> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works."

I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and structured your interview process, the more likely it is to produce vaguely biased results.

Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020. There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.

By standardizing the hiring process aren’t you then just optimizing for a very specific perception and/or perceptional ability? Isn’t that at the core of principles relating to diversity in the first place?

I personally find some of the current (if I can call them) standards of tech hiring to be very narrow in which skills and capabilities they test. It presumes a lot—particularly that one has time and resources to commit to spending time studying enough of the spectrum of CS subjects in order to pass a given question from the rather large field. (By this I’m referring to the classic “white board a <somekindof>sort algorithm purely from memory” process that has become the de-facto standard)

> I personally find some of the current (if I can call them) standards of tech hiring to be very narrow in which skills and capabilities they test.

What would you propose as an alternative?

I’ve been involved in training new engineering managers how to hire and interview. Everyone starts with the best intentions, but reality quickly forces some compromises.

The bottom line is that you only have a number of hours in which to evaluate the candidate. The longer and more comprehensive you make your interview processes, the stronger signal you get. However, the longer your interview process, the more you’ll find people dropping out of the hiring pipeline due to lack of time or willingness.

I’ve worked with companies that tried to implement week-long paid interviews where candidates pair with employees to solve real problems. It’s great! But only when it works for the candidate. You can’t realistically expect busy professionals to take an entire week off of their current job to spend time with a company that may or may not hire them. Monetary compensation only goes so far when you’re forcing someone to choose between spending a week of their vacation interviewing with your company or spending a week taking their family on vacation.

> What would you propose as an alternative?

Easy. Just talk to people as would-be peers. They want to find a role they can succeed in. You want to find someone who can succeed in the role.

I interview by just talking about their past projects (based on resume). You can't fake your way through a friendly technical dialogue if you haven't done it. (Pre-requisite: the interviewer must be technically competent. This is where many companies miss. Algorithm puzzles won't make up for it.)

Also it is important to describe the role and expectations in detail. Nobody (really: nobody) wants to get hired in a role just to be let go in six months. There is no need for elaborate whiteboard algorithm dances which discriminate against everyone who doesn't have the time to memorize every possible question. Just be up front about the requirements and let the candidate decide if it's a match. They know themselves better than you ever will.

This would be my way of interviewing, at least for anyone who's not a junior.

What troubles me is that people will say this allows all your biases to run wild, but my feeling most of the time is that these biases will find a way to express themselves unless you remove humans from the hiring process entirely.

Especially when the company says they aren't necessarily looking for the most bit perfect compilable code or even that you output the optimal algo on first try. Rather they want to see how you think through problems. Well now you're back at a subjective assessment again which inherently can have hidden biases.

After failing several of these "let's see how you think" technical interviews, I've come to the conclusion that the way I think is deeply and fundamentally flawed.

> I interview by just talking about their past projects (based on resume). You can't fake your way through a friendly technical dialogue if you haven't done it. (Pre-requisite: the interviewer must be technically competent. This is where many companies miss. Algorithm puzzles won't make up for it.)

I absolutely disagree with this.

I've interviewed people who seemed incredibly impressive, both in terms of showing me actual past projects, and in their explanations of them. I've then gone on to give them simple programming exercies, the kind that people with far less experience take, and they've gotten nowhere on them.

I'm talking a two hour, "here's a computer, here's internet access, here's a setup environment, code this simple thing, which you could probably copy-paste from Stack Overflow / documentation". And they couldn't do it.

And what's worse - I'm pretty sure I could fake my way through most technical dialogues. I mean, not literally everything, but I could probably fake my way through interviews about most technical topics, and given a bit of preparation time, fake my way through most things. I mean, I could probably get caught out if someone was seriously trying to do it - but to the depth that most interviewers get, I can pass as experienced on most things.

This is what we do where I am now and it’s worked well.

You can’t pre-correct for some things, but you can for others.

Having someone speak in detail about their experience isn’t easily faked.

Having someone speak about their experience in brief and then giving them a “skill-testing question” as if they won the lottery can be gamed.

Honestly, the "coding" is rarely the issue. For most software engineering roles you generally want someone who can: understand problems, figure out possible solutions, decide on which is best, communicate why it is best and (importantly) be flexible when the company wants you to do some other solution. Meet all those requirements and you are a useful member at most companies.

I think a general chat about a broad problem and the interviewee's thought process of how they would approach it can tell you much more than whiteboarding some memorized algorithm.

Reading code is the biggest problem.

Good tests, I find, are to give them a simple piece of code with minimal comments. For example, some non-standard special purpose container implementation. Then ask them to explain what the purpose of the code could be as simply and short as possible.

