I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.

Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.

This is commonly referred to as Yerkes-Dodson Law [1]. This is typically where one's performance, whilst performing a task and being watched while doing said task, will result in decreased output compared to if the individual was not being watched at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law

Thanks for the formal name, I always knew it just as the "I can't go while you're watching" syndrome.

Sounds like the interview would effectively filter out candidates that would not be a good fit for a job that is mostly corresponding with people.

IMHO, to the contrary: crafting one's message is a valid process for effective async communication.

Crafting a message well is important but more often, fast writing and decision making skills are more important. Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies. If you're an excellent writer who takes 20 minutes typing up a single email and then need another 20 minutes to destress because emails in formal settings make you anxious then you probably aren't a good fit for that type of job.

> Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies.

Because they're positioned with higher status in a hierarchy?

If a student makes a mistake, the professor merely points out the mistake.

If a professor makes a mistake, a student will at least be uncertain whether a mistake was made, and will have to go to much greater length to point out the mistake.

Short and fast emails could just as well be a sign of someone who is bad at communicating.

Not if the job entails writing 50 of those per day and you can’t manage more than 5

Exactly. I have a friend who was a directional drill operator, and then moved to white collar work, and was super slow with writing letters. I think it was a him problem more than a blue collar work problem though.

That's a fair point, however these 50 would mostly fall in 5 or 10 categories.

A few templates, a couple of text expanders, and a brief mentoring in soft skills, active listening, and written comms would resolve any major issues.

Granted, Gaussian distribution guarantees that the above wouldn't cover all cases.

Sounds like that type of job might not be a good fit for you? You’d always be anxious!

It might be the fact that people are monitoring how the sausage is made with the explicit purpose of judging that process.

But when working with people in the normal job, nobody is watching them type they just eat the sausage.

I can relate. I don’t have anxiety generally with work and have been praised on my interactions with customers. But I feel anxious during interviews because they are actively trying to judge me.

It's my opinion that interview anxiety is almost entirely unrelated to: how well someone works with a team; how well someone handles an emergency; and how well someone can related to and work with clients. Source: I've been repeatedly told, over decades, that I'm good or great at all those things—and I enjoy all of those things, for the most part, even when they're tough—but interviews make me anxious as fuck and I hate them (though I'm actually good at the talking parts—I just tend to lock up when someone is watching me work and judging me). It's a totally different thing.

In my experience that is a lot less true with customer facing jobs or jobs where there is an element of external facing presentation (like the note above). The candidate is going to get the same treatment from every crowd or customer.

If someone is doing an internal facing role, especially engineering, it may only come up during things like team stand ups, or certain types of design reviews, or not at all. So less of a problem.

It would not, and I wouldn’t apply in the first place! But I could do it if I had to.

I don't know about the GP, but if I interviewed you I would see that as a strong point in favour of you. It sounds like you proof read your emails and edit the things that aren't well composed. It's hard to find people who do that.

Then again, maybe I'm biased because I write the same sentence multiple times in quick succession. And I go back and re-write previous sentences if they don't flow well with what's coming next. But when people have watched me do it, they have only expressed wonder and admiration over it, never negative feelings.

What doesn't work is when someone starts verbally editing my first draft the instant I've typed it out. Yes, I know it's bad -- it's the first draft. I just needed to get something on the page to see where I should go next.

Sounds a lot better to me than live coding on a white board.

I would take the coding on a white board instead of answering fake mails to be honest. But the job doesn't sound too attractive if correspondence is mostly with customers. Internal mails are way more informal and quicker to write.

Yeah, it's a super relevant skill and something that doesn't go away (for me) in the interviewing environment (the way technical skills sometimes can).

My guess is that they're looking to see if you complete it in a reasonable time period, your initial draft is at least in the right ballpark (anyone experienced in tech support, team supervisorship, project management, etc can answer common emails almost by reflex) and it appears to be you, and not someone helping you.

I would imagine that, if anything, seeing you pause after an initial draft, adjust some grammar and tone, pause...even re-write a sentence or paragraph - and then say "done"...would impress, not detract.

this sounds closer to pairing, which IS a real-world skill & experience for many jobs, than your typical white-board programming nonsense.

As far as your technique, drafting then editing down is a totally legit way to write. I wish more people did that!

