if I don't agree with it 100%.
Does this create far more bias when the goal is to create the ideal, diverse workforce? By systematically including certain biological features of people in the candidate pool are we at least ensuring we gave a diverse group of individuals an equal opportunity?
There is no "ideal diverse workforce". By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity. You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
I didn't make the definition. The company leadership makes it based on internal feedback, advice and general societal beliefs in what "diversity" means.
> irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character
I agree - everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. However, it is difficult to judge someone's character alone from a CV.
> You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.
Every person I'd hire deserves to be hired. There are no bones thrown to fill a quota (which doesn't exist). However, to help achieve the goal of a "diverse workplace" a systemic method needs to be incorporated to ensure that a diverse set of candidates were given an opportunity to join the interview pool. With a large enough pool we can reasonably assure that every hire is hired on merit alone as they will be competing with other people that have different immutable physical characteristics. This also means if the hires tend to all look a certain way I can reference the systemic method used to ensure that in fact we actually removed bias from the selection process by ensuring certain attributes were included in the overall pool.
> There is no "ideal diverse workforce".
Ask 1000 people and you'll get 1000 answers.
> By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity.
No, you are creating a pool that is defensible in terms of who you end up hiring. No one is guaranteed a job because they are in the candidate pool. They will compete with their cohort on equal grounds.
> You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
See, this is where you're making a mistake. The specific heuristic across the group includes everyone. It doesn't say "not white males in their 20's" - in fact 9 out of 12 candidates could be just that so long as the other 3 candidates somehow cover every other enumeration of attributes. But with a large enough pool you can ensure that each characteristic the company determines is "diverse" is somehow included in the candidate pool without diluting it in terms of merit. This doesn't mean the outcome looks anything like the candidate pool.
> This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
Fair enough - I don't know your thoughts but it could be from the point of view you're looking at if from. To me, you sound like someone who thinks a systematic method of candidate pool selection sounds like exclusion of certain people. And it would be if we excluded certain candidates because they didn't possess an arbitrary diversity attribute. However, this process is inclusive because it demands that each enumeration of each diversity attribute be included at least once. And with a large enough candidate pool (this is key - you need to do the work here interviewing enough people) this means there are still very many seats for the dominate attribute enumeration - white guys that are youngish as it happens to be.
However, it would be an illegitimate candidate pool if there wasn't a white person in it, or a male in it, or a young person in it as well! That would be exclusionary.
This is a pragmatic approach to fulfilling a diversity goal (regardless of if my personal beliefs are different) while ensuring that there is no exclusion, that the quality of hires remains at the level desired and most importantly that nobody who is hired or anyone they work with has...
We're going in circles here as long as you fundamentally believe diversity of physical and biological details is important. If that's what you want to enforce in your workforce, even though it is meaningless to the job, then you're designing for an outcome, and not opportunity. Inclusive does not exist in a vacuum; to include some means to exclude others.
I think this is quite valid. Especially from the progressive side I guess I'd say, there's a certain moral altruism that has no regard for other ideas or even the questioning of certain ideas and ideals. And to me, a lot of it is certainly a feeling of moral superiority that self legitimizes certain values from the authority of a middle and upper middle class socioeconomic position with complete disregard for the working and lower classes. The classes which served the progressive side so well until they became inconvenient.
My points are only trying to find a balance such that we can still live in a world with merit; where we can compromise a bit by ensuring there is a measurable opportunity available but yet the outcome is up to the individual.
To be frank, my dissenters here are people I probably agree with more from an idealist vantage. But I also understand that when working in a larger social system we need to be considerate of other points of view and to create systems that the reasonable people on "both sides" can live with. It's when we play to the unreasonable that extremism gains foothold.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
It raises, I think, some very interesting points. Not so much in the way you may agree with it or not, but in terms of how to frame the problem itself.
From my perspective what makes sense is we have large groups of people that believe diversity as defined by certain attributes is important. We also have large groups of people that don't. And both groups have some good and some poor reasons for their beliefs. Both "sides" are legit. So how do we reconcile this?
To me, the most agreeable aspect of each side is that:
1) We live in a diverse society whether we like it or not, which has a history of certain exclusion and we should try and improve on that to make all of our lives more peaceful.
2) Not everyone has an advantage or disadvantage because of certain immutable attributes and we should be conscious of this as well. Social engineering is less engineering than politics.
The idealist approach is to optimize one way or the other; mainly for political reasons which results in resentment and bitterness. The pragmatic approach is to try and create a system that is defensible one way or another - even if it is flawed in both regards. The perfect system is impossible anyhow and a matter of opinion.