Either - They'll start literally explaining each line of code without understanding the whole. - They completely miss the point. - They at least figure out it's a container of some sorts. - They'll explain technically what it literally does. - They'll give you the academic term for the concept it implements. - They'll actually explain the purpose briefly in simple words.

Those last three are good, in different ways. The better ones will also spot the bugs or performance issues in the code.

I completely agree. We had this exact discussion at work the other day.

I mentioned to a colleague that what I value most is someone who is creative. There are many candidates out there who know all the buzzwords or can discuss features of a programming language purely from memory, etc.

This can make for some impressive interviewing, but it tells nothing of their ability to use that knowledge to solve real problems, or their creativity in how they use their skill and expertise when faced with new dilemmas.

Sure, you could contest that the creative side isn’t necessary for certain levels of engineering, or that only tech leads require this as a mandatory trait, but I would argue that it is far more important than what most interviews test - rote memorization.

I'm right there with you. I am always looking for people who attack problems with new perspectives and, most importantly, can describe to me coherently their thought process and pros/cons of their approach.

"can describe ... pros/cons of their approach"

I've always tried to do that... until recently.

With a new recruit, this is the fastest way to nightmare discussions. He always emphasizes the cons of my proposals, and never admit that his proposals also have cons. To be honest, I really think he believes what he says, he seems to not see ahead of time where the blocking points will be.

I am now forced to only submit the pros, and prepare an argument for the cons, which is rarely needed. This is not a way to have good technical decisions.

> than whiteboarding some memorized algorithm.

This is not how it works! There are over 1000 problems on leetcode. Sure, many of them are solved using the same techniques but there is usually a twist and you often need to combine multiple approaches or come up with something new (to you). And then there is usually a very problem-specific way in which the problem can be solved 10 or 50 times faster. Often these insights are very difficult to come up with. The people who created these questions are actually very smart and excepting some of the questions at the easiest level it's usually a far cry from simply implementing Dijkstra from memory!

I don't intend to say that leetcode/competitive programming is easy, far from it. It is too focused on coding vs. the broader skillset that successful web devs have: working in teams, business objectives, scaling issues, etc. I think even the baseline expectations (lets say remembering how to implement a specific type of sort) are often at odds with how anyone does things in the real world - a few devs are implementing these things by hand for certain reasons but not MOST devs, not even at most FAANG jobs. So why is everyone using that knowledge as a filter?

The problem with leetcoding in interviews is that it is easily measurable but not an important metric. Focusing on someone's aptitude at skills they never use at their job means good developers get tossed aside or are forced to waste energy jumping through hoops needlessly.

True but the whiteboard algorithm problem is supposed to be the proxy for that. then maybe a systems question. I don’t do well at them. I agree that requirements are underrated.

> What would you propose as an alternative?

In my company (totally remote) we decided to automate hiring (also remote) as most as possible and we are happy with the results. We also value the candidate's time very much so we made the hiring process very straightforward. It works like this:

- First the candidates must do some online tests, which are mostly multiple choice questions. The subjects are logic, english and a specific test for the coding language. All of these tests were hand made to us and customized to our needs. The candidates spend about 2 hours in total doing theses tests, and they know immediately their score in the parts of the tests that can be accessed automatically (which are the most part)

- The candidates approved in the theoretical tests - about 10% of the candidates that applied for the job - do a practical coding challenge that was also made from scratch by us. We have looked at the available solutions in the market and thought they are too focused on textbook algorithms that are rarely used in the job market. So we made our own tests that contemplate practical problems a programmer has to solve daily in our company. The questions are NOT too complex. The objective of this step is to weed out the candidates that can't code in the language, not to get the best. We design this challenge to take about 2 hours. The implementation was a lot of fun: we use the Docker API to run the candidate's code against the automated tests we made and the score is calculated as the number of tests that passed. Using Docker means we can work with any language that runs on Linux. So far we have made tests in Javascript, Typescript, Ruby, Postgres and Elm.

- The candidates that are approved in the previous step - about 2-4% of the candidates that applied for the job - are called for an interview. Now is the time when we take a look at the candidate's resume and look at the human side of things. Given that we have very few candidates to look at and we know they all meet some minimum skills we are very confident when conducting the interviews. By now we usually have a very clear signal to tell who the best candidate is even before we conduct the interviews. So in practice the interviews are NOT used to select the best candidate. They are there just to see if a red flag doesn't show up.

We are very proud of our coding challenges app. If someone wants to collaborate on it just drop me a message. It's a Rails app on GitHub, but it probably not good enough for an open source project yet - one needs to know a lot about Docker and Rails to make it work.

