You are too quick to dismiss the study, I think. What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job. The study simulates the other things being equal scenario by eliminating all other avenues for the hiring manager to judge.
Here is the quote from the TFA, lightly edited for emphasis:
The study, ... , demonstrates that:
(a) people can accurately assess a stranger’s socioeconomic
position — defined by their income, education, and occupation
status — based on brief speech patterns and
(b) shows that these snap perceptions influence hiring managers
in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes.
Agree, but ALSO be aware of such biases and try prevent those.
In an interview where you're not allowed to evaluate "all other things".
In other words, absent any other information, people believe those from a higher class are more likely to be competent. Is that true? The link says nothing about it. If it is true, the hiring managers did a good job at estimating average competence from social class based on their knowledge (i.e. "bias").
It does not show that in an interview process where you are allowed to evaluate the candidate on factors that matter for the job, higher class matters at all (i.e. given two equally qualified candidates that are interviewed by an experienced hiring manager, the higher class one gets better offers/evaluation of competence).
And this is the bias that matters because it applies to the real world.
That seems like an extraordinary claim unless you have some evidentiary base for it.
If a hiring decision is influenced to 0.01% by speech and accent and 99.99% by whatever you deem reasonable criteria, then what do you learn from filtering out the latter?
And of course, decisions like this need not have linear behavior in reality either. A gross mismatch between different indicators could result in significantly worse hiring manager opinions than the (weighted) sum of the individual aspects.
Imagine that a candidate shows moderate (but sufficient) aptitude but then tries to disguise it with "high brow" rhetoric. In isolation using such speech may be considered a positive, but in this case it will be probably be to their detriment.
Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0.01% by speech and accent, 64.99% by other class, race and gender markers, and 35% by reasonable criteria such as competence? Why wouldn't this be your base case assumption?
No such thing was shown in this study. The study makes no attempt to measure E(skills | social class). For all we know, the hiring managers provided an unbiased (i.e. the opposite of "irrational bias") estimate of the expected skills conditioned on the social class of the applicant, absent any other information.
With regards to minority tenants, institutionalized racism often leads to the case that non-racist agents will have sound evidence based reasons to discriminate. Not based on the properties of the group discriminated, but based on the behaviour of a third party. A decent example is if banks discriminate against a group, then their availability of credit is worse. This can create self perpetuating circles of discrimination, which can be sustained even if all involved organisations and individuals aren't racist. For a hilarious example of something similar, see: https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg This is a communication and organisational failure, not racism, but its difficult to distinguish, but critically yes, it means it could be.
Non-discrimination and positive discrimination is best viewed as taxes designed to address this kind of problem, and its working. But the habit people have of challenging this kind of thing as a kneejerk reaction is harmful. What you are doing is essentially claiming that their judgements are corrupt or trying to shame by implied association, and that isn't helpful.
I would also challenge your notion. It is true that wealth is correlated with educational achievement. But educational achievement will not, in itself, lead to someone speaking in a way that is more patrician. Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position? It may even be the case that, assuming two people with the same education, the person from a lower class background is more likely to be exceptional.
Just like it is not necessary for the upper class to be more educated, its not necessary for the more educated to speak upper class. But it is more likely.
That such would be enough to stagnate social mobility seems like pessimistic hyperbole to me. Given that we are talking about high value added, high paying, i.e. worker shortage jobs and that there are significantly more demand for such workers than the upper class could provide, meaning, even at worst, such behaviour could only slow down social mobility, not stop it.
If the people who are evaluated are drawn randomly from the population as they claim to in the study, then no. If its a real hiering situation, then possibly yes, though it depends on how the position was advertised. That however may not even change the outcome of the study. In most big companies recruiters are not looking for the best applicant for the job, or atleast have no incentives to do so. They are looking for the easiest to motivate hiring for the job. Similarly, their boss may not have ordered them to find the best worker for the job, they likely asked for a good enough worker who causes minimum issues and who if they cause issues were easy to motivate having hired in the first place. Note that I never claimed that upper class speech meant better at the job, I explicitly wrote academic achievement, i.e the kind of thing which makes for an easily justified hire. Imagine having hired Dr House except without a degree, or a slightly below average doctor with an average grade degree. Now one is plain better, but the other will never get you fired. But thats a whole other problem.