So, you design a system that takes into account both points above. You ensure you interview across certain enumerative attributes generally agreed upon as important. But you don't optimize across it as it can turn into an exclusionary system in its own right with awful side effects such as legit resentment, meritless and simply political. You don't exclude any of the apparent important diversity attributes - they all are important. You also create a reasonable metric around what this means. This ensures you, in some way, have at least given the opportunity to a vast range of of people. It doesn't mean you've given an outcome to anyone.
The trick becomes in keeping it honest - that you don't assume that a certain set of attributes is more important than another. Where a lot of similar systems get it wrong is they define that a certain subset of attributes must be included. They should demand that over the entire pool all attributes must be included. And only to a limit and after that it's fair game.
I'm only saying that we should at least try and ensure we speak with everyone in terms of various individual attributes that are generally accepted, albeit arbitrary, when opening an opportunity. And that's it. What is alarming about this? How is this not pragmatic? Who is this stealing from? How is this bad for anyone?
Inclusion and exclusion are two sides of the same thing. If you forcefully include group X, then you are by definition excluding group Y as a reaction. Therefore, the only truly fair design is to not preference anyone by any physical attribute, and in this case only judge for positions based on competence and merit.
Regarding your questions, I can't think of a clearer explanation that the comment that I initially replied to. Fundamentally, the core argument is that the moment you start using immutable characteristics as part of your heuristic, you've already lost- there will be resentment, because now, by definition, you've given something to someone that they did nothing to earn, and that position is coming from someone else.
That these exact things happened in the past, and happen now, doesn't mean that reversing the arrow makes things better- it just breeds a new generation of the same thing.
In terms of how do we move forward as a society, and speaking strictly as just my own opinion: we need to focus on what our commonalities are, not our differences, and go from there.
I had the great luck of growing up as the child of a diplomat, and thus getting to see a much wider variety of countries and ways of life than most people do. One of the most important lessons I took from the experience is that people are far more alike than different, even in areas that have had little previous cultural exchange. It takes some time to find out how to translate across different givens, but once you understand the shared local model of how things work, people's decisions make sense.
The catch is that if you don't agree with some of the base assumptions, then some decisions will seem utterly abhorrent, and the same is true in reverse. Some are mutually exclusive, in that there is no such thing as a middle ground. That is the problem of diversity, and it is a very real one.
So, moving forward- these schisms exist because the world used to be far more closed off from itself than it is today. I'm only in my mid-40's, and yet when I was a child, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip. Now I can hop on any of a dozen free webcams if I felt so inclined and look at who is walking down the street where I used to live. All we can do is start talking to those now so close, find out what we can agree on, and try to forge something we can all live with.
(I realize this is a bit further afield than the original subject of applying for jobs, but I think a friendly reply deserves an honest answer.)
Small quibble: it will persist the existing advantage through the offer stage. Then income differentials could/would apply. The blind approach is not a guaranteed proximate cause towards increasing bias, but rather an entrenchment of existing bias.
But, agree that amplification begins shortly after point of offer.
You argue that removing identifying marks unfairly tips the balance toward those who will be better prepared for the job (i.e. those who did not grow up poor). But assuming a particular test is the best measure of one's on-the-job performance, how can changing that test for some (based on things that identify them as "repressed") create any societal good? You're only pushing the problem out in front of you, and you'll eventually meet it again, but in a different form.
The problem is that people grow up poor, and that poverty creates severe disadvantage. Let's fix that problem at the source (there are a lot of NPOs that try to do this - free after-school programs, etc.) and keep hiring standards constant and unbiased.
Poverty can't be solved by changing admissions and hiring standards to avoid rejecting poor-performing people who grew up poor. That approach only creates new problems.
This is unfair: I never said anything about affirmative action, made normative claims, or appealed to emotion. I stated why this test would still have bias towards poorer classes.
The narrative I was concerned with pointing out was that class characteristics could be biased in similar ways to physical characteristics and that mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.
> mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.
If by "bias for class characteristics" you mean "objective standards", I call that nonsense. By definition, an objective standard will cease to be objective once a subjective-based alteration is introduced.
If an objective standard happens to favor one class over another, it's not the standard's problem. The problem lies in whatever caused that class to do worse.
Inequality is another discussion than bias and discrimination, in my view. Inequality is solved by implementing encouraging measures. Discrimination is resolved by removing entrenched barriers.
Of course people are a sum of everything that happened in their life, but this is a way to make a particular job application much more fair, based on capability to do the job rather than irrelevant physical details. This is not meant to solve everything at once.