Sorry, but what you've outlined above doesn't show that you value the candidates' time. You require two rounds of technical interviews before any human contact. It's asymmetrical. By automating the first two steps, you've made it so that you can waste as much of the applicants' time as you want without expending any further time or resources on your part.

Also, from experience, I've never come across a two hour takehome that actually takes two hours. Everyone always says not to spend more than two hours on it, but I can't exactly turn in an incomplete assignment.

I'm glad it is working for you, but it's not something to be proud of. Essentially what you've done is replace the standard 30 minute intro phone interview with a 2 hour SAT.

This is unfair. A typical, half-competent candidate in tech sends much fewer applications before they find a job than a typical company has to process in the same time span. So there's indeed an asymmetry here, but in the other direction - few companies could even afford to fully process every single application that comes in (not even counting the human toil on the interviewers from dealing with spam).

4 hours over two steps to get to the human part? I wouldn't mind it. Last company I successfully interviewed, I spent about 2 hours on the phone with different people + a lot of e-mail exchange, before I got to 4 hours long on-site.

It doesn't have to be equivalent, but it can't be entirely one-sided either. Two technicals are a major commitment. Even if we assume the nominal 4 hours, there's still lots of preparation that goes into taking those tests. And that's 4+ hours to get to speak to a human being assuming you pass. Otherwise, it's the "We appreciate your time," autoreply.

That's asking for too much upfront before the candidate can even decide if the job is a good fit. Job descriptions alone don't tell you much. That's where the phone interview comes in. It's a two-way street.

And, if all companies adopt this technique, that's 4+ hours per company. If a reasonably-competent person applies for, say 100 companies and expects a 10% callback rate[^], then they're dedicating 40+ hours just to do tests and "challenges" before even talking to a person. That's a lot of time to blow for a mere chance of talking to a person. I mean, I guess I'd do it--especially if I was desperate for a job, but if I was still employed I'd think twice and maybe find a way to grin and bear my current employer a little longer...

I think when your company comes up with a hiring scheme, they need to analyze it, understand and be cool with the kinds of applicants their system is screening out. In my view, most SV tech companies' practices tend to screen out the "skilled professional who's currently semi-comfortable at her existing job" and filters in the "desperately needs a job and will jump through hoops and put up with whiteboard hazing to get one." Which class of applicant does your company want to court?

[^]: I consider myself "reasonably-competent" and the 100:10 ratio was about what my last job search was like a few years ago.

If a candidate is preparing for an interview, they will not perform well at work for no test replicates actual work unless the test can recognize the general skills that a person would rely on day to day basis

> Sorry, but what you've outlined above doesn't show that you value the candidates' time. You require two rounds of technical interviews before any human contact. It's asymmetrical. By automating the first two steps, you've made it so that you can waste as much of the applicants' time as you want without expending any further time or resources on your part.

I understand this was the goal. You can either waste your company's time or the candidates' time. I don't think there's a way to preserve both. Given that your goal is helping your employer, this seems like the sensible thing to do.

That's playing the short game.

If as mentioned previously wasting candidates' time filters out the most competent people, then you're not helping your employer.

Also, I object to thinking that someone's time needs to be "wasted".

Good points, agreed.

Usually I like to take things in a practical way, if you are happy with the people you're hiring, than it's fine, and there is not much point thinking about "what if these are not the best possible people we could hire?", you just never know.

But probably a lot of people that don't make it into your company just can't be bothered to do 2 sets of technical tests with zero human contact. I can tell you that my most "successful" interview processes (there is, the ones with offers/acceptances or just the ones I can even remember the name of the company) were the ones that focus on me as a human and as a professional, the ones that looked less automated and that seemed to have taken more time trying to know ME rather than just my skills.

Not that there was no tests, there were and some went kind of overboard with the complexity, but in the end what I remmember about these companies was the conversations we had and how they were interested and knowing me.

So, like I said, if it's working for you than great, but I probably would forget your test in my inbox to be honest.

I can't lie to you, I wouldn't go through that process. Or, if I did, you'd be at the bottom of the stack for me.

Half the interview process is about selling the company to the candidate. How can I know if I want to put up with your bullshit tests if I don't know whether I'm going to enjoy working with you?

The message you're sending with more automation is simple: you will be a cog in a machine here. We're not interested in what you have to say, we're only interested in whether you're smarter than the average bear.

The effort is very considerate in terms of legality that you are not favoring anyone.

Programming or the fancy name of Software Development has sort of become the new blue collar job.

If you’re so confident about your challenge app why do you first make everyone do a 2hr online test?