The cure for performance anxiety is to do more performing until it goes away.

Or to find a position in which such performance is not required.

Adaptation only goes so far. More training won't turn a dwarf into a basketball centre, or a heavyweight bodybuilder into a champion marathoner. Sometimes you've got to work with what you have, both in terms of abilities and limitations.

Intellectual and psychological limitations may be less manifestly visible but are no less real.

Performance anxiety goes away with repetition. I have plenty of personal experience with that and so do many others I know. This is not a special skill. You don't have to be a champion. You just get used to doing the performance and the anxiety goes away.

Just like if you're nervous about driving on the freeway, or flying in an airplane.

Heck, I remember buying my first phone answering machine. I froze up repeatedly trying to record the message. After a while, that problem went away.

Only if your anxiety is reasonable in the first place and your emotional regulation is normal.

I've been driving more than 20 years and almost none of the anxiety I experience because of it ever went away. If I know the roads already it's a little better, but every single day I have to power through the anxiety to get to where I need to be going. It doesn't get better.

Hotels give me anxiety even though I actually lived in a hotel for six months.

My husband developed anxiety later in life doing things he has done for years.

What you're talking about is just normal human emotions, when people refer to "performance anxiety" they are usually referring to an anxiety disorder. Crippling anxiety that doesn't spontaneously resolve.

If you're in your 20s and experiencing this, perhaps.

If you're in your 50s and it's still a constant problem, quite possibly not.

Again, people aren't infinitely malleable, and don't all fit in standard packages.

Even seasoned stage performers often face crippling anxiety before performances late in their careers. Others take their own lives, often at a young age. Dick Cavett is among those who've suffered crippling depression and taken extended leaves due to it.

Depression is a different problem from performance anxiety.

I'd appreciate seeing your sources on that.

They're distinctly different emotions. You might as well ask me for a cite that being angry and being happy are different emotions.

That's an assertion, not a source.

I think you're pulling my leg.

I think you're wrong.

If you don't have a source, you can simply say so.

At this point, I'll simply presume as much and move on.

Depends on how they’re grading. If they’re just grading on final output plus looking at the work process for authenticity you’d be fine. But a lot of people would probably needlessly grade on process.

Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.

Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?

    they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and 
    evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome 
    by each employee

I've been in the industry for 20+ years and have done my fair share of live coding interviews.

Some of them were horrible. There was one where I had to code on a literal whiteboard while a pair of, uh, let's just call them "people with distinctly non-wonderful personalities" critiqued everything. I did horribly.

I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.

It's perhaps also worth noting that I began a lot of these by saying, "These sorts of interviews make me nervous, but I'll give it my best!" or something similar. And you know what, a good interviewer knows and understands that. They know these kinds of interviews make 99% of the population nervous. So acknowledging that fact helped me to feel at ease.

So, done well, I think they can be great.

> I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.

My best interview experiences were like this. I thought I did well and left those interviews feeling great, positive reinforcement, great performance of code, plenty of time left over! Just for a faceless and ambiguous rejection letter :) I started getting an aggregate view that people just didn't want to pay me that much, or that there's some external factor on a search engine or within the industry about me that I'll never be aware of, but I landed on my feet on the entrepreneurial side.

So guess I'll never know!

Did all of your positive interviews result in rejections?

Some of mine did. That always hurt. But, I mean...

1. A lot of companies follow the "it's better to turn away 10 qualified hires than to make one bad hire" adage

2. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, that might be true for 10 other candidates as well so I expect a 90% rejection rate even when things go well.

3. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific domain knowledge (maybe it's fintech, and they've worked in fintech before and I haven't) and it might be a tiebreaker in their favor

4. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific tool/framework/language I don't. If I have experience with 50 tech buzzwords, and so does the other candidate, but 27 of mine overlap with the company's requirements and 29 of theirs do, then that might be a tiebreaker in their favor.

Anyway, being an entrepreneur is better anyway. I'm glad you found success. I miss running my own show. Every day.

Right I’m aware there were potentially other reasons like what the very first chapter in all the tech career handbooks say, as you wrote, and they all concluded that I was wasting my time on a broken process, while surrounded by people bragging about the multiple offers they are able to line up in the same time frame somehow. Well good for them.

I was getting the short straw so I unsubscribed, good for me that was an option at all.

