> I've worked with and mentored a lot of minority candidates (who often have trouble with the cultural test that is getting and passing interviews)

Maybe have an open, empathetic mind for those people that are so upset? Or ask a minority friend of yours what they think?

From my personal XP: Many black and brown friends of mine think that entrepreneurship is a rich kid’s game because the common first step of raising a “friends and family round” is an absurd notion to them. Most of their friends and family barely have enough money to pay the bills, so the idea of raising $100k+ from them is silly. When I read the angry responses in this thread (and see a price tag like $10k) I think about those friends. I’m sure they’d laugh at the idea of asking friends/colleagues to help them raise $10k to “skip the interview” for similar reasons.

Empathy is hard, especially over the internet and across socioeconomic bubbles, but it’s essential when seeing outrage that you don’t understand.

Your explanation is a great example -- if you want to look at the idea exclusively in those terms, that sure sounds problematic. But do you really think that's the only way it could have played out? Keep in mind, we are living in a system that causes massive aggregate harm to underrepresented people on a daily basis. And I'm just referring to the tech industry and particularly its hiring practices, let alone society as a whole.

Killing a new idea just because you can conceive of scenarios where it might be harmful (though I would argue not even that much more harmful than the status quo in this case) is probably unwise in general, but is almost certainly so in a space where the status quo is already so fraught. I work in this space, we need more/better ideas (among many other things), and I think this idea actually had a plausible chance of putting a dent in some of the problems at the core of these systemic issues. Sure, it's a small chance, but to just throw it away? That bums me out.

Edit just to be clear: I have no idea who the people behind this site are and had never heard of it before day. I just work on some of the same problems and would love to see the system improve more quickly.

I’m truly sorry you feel that way. My intent was sincerely to provide another point of view.

Also:

1) unless you think it will be very common that people with money will take up sponsoring minorities for jobs, the fact that you personally would do it doesn't counteract the disadvantage of minorities in general through this system, and

2) if you want to pay to help people from underrepresented groups get jobs, there are already plenty of ways to do so, from sponsoring education to hiring interview coaches, and more.

To your 1): I think it's at least plausible that this would become common; many crazier-sounding ideas have succeeded. There's a big disconnect between talent identification/development industries and hirers, and something like this could help to bridge that gap.

To your 2): Trust me, I have done all of that. It helps, but it is far from a panacea. That is the conventional shit that has resulted in the tech industry barely making a dent in its diversity numbers for well over a decade now. There are so many people for whom I would have so much rather just invested money in them getting a job immediately than spend yet another hour walking through their latest interview experience and explaining why something innocuous they said or did was probably incorrectly treated as a red flag by their interviewer.

It’s hard to distinguish between radical ideas and truly stupid ideas.

There needs to be a better filter to get rid of bad ideas because some are horrible (ie, this one).

I think it’s funny that people assume that all radical ideas are worth trying and that change can only be good.

Nobody thinks that.

Also, it's disingenuous to say that all the responses are just performative words. Tons of people on Reddit and HN have thoroughly laid bare all the problems with this proposal. Just read through the threads.

Trying radical ideas does not equate turning off your critical thinking.

Also, if you are the one with radical idea, do not look for a group of people that will approve anything. It is pretty poor way to test your idea.

> Anyone who claims to definitively know that this idea would have problematic (...) results is kidding themselves.

Oh, let me think about it. Pay couple thousand to skip couple of hours of interview to get a job that pays many times more per month.

Definitely nobody will want to exploit that.

At the same time, you expect that this system will provide benefit to the underrepresented from the good hearts of their supposed rich benefactors (ie. you). To me, this comes off similar to expecting developing countries to rise out of poverty through donations from western billionaires. For every underrepresented person you know, there are a thousand others who don't have such a rich benefactor.

>Anyone who claims to definitively know that this idea would have problematic/racist results is kidding themselves.

This system exclusively favors wealthy connections. Which groups are least likely to have wealthy connections?

In my opinion, in your argument, you only consider your personal position and social bubble rather than society at large. It comes off similar to a president advocating for dictatorship to do more good.

I genuinely don't mean this as a personal attack; I just find your position baffling.

It's not about whether ideas are good or bad (I think this idea is bad), there are now mental gymnastics about why it never even should have been considered in the first place - see the comments about how we need a filter to identify things that should never be tried. This is the same idea as people who think there are ideas that should never be questioned, or concepts we shouldn't be allowed to talk about.

(Also, as I reread many of the responses, there also seems to be a healthy dose of people just not having read and understood the concept)

From my point of view (someone who has had to interview and hire people for the last 10 years) the main idea doesn't sound completely broken. Here in HN we have discussed countless times how the interview process is broken, how it sucks for everyone (both interviewer and interviewee), etc. This person is trying a completely different angle, and that's good. I am happy to give it a chance.

The way I would implement it is more like this:

    1. Hiring Company defines, they would spend $X for a Mid level FullStack dev.
    2. Hiring company provides SkipTheInterview $X + fee. 
    3. SkipTheInterview opens the Position"bounty" .  
    4. If a candidate wants to be hired for the position, they apply and have to get enough _backers_ to get to the $X amount.
    5. Once the candidate gets enough backer money, they get hired.
   6. After a "trial" period (where the candidate is paid normally as he has bin hired), SkipTheInterview gives back the bounty money to the backers  *doubled*, and only keeps the fee.

The people crying about this "idea" being racist or "enabling racism" are wrong.

It feels as one of those things that will deffinitely work, but the current culture won't allow it. Similarly to how if someone today invented "firefighting" as a social good, people would be outraged of having to pay to extinguish somebody else's fire.

Firefighting: a public good, paid for with public tax dollars, so that you don't have to worry about paying out of pocket for fire defense. They just show up when you need them, it comes out of your taxes, done deal.

Skip the Interview: a private company which turns job openings into pay-to-play gambling and takes a cut. People with networks of friends and family that have disposable income (i.e. "rich kids") are disproportionately advantaged. People from poor backgrounds, whose friends and family can't afford to put up $50 to buy them a job, are disadvantaged. Networks of friends can easily game the system over the course of a few years and buy each other several good jobs. The existing systems of class and privilege are reinforced, and on and on.

The people who would be opposed to firefighters if they were proposed today are not the same people saying this is a stupid idea. People who would oppose firefighters now would be the financial hawk conservatives who think all public funding for anything is bad. The people saying this is a stupid idea fall into two camps; they either see how impractical, toxic, and easily gamed this system would be, or they recognize that it would entrench class and privilege even further and they don't want a new business to contribute to such a world.

/end rant