How many hours do you spend assessing each candidate and how does that compare to how many hours you make them spend jumping through your hoops?

> Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020.

Depends what you mean by "use your gut" but that's not my experience. Currently at a well known public tech company in silicon valley and there isn't any standardized interview process. Every interviewer is free to approach it as they wish and the hiring manager gets to listen to all input and decide. This is a strength.

Perhaps (very likely) as a result, this company is also rated highly in diversity.

A standardized interview process will inevitably lead to a standardized employee pool, as only the candidates who fit the very narrow profile (willing to memorize endless algorithms they will never need or use in real life) can get in.

I should add that my current employer is not, in my experience, unusual. In my ~25 years in the valley, it's how it's always been. I have not worked (and never want to) for the companies which value conformity in hiring above all else (infamously, google).

Where I work now doesn't have any real interview structure or way to measure candidates. It makes interviewing difficult, but honestly in the end the most important part is the answer to "would I like working with this person?" There are many aspects that can lead to your answer, but I really believe that is the most important question to answer. Someone can be extremely productive, but if they're an asshole, nope, I don't want to spend a minute working with them. On the other hand, if someone is slow and error-prone, but otherwise a pleasant coworker, I'm pretty forgiving, and hope they can learn along the way.

And for the social justice aspect, we do have a very diverse group of engineers, especially for our size and location.

Is the interview process similarly standardized for managers?

If so, how are they "objectively" evaluated?

Do chemists recite the periodic table backwards in interviews?

I don't pretend there's never any bias, but I'm still not convinced you get any less, or any better bias with the whole hoop-jumping algorithm day-long whiteboard thing.

As has been noted elsewhere in the comments here, ours seems to be the only industry that does this to itself.

The "standardized" interview at companies like Google has lead to them hiring mostly White/Asian males though... I have had plenty of people tell me that interviewing at Google is essentially a roll of the dice these days. You can answer all the 5x interviews in a satisfactory manner and still get rejected.

I feel "just wing it" can lead to somebody talented from a non-traditional background getting a chance at a great career that they would be auto-rejected by google at the resume submit phase.

> hiring mostly White/Asian males though

Which seems reflective of the underlying pool of applicants.

It works in the opposite direction too, though. If you live in a place where a given sort of people is scarce, it doesn't matter how hard you try to be unbiased, you internalize prejudices based on your lack of (or minimal) experience with them. Then someone does come along and they don't fit in, and they are set up for failure, and try as you might, you (subconsciously) associate whatever group they belong to.

Has a company like Google ever released data proving this? Latino's make up a fairly large number of the people that live in the bay area (23.5% [1]) yet there are like what 3.6%[2] of those people working at google. Seems like a pretty big gap.

It would be interesting to see what their application/success ratio demographics are like.

1. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm 2. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-employee-diversity-numbe...

> Latino's make up a fairly large number of the people that live in the bay area

How many of them hold relevant degrees for job openings at Google?

I know multiple people who don't have a degree at all and have full-time SWE positions at FAANGs. One is even an engineering manager. This isn't the 2000s.

There's even a sourced 2018 article about current hiring practices trending away from degree requirements for you to peruse:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/15-companies-that-no-longer-...

It's not about the degrees (relevant or otherwise).

Bay area residents probably make up a small portion of Google's applicants. It would be more interesting to hear what percentage of their applicants are Hispanic.

Of course the most important thing is: out of minority applicants who are qualified, what percent are hired? Because we may expect a smaller proportion to be qualified due to systematic barriers that they face. Google is not necessarily in a position to fix those.

You can effectively look this information up yourself by checking on the demographics of CS graduates.

I'm willing to bet that Google's demographics hew pretty closely to CS graduate demographics. You need to look farther upstream.

I 100% agree with you. I got my shot at my job title (not SWE, but in SaaS) from a non-traditional background for that role because the hiring manager was given carte-blanche to find the person he wanted to work with. We had breakfast, we clicked, we spent two years killing it. No way my resume gets through a more traditional hiring process (I know this, because I know some of the traditional hiring team wanted to throw out my resume).

> There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.

Standardized processes don't mean unbiased processes. The SAT for example is pretty racist.

"The SAT is..." seems like a questionable statement even before you complete the sentence, given that it has changed over time.

Is it equally racist now versus in the 90s?

Probably not, but who cares? The point isn’t that the SAT has been equally racist for some amount of time. The point is that bias exists in standardized processes.

If the SAT has undergone changes, obviously someone intended to improve it. What they were trying to improve and what the consequences actually were, if it got better or worse, would be relevant to why it has problems now and what they are.

> The SAT for example is pretty racist.

What do you mean by this?