I feel like the process is broken in a looooooooooot of ways, but I can't feel that a low % of job offers relative to the # of interviews is necessarily a sign of brokenness?

For most software development jobs, I feel that collaboration is important and those sorts of interviews, when done well, are probably one of the least-terrible ways to get a feel for it.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases when this sort of interview is not ideal. Not all development jobs require collaboration. And there are brilliant developers who just don't interview well. Etc.

In the end, though, you won. Entrepreneurship is tough but ultimately I love it more than working for others. It's your life, why work for others if you can help it?

Apparently my coworkers interviewed someone a while back who got pretty far into the onsite interview panel before they realized the candidate was not the same person typing out the code they were seeing on CodeBunk...

How'd they find out?

As far as I know, someone noticed something fishy and told the final interviewer their suspicion to be sure. Like the way the candidate would only explain stuff after it was written. If you're on a video call and observant, I think you could tell if the typing didn't sync up with what you saw. I imagine it might be hard to notice at first, but if someone suspects it I would think a skilled interviewer could throw a few wrenches in their plan to see how the respond.

This is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and not just 'point them at the Github'.

Or stuff that's so old, it predates Git, let along Github

Here's some code I wrote back in 1987/88, for example.

http://www.retroarchive.org/swag/MISC/0153.PAS.html

There's a spelling mistake / typo: it should be ensure not insure.

> This procedure allows the programmer to insure

Spelling mistake from 35 years ago. Strong no hire!

Wait... perhaps that's why the github account route may have issues...

The comments were so good, I kinda had to point it out!

This is ridiculous. It might be true that there are many great developers that have nothing on github but it is certinaly not true that "actual best developers have little or nothing to point to on github".

There are plenty of "actual best developers" who have prolific amounts of stuff on github, directly or indirectly.

>> The actual best developers mostly have little or nothing to point to on GitHub. You might find this shocking but many of them don't even know how to use Git at all.

It all goes in circles. As soon as Github (GIT in general) becomes adopted by the majority of enterprise (already happened probably) we are gonna see something else which is "cool". Something else, smaller, simpler, cooler gonna attract the next wave of programmers. I am sure there is a great space for innovation.

...source?

Game industry would be one source. At least for many teams and projects, Git isn't very useful (horrible for large binary files common in AAA games). So many companies still use Perforce or sometimes you'll see SVN still. That means a whole bunch of really qualified engineers who have never or rarely used git.

I'm sure there are other industries for which that is true too.

It's a good reminder how small a section of the tech industry comments on Hacker News.

I've encountered this myself as someone who maintains small open source games. Engineers with vastly more experience than I do have approached me with contributions, but needed me to walk them through installing and using git. You could tell they were good engineers because they were so eager and happy to learn it. I can't speak for how big of a demographic these types of engineers are but they certainly exist.

> as someone who maintains small open source games

Are those public? Very intriguing, would you mind sharing a link?

Uh, git is how old? "Engineers with vastly more experience" might be how old?

Hate to tell you, but these engineers probably wrote code pre-Google, or pre-WWW, and actually got stuff done. Amazing, that.

Timeline of Github: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_GitHub

suggests that things really got started in 2013.

Thus anyone with over (2022 - 2013 approx 9 years) of experience might have had substantial pre-git experience.

Noting as well that even post 2013, github might not have been the default in many organizations.

Heaps of us.

A stack of manuals several feet thick...

I started at the end of this era, working on a monitoring team that supported mainframes, network and data center systems. My second week on the job, my delivery of books arrived. About 30 linear feet of documentation. Iirc, it was part of our ELA.

I kept a couple of the references that I spent a lot of time in, along with my Perl books. Good times.

Old people who manage legacy systems, like that one guy duct-taping a bank's online operations.

Are they really the "best" developers? It just sounds like a different skillset and mindset, not necessarily better or worse.

I am willing to wager in a broad sense, that the best COBOL, Fortran, and RPG, that "Old people who manage legacy systems" is probably a fair estimate, and there is probably narrow overlap between developers for those languages and git experience.

There are lots of younger folks who fall into supporting these platforms through experience, but I would also wager that the number of fresh, doe eyed engineers graduating from uni/college thinking "I am going to be the best COBOL programmer!" can probably be counted on one hand :P

I encountered such a person. Her parents were both mainframe nerds and she was a true believer. I think the shock of working as a 23 year old in a group of geezers that had been fighting each other since 1975 was traumatic.