No, that is why interviews should look more like the ones Google performs and less like "please describe yourself, hobbies and life experiences"
I think the issue here is that if the hiring manager only has one variable on which to judge, of course that variable will be used. Whatever that variable may be.
Here is the speech, which is a proxy for class, which is a delicate topic. What if the candidates only differed in the color of their shirt?
I think the issue is not so much to see whether certain criteria matter "all else being equal". It probably does, and the fewer different criteria there are, the more a particular one will matter.
What's more interesting to me, though, is how much a given criteria matters compared to others. Especially criteria I cannot influence (say my race) versus others I can (say my coding level or even speech). And this kind of study cannot show that.
Should we all show up to interviews wearing lime shirts if some study showed that's what a bunch of hiring managers preferred when they had nothing else on which to judge? And how important is that compared to, say, knowing how to code a FizzBuzz? Given limited resources, should I invest in learning to code or in finding the greenest shirt possible?
I.e. something that does matter.
I notice with wry amusement that my own speech patterns vary depending on who I'm talking to. For an obvious example, using simpler words and a higher pitch when talking to very young children. But I use different vocabularies when talking to different groups of adults, too. This is all quite unconscious. I bet we all do this.
I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy, but this is kinda silly.
a) only speech
b) lots of complex skills-based information that is (verified in a separate experiment) equivalent on balance, plus also speech
It's quite possible that you could see a large difference in decisions in (a) without any detectable difference in (b).
For example, imagine in this study hiring managers are (perhaps subconsciously) estimating education level from speech. If they already have lots of details about candidate's education, that "screens out" the rough proxy of their speech patterns.
It says nothing about what actually matters: do hiring managers with the ability to properly interview "equally qualified" candidates from different social backgrounds do so effectively (i.e. offer them similar compensation), or do they still rely on the base rates (i.e. bias), and how big is that effect?
I think this is a straw man argument, unless you can point to more than one person here (now I see none) arguing hiring is a perfect meritocracy.
I see lots of people questioning the methodology and conclusions drawn, but I don't see anyone claiming hiring is perfectly meritocratic.
On the one hand, if we need to perfectly understand the problem before starting to solve it, we'll be forever stuck in analysis. On the other hand, if we are incorrect in our initial analysis, we risk wasting time and other resources on the wrong solutions, reducing resources available for other solutions further down the road. It's very important to distinguish constructive criticism from animosity.
Then each hiring manager could have been presented with a different subset of that pool, with both resume and recording.
A multivariate regression would then reveal the relative impacts of class, being an actor, and the different self-descriptions.
I'm surprised you evidently haven't seen the thousands of threads where HN predominantly does nothing but complain about how hiring is not a perfect meritocracy.
You make it sound like that kind of thing is impossible. It's NOT. Class signals, in many cases, are absolutely critical to landing a job. You give an example of "an artist with no experience" grifting into a SW engineering job-- that's a bit extreme. What is common, however, are corporate HR/hiring-managers and even entire professional networks that dismiss otherwise qualified people based on class signals.
You people are thinking of software engineering, of course because this is HN. But keep in mind that for some people, that's just "the help". There's a whole world of business jobs and networks where even showing up with the wrong suit will get you instantly, silently, and permanently dismissed unless you have some incredibly strong connections to that group. I know this anecdotally because I grew up in my father's tailor shop!
This isn't a shocking or unbelievable finding.
I far prefer the Software Engineering industry's focus on design and coding interviews. Impartial. Unrealistic. But fair.
Even deciding what’s a fair assessment is difficult. Should you give someone more slack if they haven’t used a language in 2 years, but remember most things well enough?