The SAT has historically been formulated in a way that is culturally biased towards white experiences, probably unintentionally.

I have a very simple solution to this problem. It frequently evokes an instinctual negative reaction, for understandable reasons, but I truly believe it would be both equitable and effective. Ready?

You want your company to be 50% women? Tell your teams that at least 50% of their hires must be women. That's it.

To me, formalizing the quota but keeping the overall hiring process looser makes a lot more sense than the other way around. A quota is dead easy, and a formal process is hard for all of the reasons discussed.

A quota is not "hiring people just because they're female/black/gay/etc"—it's a way to make us more effective by preventing us from overlooking good people. If we're naturally inclined to skip people who are black, then we need a process to counterbalance our natural tendencies. And of course, recognizing and taking advantage of an undervalued resource is good for business.

If there are legal issues with a quota (I'm legitimately not sure whether there are), then the law ought to be changed.

---

50% women may be the wrong number because of the demographics of computer science majors or what have you. It was just an example. Choose a number in good faith that you believe represents the potential population of good hires.

One simple solution might be to have your quota match the demographics of your job applicants. But this decision bares more thought than I'm qualified to provide.

> If there are legal issues with a quota (I'm legitimately not sure whether there are), then the law ought to be changed.

That would be quite literally destroying the anti-discrimination laws which safeguard the exact thing that you think you're arguing in favour of. Quotas implemented the way you describe are the antithesis of equal opportunity. That 'instinctual negative reaction' you come across is people seeing the complete logical reversal going on in your claim.

I don't think we need to have the same rules for well-represented and underrepresented groups. A reasonable person is fully capable of determining which is which. "Reverse racism" is not a real phenomenon in 99% of cases.

What is the definition of representation? Who is the arbiter of what groups are over and under represented? What does fair representation mean if not equal opportunity?

This is a subject of entire books and hours long debates, but we can skip to the reductio ad absurdum with your line of reasoning: 99% of underwater welders are male.

Trying to 'represent' females in that occupation and push the gender ratio to 50/50 would harm all parties involved and result in a measurable number of deaths. Protected attributes are not uniformly distributed in terms of fit for job, and trying to hit a uniform quota across those attributes is naively idealistic, at best.

A less generous interpretation is that you are actually totally cool with discrimination as long as it's in the 'right direction', whatever that personally means for you. In which case you are exactly the force that you claim to be fighting against.

"Reverse racism" is a term that was created to redefine "racism" so that people engaging in racism could say they're not engaging in it, because their kind of racism is not racism.

It's worse. It's not just 'wrong kind of racism', it's 'if you were born with attributes XYZ you should never be called racist, even if without those attributes your actions would be labelled as racist'.

The notion of reverse racism is something that requires religion-like amounts of self delusion and selective consumption of facts. The flaws of the notion are just too glaring for any rational individual to overlook even at first examination.

You are making decisions based on arbitrary labels and demographics, not on the person. It is the definition of descrimination.

Not only that, but it's blatantly hypocritical since you don't spend your money based on the demographics of a company, you spend it based on performance.

It's discrimination, yes, but in what sense is a quota bigotry?

It can result in hiring of person B instead of more capable person A, just because person B satisfies some arbitrary immutable characteristics (skin color, sex, etc.) and person A does not. Texbook discrimination.

GP has since edited their post, it originally used the word "bigotry" where it now says "discrimination".

Edit: This leads to a much more interesting line of discussion that can be summed up as "discrimination (and similarly bias) isn't always bad".

They're useful tools and we should be careful about practicing them, but the idea that because discrimination is sometimes bad it is always bad doesn't follow. (or an alternative way of looking at this is that discrimination often includes the qualifier "unjust". Bias in favor of some group in the pursuit of greater justice therefore isn't discrimination).

Carl Sagan described it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World. Reducing people down to a few single bits of information is lazy thinking. It shields the stereotyper from contact with the enourmos variety of individuals, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if it discrimination were valid on the average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases.

Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an acceptable social trade off. This is why countries enact general discrimination laws, making it illegal to judge people based on single bits like gender and race.

Relatively few countries ban discrimination in general, they ban discrimination based on certain characteristics.

For example, in most places in the US it's okay to discriminate based on political party, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where you aren't allowed to discriminate based on someone identifying as a racist.

If you want an example of general ban against discrimination you can look to the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10, 11 and 14.

Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected.

The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as someone who identifies themselves as a racist.

It should also be noted that where I live, Sweden, the right of political association is particularly cemented in our constitution. The same protection that is given union members are given to political members, including racist political groups. People talk about changing the constitution whenever neo-nazists goes around and demonstrate, but that kind of talk usually dies down when people realize that life goes on even if a handful of people believe in something which the rest of the nation consider crazy.