We stole her and she was a pretty awesome DBA last I knew.

Nearly all DBAs i have worked with have been great. Not sure why that is, but it's been very consistent.

Not in GitHub, that's for sure.

SourceForge of course

These "best developers" should really start learning to use Git (and these other newfangled technologies) or else in 10 years they'll be blaming age discrimination when they can't land their next job.

I can believe they don't have an extensive GitHub... but if they can't use Git they must have either only had a few jobs that all used something else(That's fine, just uncommon), or be in a specialist industry that doesn't use Git(Also not common), or they don't know VCS at all.

Plenty of companies use source control other than git. AAA gaming studios are famous for not using git due to git's poor handling of large binary assets w/o workarounds.

I've used other source control systems and they do have benefits over Git to be sure. Access control is a huge one, you can have a large repository and have fine grained access control over who can access what paths in the repository. Heck with some source control systems this access control may even integrate with Active Directory, so there is only 1 account to maintain!

The way to do that with git is to have a lot of tiny repos, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.

Don't get me wrong, git's ability to easily branch is huge. I am totally over working in source control systems that required an admin to approve creating a branch, or where merging branches was a huge deal that could take a very long time to do, but git isn't the end all be all of source control systems, and there are certainly features from other systems that I miss when using git.

Game dev always seemed like a highly specialized thing to me. Performance critical, uses real math, lots of local instead of just server work, art assets...

I'm not saying everyone uses git, but it seems like there's probably not many people who have never had to learn it.

Especially when "knowing git" often means memorizing about 8 commands total if you're not on really big team.

When I pushed for a transition from no VCS at all to git, we couldn't use branches at first for fear that someone would need to access something and not be able to, if someone who actually knew git wasn't around.

Maybe their idea of "Can't use git" means "Can't use it well?"

I mean, a lot (most?) of the largest companies in software don't use it primarily. That being said, I agree that "knowing" git enough to for daily use is picked up very quickly. Your day to day usage of git is I'd say, medium complexity for source control. I've used tools where even cloning the repo could be a hassle, and there were nearly as many footguns as git, without reflog to recover.

Regarding large binary assets, I literally Googled "git large binary assets" and had many hits with various solutions. GitHub started offering Git LFS (Large File Storage) in 2015 -- more than 6 years ago. That said, many places still use Perforce.

It's newish (yes, 6 years is newish for projects that don't have a lot more hours, direction, and dedicated drive behind them than git-lfs seems to) and janky or unintuitive in some cases and adds another obtuse nerdy thing for e.g. artists to figure out (or be supported through) and requires extra software and server config to self-host (most of which is, uh, not as complete as one might hope) and makes backups less dead-simple than plain git and has nothing like an official server-side implementation (last I checked GH's "don't use this for production" implementation was the closest thing) and can make any kind of automation or extra tooling used with git a real pain since much of it's not lfs-aware, including some built-in git commands in certain situations (git-archive against a bare repo, for instance, which can be a super handy command in many situations).

Overall, I like it and have promoted its use and stand by that, but not every place has the time or inclination to screw around with it when they can just pay for something that solves the problem (likely Perforce).

While we're at it, git in general would be one fuck of a lot easier to support for cross-platform users and in tooling for complex projects if libgit2 caught up and took over as the official implementation. The pile-of-binaries-and-shell-and-god-knows-what-else (all living on top of a hacky, huge bundle of junk, on Windows) official Git itself is a huge impediment to doing anything with git other than just executing "git [command]" in Unixy environments. It'd also make "build my own GitHub" type projects far more tractable, cutting out some of GitHub's (and GitLab, et c.) server-side moat.

LFS is a pain, right now, even 6 years in, if you don't tie yourself to a major commercial Git host or put in a lot more effort than traditional self-hosting git requires. To reiterate: I still like and advocate it, circumstances allowing, but it definitely is not a mature solution.

I also think a lot of people in this thread don't understand that large companies don't want everyone having even read access to the entire repo.

Using a system like perforce, artists can drop files in the assets part of the repo, translators can have access to script files, and coders can have access to the parts of the code that they are working on.