Many many different industries have jobs that require technical skills -- not tech as in technolgy -- and they get away just fine with managing to hire people. Nurses need to be able to nurse, a highly technical skillset; no one is having nurses give fake shots on test dummies during interviews. They use credentials and experience, and accept the risk that a hire might not pan out.
The fact that we want senior level developers to have to refresh/cram before interviews on how to implement graph search algs and hash tables just so they can pass some artificial whiteboarding section is a bit crazy. Their actual job experience over the past N years should be what counts.
Now, conversations about how one would solve technical problems of a sort actually faced on the job are totally on point, and really should be a part of any job interview in any field.
edit: Really, what we want as engineering types is for there to exist a way to gauge ability in a purely objective way. But there isn't one; it doesn't exist. Furthermore, you are building a team of people. IMO the focus should really be on fit and soft skills regardless. Make sure they meet a minimum bar of technical ability, then work to verify whether they'll be a productive, beneficial teammate.
There’s a spread in performance from the +1σ to the -1σ nurse, but both will be functional in a nursing role, so checking credentials is a mostly sufficient evaluation of occupational ability.
The spread in software ability is so much larger that the -1σ candidates (the least-effective ~15% of people who have ever worked in computer programming jobs) are worth trying to select against in a way the least effective ~15% of nurses probably are not. (I’m not in medicine so I’m not sure; apologies if the same effect is at play there as well.)
This isn’t an argument against credentialling since it is literally the direct effect of not having credentialling in software. Credentialing cuts most-to-all of what would be the low tail of the profession off before it ever enters. Nurses and lawyers who can’t do their profession’s equivalent of fizzbuzz mostly wash out of the exams to enter the profession (or earlier), they don’t show up in job interviews, except where the inability is produced by some kind of post-entry decline in capacity. And even then, decertification is a real possibility, which further purges the low end of the distribution.
So, yeah, a -1σ software developer (or at least software developer job applicant) is worse compared to basic expectations than a -1σ nurse, because a nurse as below expectations as a -1σ software developer is would be compelled to find a different profession because of credentialling requirements.
You can only be so much better at nursing than the average qualified nurse. How many more patients will the best nurse save? You can be several multiples (whether it’s 10 or not, I won’t get into here, but I think it’s at least 3) more effective than the average in SWE.
I...disagree rather strongly that this, to the extent it is true, differentiates SWE from nursing. Comparing workers with identical responsibilities, the same is true in SWE, in both cases there are large impact multiples possible within the field, but they come from roles with greater responsibility; in nursing, because different roles require different credentials, this is reflected in the fact that a more competent nurse will be more likely to take on a more responsible role within the same credentialed category, and also be more likely to acquire greater credentials over time compared to a less competent nurse. “Nursing” isn’t a binary credential, but a whole set, starting with a basically heirarchical set: CNA -> LVN/LPN -> RN and beyond that various Advanced Practice Nursing credentials.
SWEs likewise have wide variety of scopes of practice and responsibility, but because we have no structure in the profession, they are assigned ad hoc and even with common titles there isn’t consistency in substantive roles, skills, or qualification. But, again, that’s a product of the absence of structure and credentialling, not an argument for it.
Whatever the highest-level credential is, SWEs will have a spread that’s wider than the highest-level nursing credential (and likely wider than the ratio in the entry-level SWE range as well).
I see, and you have presented, no reason whatsoever to believe that this is true.
By comparison, given the physical and time constraints of the job, an excellent nurse might be able to spread their expertise to 2x as many patients as a median? 3x? I think even 3x is a stretch. Maybe they can make a life-saving catch in the hardest 5% of cases (definitionally, very rare opportunity to apply this level of skill)?
This is why a top PI or scientist can literally save hundreds of millions (as Norman Borlaug did) but the best surgeon can save mere thousands in their life at best using surgery¹. There is a scale effect.
Likewise, SWEs can write code that can apply to all people.
Same with the top public policy people, for instance. It's the length of the lever and where the fulcrum is placed.
No nurse has that lever.