The right of political association is different from nondiscrimination. Are you suggesting it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi? Because that's the right we're talking about, my right to discriminate against you.

It appears that you're conflating government nondiscrimination with government mandates on individual nondiscrimination. Those aren't equivalent.

> it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi

Here in Sweden, yes. The law is very clear that you can not deny service because you disagree with someones political, religious, or world views.

Government nondiscrimination is a US technicality of the first amendment. European Convention on Human Rights is not limiting to government behavior. Everyone has to follow it.

Then Sweden has a unique interpretation of the ECHR. In most EU nations, that isn't the case (nor does it seem to actually be the case in Sweden, given that Sweden's anti discrimination law doesn't protect arbitrary views).

I think you should speak with a lawyer, because you're not correct.

In 2016 the Swedish national cabinet issued a report on the status of the anti-discrimination law (SOU 2016:87). It cites the EU courts cases C-399/11, Melloni and C‑617/10, Åklagaren mot Åkerberg Fransson, and the conclusion that political discrimination is against the human rights convention.

The report also note that current law does not protect children that get discriminated based on their parents political activity, which the FN convention of children rights says they should be protected against.

The report goes on to basically say that the EU convention of human rights extends the Swedish anti-discrimination law to include, among other things, political and other world views, class, and social status. The report then goes on that courts must already follow those extensions.

There were also a specific case a couple years ago where a politician was kicked out of a restaurants based on his political affiliation. A Judge commented on that case noted that while the Swedish anti-discrimination does not make it illegal, there is a case to be made under the EU human rights declaration.

So there. The government report, and a judge, both saying the same conclusion.

What kind of moral / logical principle do you base the conclusion “discrimination is not always bad”, on?

Genuinely asking. My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” (with the possible exception for family, bwcause that’s just cruel), from which I cannot conclude for example that discrimination is bad if it’s agains blacks but good if it’s against whites.

I fear that by dropping this principle, while allowing for “positive discrimination” (e.g. preferential hiring / admissions of blacks/women), you also allow e.g. White Nationalists to argue that it’s OK to discriminate for whites. How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?

I'll get to the meat of your question, but two sidebars first:

> My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad”

As a bit of an aside, are you saying that this is your base moral precept from which all other decisions about what is or is not ethical follow? This would be a very strange ethical framework (for example, it follows that murder is ethical). Usually moral and ethical frameworks follow from very high level principles "optimize happiness/utility" (utilitarianism), "do good things" (deontology), etc. It seems like you might be coming from a rights based ethical framework, but it's not clear.

> How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?

I don't generally waste my time arguing with people who are engaging in bad faith[1]. In this day and age, I don't generally believe that a white nationalist is going to be convinced by facts and logic, or really anything else. I'm more concerned about appealing to the majority of people who aren't white nationalists, because ultimately I believe that discriminating against white nationalists is okay[2].

Ok, now back to your actual question: in what cases is it okay to discriminate? I'm approximately utilitarian, so the simple answer is "when the expected value across society is positive." For me, I don't think optimizing for strict utility is the right goal, instead I personally think that we should maximize agency (possibly median, possibly total, unclear exactly), which is something like each individual's ability to make meaningful decisions.

This sidesteps issues of de jure rights. It leads to conclusions that we should do things like lift up the least fortunate and provide social safety nets, since a destitute person has less agency than a person capable of getting by. Similarly, it addresses questions of when regulations on personal liberty are ok. If allowing some action has a reasonable possibility of reducing agency of some other group, we should give it less protection than another action which does not.

So for example, when you have two groups, racists and some racial minority, it makes sense to provide the racial minority more protection than the racists, since the racists want to reduce the racial minority's rights more than the racial minority wants to reduce the racists rights. That is, the minority would prefer it if the racists weren't allowed to be racist. The racists would prefer it if the racial minority weren't allowed to live in the same area, or use the same water fountains, or what ever.

That's an extreme, but illustrative example. So back to the less extreme position: Discrimination is okay when it's done explicitly to counteract a gap between what the law (or more broadly society) intends and where society actually sits.

Society intends for hiring to not discriminate based on race. But it did for a really long time. The put (and continues to put) the subjects of discrimination at a disadvantage. If you're deontological, then "nondiscrimination" is the rule and that's that, but if your goal is justice or utility, then discrimination to bridge the gap between intent and reality is ethical. It should be done carefully of course, but it's alright.

