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> I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude. If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds.

Well, make me a multi-billionaire, I now present to you:

BLIND SOURCING AND HIRING

I should only share the details in private, you say it's a multi-billion dollar idea and I'd hate to tip off the competitors.

In all seriousness, though, I know this is challenging. Especially at Google, there's still an opportunity for trouble after you've been hired but not yet assigned; though I doubt it would be enough of a problem to trash the whole system.

The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.



> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

Or the fact that it's not really possible. Right now, most software engineering jobs are pretty communication heavy. Almost all company cultures contain a non-trivial amount of verbal communication, so with that premise, it's reasonable to have candidates verbally describe technical things or even make technical arguments.

Once you're listening to real voices, it's difficult to pretend that the hiring is blind.

The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra worked really well because you could hide the person behind a screen and judge an entire work product without knowing anything about the instrumentalist.

Now, if most software jobs include a heavy remote work component some day, it might be more reasonable to throw a somewhat detailed spec at a candidate, have them code up a solution, then show the code (and only the code) to people evaluating the work product. But most devs don't have a day-to-day that looks like implementing textual programming problems for strangers.


You can setup interviews with text chat and screen shares at a large company without including someones voice or picture. Some places also remove names and other details from resumes.

Most companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.


> Companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.

Mostly likely it is because it doesn't mirror how they work. (Text chat is SoP for remote-first work, but remote-first is far from the norm.)


> The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra

And even there they had to put carpet down / remove shoes to hide the difference in shoe sounds when they walked to the performance area.

https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

"the telltale sounds of a woman's shoes allegedly influenced some jury members such that aspiring musicians were instructed to remove their footwear"


> Once you're listening to real voices,

Use a voice scrambler.


People have tried that... specifically to show that women were being discriminated against, but guess what happened when it was implemented?

They found that contrary to their initial hypothesis, women with voices modulated to sound like men were still not getting hired at the same rate as the men masked to sound like women. Not only that, but they found women modulated to sound like men did worse than unmodulated women, and men modulated to sound like women did better than unmodulated men:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...


One very interesting finding of the study is that woman and men are faring equally once the attrition is removed.

It seemed to me that the natural conclusion was that woman have lower confidence and thus performed worse at interviews.

And this is a deep realization for me, because it pushes me in the direction of current diversity policies. You see, if there is perceived bias against you, then you lose confidence. So we must, for a while, try our best to remove that perfection. That might mean hiring more woman even if they don't seem to perform as well as men, because, once we have done that for a while, woman will feel more confident and the good candidates will appear.

In any case - whether my last paragraph makes sense or not - the conclusion of the experiment interviewing.io did is that only removing gender perception during the interview process isn't enough, for woman may already have been affected by the bias and thus will perform worse than men during the interview.

So we come back to the conclusion that we must invest to bring woman to tech early - during college or even high school - and fight biases there.

It's a long road anyway, isn't it?


thats what i was thinking. Everyone should be made to sound like darth vader and now we've an interview process to die for :P


Maybe Donald Duck


Double blind. We do it in science, then do it hiring.


Double blind hiring famously does not result in gender balance (and even less in ethnic balance). This is called the funnel problem.

So that wouldn't solve matters.


> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

This will possibly result in less women being hired. See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...


Then there's either something wrong with how they introduced the trial, or there are just fewer qualified female candidates. Either way, I really didn't understand why they backed off on the trial.

If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.


> If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.

Because it goes against the results they wanted to arrive at.


Odd how that Idea never occurred to the person to whom you are replying.

In comment after comment, the possibility that there is no bias is considered literally impossible. The blatant and unrecognized bias in this conversation is absolutely fascinating. (I also notice HN has introduced a throttle, presumably to reduce the volume of incorrect messages.)


HN has always had a throttle for comment threads that go more than a few deep. The deeper the thread goes, the longer the delay gets.


From my observations (without access to the code one can only speculate), not in this case - depth is not the cause (nor is recent downvotes, or excessive volume). I've never before hit a limit of being able to participate in a back and forth debate at far higher volumes and depth than today, but now I would be completely unable to have a conversation. Something major has changed, I'd bet money it's a flag assigned to a user by a moderator.

That said, it's not super hard core militant censorship, there's plenty of other people saying politically incorrect things in today's discussion as well, so my censorship may have been due to "not adding to the discussion in a meaningful way", rather than my particular point of view. Hopefully there's an appeal mechanism for when I decide to straighten up my act, I'm working on it.

But as they say, freedom of speech does not require someone to provide you a stage to speak on, and private companies are free to censor whatever speech they see fit.


> From my observations (without access to the code one can only speculate), not in this case - depth is not the cause

It might be depth within a certain timeframe then. I've noticed similar delays previously in non-controversial topics when trying to reply to non-controversial comments.

I don't think there's anything sinister going on here, there's just a mechanism in the comments to prevent people from speaking past each other in quick succession.

Edit: For reference, this comment took 9 minutes before a reply link appeared, and it is the 9th child of a top-level comment. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Try replying to this comment and timing how long it takes before a reply link appears - my guess is 10 minutes.


It was waaaaay longer than that.

An alternative explanation is the universe was punishing me for being a dick, which wouldn't be that unrighteous.




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