The very examples you post are about situations that would be helped if there was blind judgement.
Yes, it would be much better if we are able to remove discrimination earlier in life.
But this is not a either/or solution between affirmative action and equal opportunity.
But if the assumption that positive reinforcement make a better just society for future generation then doesn't it mean equal opportunity will make also have the same positive effect albeit a little less ?
Affirmative action laws were introduced to address this, but the trend toward meritocracy counters them.
My guess; we end up with the worst of both worlds: One stream blind to these factors and a bunch of regulated exceptions.
> The same group(s) facing discrimination at the employment point also face discrimination earlier in life
The goal of Helsinki here is to make the hiring decision independent of direct factors they blind themselves to (name, sex, etc.). However, the factors they condition on (education, experience) are impacted by these factors, so the hiring decision won't be independent of the factors.
The "best" thing to do is to correct the inherent bias, as you're pointing out as the real problem. We agree. This isn't something Helsinki can do in a vacuum, so if they want to achieve their goal of true "blindness" to the above factors, they have to take into account their impact on their "seen" factors somehow.
I put the formalized model I have in mind in another comment on this thread, which walks through my thought process here.[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18548270
[...]
> when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant
So they base their assessment of know-how and capabilities on age, gender, mother's tongue, and other personal information that has been hidden? I feel like I must reading this wrong.
In my experience it's the opposite. Like with small countries: the odds they produce someone extremely good at a certain sport is just smaller than in large countries, so large countries are more likely to win some world cup or the Olympics. I know only a handful of women in IT to begin with, but most of them aren't great at it.
But that's not your point. You're saying that there are biases in hiring, and I agree. What I'm surprised by is that the article quotes them saying that they now find it very hard to judge someone. Who would say, alongside a press release about anonymous applications, that they find it difficult to base their judgement solely on only relevant information?
To the best of my understanding, not hiring somebody because of age would be age discrimination.
Inferences about learning speed or motivation based on achievements per years don't sound like age discrimination to me.
Maybe the older candidate only recently started to do the work. And this just the first thing the young person did?
I always get weird when people make a big deal about things people do at some young age. Most of the time the age is not important for the things we praise young people for doing. Most of the time it was just something their parents pushed them into to doing that any of many kids could have done had they just had the right parents.
It could not.
It really comes down to implementation (of which "doing nothing"/autarky is one choice).
Life isn't fair, some will be rich. Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. People move between classes all the time, and in the US you'll see many people going in both directions.
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
"Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied."
The concept of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools alone.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2004/12/29/ever-hig...
It turns out that we can, in fact, make general statements about large populations.
> Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual.
Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
>> Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
...What?
Why do you think that the biases from both race and legacy aren't still there whenever an applicant is effectively just a number tied to a varying skill set?
By judging competence for the job, we remove all the various "how" and "why" they got there.
It does nothing to the joint distribution, in that the conditional distribution ignores that systemic bias has already been applied, this full independence at that point perpetuates the accumulated, extant bias.
You mention an iterative process and yet are seemingly against even the 1st step. Bias is not a one-time thing. It's not just applied and then you live with it forever. Life is a constant stream of dynamic decisions and improving opportunity in one scenario is a positive step forward to improving it elsewhere, and perhaps even countering any earlier biased treatments.
I am for a bit of redistribution, myself, but the positive claim made about perpetuation of bias is simply a systemic fact. Blinding means that, conditional on prior experience and work, your likelihood of landing the job should be constant. That means prior bias gets perpetuated (is built into the factors that generate prior experience and work).
Please don't foment flamewars on HN.
The GP comment wasn't so bad, but the problem is that generic comments about ideological topics usually lead to flamewars.
I get that everyone who's bad at interviews want to do away with them. But you could likely find charming individuals who want to do away with technical requirements because they feel their great personality is more important than what their gradepoint average was. Neither of those groups are right to discard the "other side" of the equation.
You need both, and hiring blindly based strictly for technical competence will have you feeling like you're managing a daycare center. Trust me, the interview is not a problem.
If you want an interview to favor a higher level of competence, do away with the hiring managers. Have candidates interviewed by their equally titled peers, or members of the group the candidate would be working most closely with. People who not only have a technical background, but an understanding of how the specific job actually works day to day.
Is it impressive that a 22 year old has 6 years of professional experience? Yes, certainly. Does it mean that they'll be better than a 40 year old with 6 years of equivalent experience? It's possible, but I suspect it'd be a weak signal at best.