If you want to see a fun set of examples of this, voting district and gerrymandering law in the US is full of weird examples of trade offs between the need (under the Voting Rights Act) to allow racial minorities to elect representatives of their interests, with the current opinion of the USSC that any districts can't be drawn based on racial lines (except in very specific circumstances)[3]. In other words, States must draw districts to preserve the interests and representation of minority groups, but can't draw districts based on where those minorities live. It's weird.

[1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_a...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[3]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-an...

Interesting, thanks for an extensive answer.

> If you're deontological, then "nondiscrimination" is the rule and that's that, but if your goal is justice or utility, then discrimination to bridge the gap between intent and reality is ethical.

I'm definitely pro-justice, it's just that I see it principles based (e.g. free speech even for (especially for) speech I don't like), not "utility" based. The flaw of your philosophy, in my view, is that you're just sweeping the tricky parts under the carpet by introducing concepts of "utility" and "right goal" and "society intends". You're even conflicted about that yourself, introducing another concept of "maximizing agency" (sounds like pro-freedom); a good moral system would somehow maximize (or balance) both in some way.

I don't think that's a good view, because those are fundamentally non-reconcilable goals. Should a billionaire be able to spend $1m for the health of his/her child (maximize agency / freedom), or should the society put that money to "maximum utility" and spending it to help several (poorer) children (with illnesses that are less expensive to treat but still life threatening).

> The flaw of your philosophy, in my view, is that you're just sweeping the tricky parts under the carpet by introducing concepts of "utility" and "right goal" and "society intends".

Sure, picking the "right" utility function is one of the hardest parts of utilitarianism. FWIW, I don't think maximizing agency is a different concept so much as a specific utility function that avoids some of the common pitfalls of strict utilitarianism (utility sinks: the person who gets enormous happiness from cannibalism). In other words you could imagine Agency as the "reasonable person" standard applied to the value of a choice. This still has flaws, but, IMO fewer than many other framings.

Some people might also find this to be similar to optimizing for the most "positive rights" across society, but I dislike that framing because the idea of positive vs. negative rights is silly, any right can be framed as positive or negative.

> Should a billionaire be able to spend $1m for the health of his/her child (maximize agency / freedom), or should the society put that money to "maximum utility" and spending it to help several (poorer) children (with illnesses that are less expensive to treat but still life threatening).

Note that giving a poor person money such that they can choose to treat their child's disease also increases agency! If you want to dive deep into this, I think that the marginal value of a dollar is probably logarithmic, or at least inverse quadratic or something, so a tax scheme modeled to tax top brackets in such a way that then improves the situation of those less off (pick your method: national healthcare, UBI, etc.) increases overall agency.

Discrimination is discrimination. Whether it's 'good' or 'bad' depends entirely on who you ask.

I think most people making a case for 'good' discrimination don't realize that the existing 'bad' discrimination originated exactly the same way.

We need to strive to eliminate discrimination, not perpetuate the swing of the pendulum that's been going back and forth for hundreds of years. Pushing down on some demographics to uplift others is not going to solve anything, it's just a no-op perpetuation of what's already going on.

That's not at all true.

The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry.

Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argumentative work that you haven't presented. Suffice to say that I believe that the best way to, in the long term, eliminate discrimination is to allow some specific forms now, with the intent of undoing past discrimination.

You haven't presented even a shadow of an argument as to why that isn't reasonable.

You're conflating hiring discrimination with a broad and nebulous notion of inequality. Everyone agrees that equality is a good idea, but it doesn't map to your notion of how to address hiring discrimination, if such a thing exists. You're proposing deliberate and harmful inequality in the name of fixing some perceived other inequality. It doesn't work.

The way to create equality is to manipulate on levers that individuals can control, e.g. taxation brackets, education incentives, government investment into particular industries. Passing up the best candidate for a job because they didn't have some inherent unchangeable attributes that you're arbitrarily favouring is the opposite of creating equality.

This assumes that there is always a clearly best candidate. Fwiw actual quotas are illegal for this reason, but are you saying that all else equal, hire the less well represented person is discriminatory in a negative fashion?

As a social experiment, I would like to see a town/province/state attempt to ban gender segregation in the work place by imposing quotas on all professions, especially those where the government itself is the employer. If you want a government contract in that town, the company must have a minimum of 40% men and 40% women for every role of employee.

I do not know what the costs, efficiency and employee happiness would be, but it would make for an amazing social experiment. Having 40% of the garbage men, sewer workers and construction workers being women, and 40% of the teachers, nurses, and social workers being men would make for a very different society than what we have today. There would be a lot of people trying to cheat the system in order to keep the work place gender segregated, but I wonder if that is a local maximum of happiness rather than a global one. Such study could shine some light and give us some final answers if quotas is a good idea or not.