¹ I hate having to handle the edge-casers, but scientists can come up with new surgical procedures (as Werner Forssmann did) and that is way for them to use a long lever.
(Jon would have started with entry-level credentials at some point.) Substitute with Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, Bjarne S, Peter Norvig, James Gosling, Brenden Eich, rtm, rms, or whomever your idea of someone obviously on the right tail of the distribution is.
I'm sure there are famous and outstandingly accomplished nurses, just as there as there are for SWEs. My claim is that there are likely more of the latter and more continuous distribution of them.
I'm not sure this learning shows what you think it does, nor that the 'solution' is really a solution. Employers don't want to hire black people because they fear they might be criminals, and background checks allay this fear, allowing them to hire a subset of black people they feel are ok? To me this confirms that both background checks and hiring managers have a tendency to be racially biased, and the 'solution' is simply accepting of that bias.
If fixing people's biases via objective data isn't the solution, is the solution figuring out which people are unbiased and only hiring sufficiently unbiased people? What if evidence suggests that there aren't enough sufficiently unbiased people in the world? Is unsubstantiated rhetoric preferable to objective data in breaking down people's biases?
Of course the ideal solution to bias is to just not be biased in the first place, but that's not an implementable solution.
Of course. But the answer to this depends on: 1. the source of the belief that 'X people tend to be Y'. 2. The truth or otherwise of that belief. 3. The source of the dislike of Y. 4. Whether or not Y is a reasonable cause for dislike.
Suppose that I tell you that the most important political issue for me is the welfare of animals, and in particular, that animals raised for meat should be stunned before they are slaughtered. There are definitely some people for which this is a genuinely held and rationally arrived at belief, consistent with their other beliefs and actions. There are others for which this is a device for attacking certain religious communities, through opposition to halal and shechita. Isn't it correct that we should try and understand which is taking place before responding to it?
Presenting objective data to someone arguing an irrational position in bad faith does no good - the bad faith argument simply adapts.
Maybe I'm grossly naive, but I doubt that percentage wise there are many hiring managers who hold racial superiority as axiomatic.
My understanding is that hiring bias usually boils down to assumptions about aggregate intelligence, trustworthiness, and/or work ethic of groups of people. If someone thinks Swedes just aren't that smart, it's not a matter of axiomatic disagreement about if being smart is good or bad in an employee, it is something that objective data can fix. If someone is worried that black people are generally untrustworthy due to criminal pasts, that's something that they can be objectively shown to be untrue.
(Yes, I grew up in a time and place where racist/originist Sven and Ole jokes about dumb Swedes were common.)
1. I believe a stereotype that Swedish people are more friendly than Scottish people. 2. I know this person is Swedish, so I will tend to judge their behavior as generally friendly when I would interpret the same behavior by a Scottish person as less friendly. 3. I tend to assume that Scottish people do better in this job than Swedish people, perhaps because I've seen more Scots and fewer Swedes succeed in the past. 4. I therefore believe that success in this job is anti-correlated with friendliness. 5. The person in front of me would perform poorly in this role - not because he is Swedish, but because he is too friendly.
Note that although in practise, I might reject a Swede and accept a Scot (who is exactly as qualified and exactly as friendly) for the same job, I don't have any dislike of Swedish people, nor do I seek to avoid hiring them. In fact I might personally prefer Swedes to Scots (because they are so friendly) and seek out their company, yet still behave as above! That's literally the meaning of unconscious in unconscious bias.
2. I think the case of the background checks is, however, one of the simple cases. It looks like some managers have an irrational belief that they're interviewing people likely to have criminal convictions, but change their minds when background checks come back clean. Hopefully as more and more background checks come back clean, managers adjust their biases.
On a side note, there is something to be said for giving convicted criminals a second chance. I'm not sure if people with a single criminal conviction are that much more likely than someone with a clean record to commit a crime that harms their employer.
It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason? Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's background, employer's were left to use the signals they could pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The solution was to allow background checks again.
It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway. So it's not testing for anything real.
(Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)