Just to be clear, this is why I suggested normal companies not trying to reform society should base their quota on what they "believe represents the potential population of good hires", possibly based for example on their applicant pool. If only 10% of all engineers are women as of 2020, you need not mandate they they comprise at least 40% of your engineering team.

(While there's a separate discussion to be had about why so few women choose to be engineers, that's not the company's problem to solve.)

"If only 10% of all engineers are women as of 2020, you need not mandate they they comprise at least 40% of your engineering team"

There's no logical reason why "10% of engineers are women" implies "10% of every engineering team should be women" instead of, for example, "10% of engineering teams should be all women".

A number of teams could be 40% women even if the average were 10%, and there's also no reason why excess men have to be engineers just because they were educated as such. That's a thing that happens anyway, just like people without CS degrees go into programming.

I don't remember the source but I've heard anecdotes of women at companies with strong diversity pushes feeling that they get taken even less seriously because others assume they're "just a diversity hire". A lot more needs to be changed culturally than that single hire/no hire decision. An employee's peers and superiors are constantly making decisions that will impact that employee's career trajectory and each decision may only have a small even unconscious bias but cumulatively become extremely impactful. Between employee A and B, maybe A gets slightly more impactful project assignments, gets taken slightly more seriously, gets told more details about the goals of senior management, is given a bit more of a break when they miss deadlines, is mentored a little better by peers etc. If B is losing these little coin tosses even 10% more of the time, the effects add up. For some minorities the same process has been occurring their whole life and plays a big role in why the diversity is so low already at the career entry stage to begin with.

I see some people are reacting negatively to what you're saying. DVs are terrible as a dialog. And I, too, agree the comment leaves kind of a bad taste, but I think because it baldly points out some unpleasant things. I only see these categories of downvotes:

1. I hit the wrong button :)

2. I'm a bigoted member of a majority, and am downvoting because I think minorities should be oppressed.

3. I don't think any questions of race/gender/etc. should ever be considered in a workplace, and and downvoting because I dislike the whole idea.

4. What I suspect is actually happening: Like (3) I think everyone should be considered on their own merits, and you can look at company-wide stats to see if bias is occurring. Its good for the company to act against it in sum, but acting on the basis of race/gender/etc. on an individual basis is shocking and unfair.

The problem with (4) is that you're trying to have some kind of emergent effect that magically appears. It's a goal without being a goal. Worse, its a global goal you want to be actively worked against locally.

Developers love to complain about clueless management that doesn't know what it wants. Guess what folks, it's a common trait. Our other favorite trope is to figure out a technical fix for a people problem. And the problem with that is of course a tech fix only takes care of specific situations and not the underlying problem.

For example, as a tech fix we might decide that all interviews are done in a pitch-black room with vocoder voice synthesizers. Great, no question of race/gender/etc. Except, of course, for selection bias in our candidates. And even after they are hired there's biased reactions (unequal success for equal quality). People just naturally favor familiar attributes, even if those attributes don't contribute to a correct outcome.

So to be consistent, there are really only three choices: a) don't care, let the chips fall where they may; b) have an actual goal to equally represent everyone; c) encourage playing nice, and hope the results aren't too far off.

What actually happens, of course, is d) encourage playing nice, hope the results aren't too far off, then someone actually looks at the results and complains, so flail around trying to avoid doing anything too unpleasant to fix it.

I’ve proposed this as well and it went over like a lead balloon. As did the very idea that more diversity would be good for the team. Ah well.

> As did the very idea that more diversity would be good for the team.

So, while I wholeheartedly agree that diversity inherently benefits teams and businesses (different experiences will lead to new and different approaches), it's just not a very convincing argument, because it feels "mushy". Here's one that I think is better:

If it's true that e.g. women have a harder time getting engineering jobs due to unconscious bias (and I'd posit that this is clearly the case), then that means female engineers are, as a group, undervalued. You should be able to hire a better female engineer for the same amount of money.

Harsh? Sure. But that's beside the point.

> If it's true that e.g. women have a harder time getting engineering jobs due to unconscious bias

Cite this.

For the tech sector, in developed nations, this is nonsense.

It should go over like a lead balloon since it is literally illegal discrimination.

Please explain? I am not aware of such a law and have never encountered this response before.

"If we're naturally inclined to skip people who are black.."

The evidence for that is dubious

> we once rejected someone on ethical grounds after they passed all the interviews

What did they do? Suggest sacrificing a puppy to moloch to make a feature release go smoothly?

Does that work? It might be worth a try?

Of course it does. Most companies do this (albeit not with literal puppies), so do governments and people in general.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/