Source code licenses are still a thing, where after buying a license only a certain # of people in a company are even allowed to view the licensed source code.

The way this is worked around is a build server exists where some pre-built libraries are pulled from during a developer's local machine build.

While I'm happy to no longer be working in that environment, it is unfortunate that many of the commenters cannot imagine an ecosystem different than their day to day. :/

Or use an IDE that has all that build in.

> "My wife wrote all of those."

There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file.

Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.

>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why

At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")

> tangible benefits to more diversity

People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.

I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of people who have a hard time relating to one another and socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite situation in a company?

My guess is that is it possible to have great diversity of thought and experience while still having high social cohesion.

During the height of immigration in the US, there was high social cohesion within communities of people who came from the same country while still having great diversity of ideas across the nation as a whole.

My personal take on this is that it's the dark side of multiculturalism. The loss of the melting pot as a cultural meme was probably a sign of this. Social cohesion depends on a set of shared values. The "melting pot", for it's issues, provided the shared national myth to align and unify the disparate cultures.

Take that away, and you get the natural result of multiple cultures with drastically different moral codes, and no core to form around.

Interesting point on drastically different moral codes. I'm curious if, during the height of immigration to the US, the "melting pot" tended to consist of people immigrating from areas with mostly similar moral codes.

It appears that many immigrants retained much of their culture while still integrating in ways that let different cultures work together, but maybe that is because the moral foundation was similar enough to allow cohesion as a whole while retaining some sense of cultural identity.

> If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does)

Strong claim requires strong evidence, please.

Why would a company choose to do anything that didn't directly make money or cut cost? Companies often have to be compelled to do things where the ROI is measured in decades no?

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity.

But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.

I've seen various "innovation" studies that show more diverse teams come up with more ideas and are more productive, but less diverse teams think they are more productive. A quick internet search turns up https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/09... for example.

For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.

Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.

Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"

If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.

Which one was that?

IIRC: Al Capone.

Probably hard to research.

How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.

Using that definition, isn't every pre-product-market-fit startup a focus group?

> Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and gender diversity contribute to business success. A McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a statistically significant connection between diversity and financial performance. The companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns that were above their national industry median, and the companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.

https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...

Are there any studies demonstrating causality? I can think of plenty of reasons diversity would correlate with success. For example, being based in a large city will have a lot of advantages for many businesses, along with having a more diverse hiring pool available that will naturally lead to a more diverse staff. But this doesn't suggest to me that adding a diversity quota or similar policy, all else being equal, will help a company succeed.

Confounded by the fact that succesful companies are located in growing areas (or move there), which is where immigrants also want to go. E.g. San Francisco.

I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce the confounding.

Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that diversity makes companies less successful - but being successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack' that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.

Would the study have been published if it came out the other way? If not, you have a form of inadvertent p hacking.

Cynically, couldn't these results be due to lower average wages offered to women and minorities?

I can say this as someone with ADHD, neurodiversity specifically allows me to approach problems in radically different manners than my coworkers which sometimes makes things an absolute cake walk for me and sometimes makes them nearly insurmountable. This is a result of my approach to problem solving which has been trained on the problems I've experienced in the past and my natural disposition. I think an entirely homogeneous company would have issues with tunnel vision - they might be excellent at dealing with some issues and absolutely flabbergasted with others... having a more diverse team ensures that you've got more varied experiences to draw on when approaching problems.

Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees.

I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.

Anecdotally speaking, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to find examples of companies doing stupid things that could have been avoided with a more diverse decision-making team.

Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.

Or Google Photo that tagged Black people as gorilla. Clearly, developers must have tested with their own photos (on top of generic datasets) and if they had had more diversity within their dev team, they would have caught that sooner.

I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just kept climbing.

But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.

> Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire.

Ironically, Mindy's brother pretended to be a black man to get into Med school.

> basically for free

Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read

> She hates my politics

What does that mean?

It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".

There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu...

[1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...

> It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".

Asians are current and historic targets of discrimination. This sometimes gets masked in outcome stats because lots of Asians in the US are themselves or first generation descendants of immigrants through programs which filter for the top end of the socioeconomic, and more particularly recently technical skills, spectrum.

Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit."

The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?

This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years or so.

That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation.

I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt.

Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it.

That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.

I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature.

"Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.

I don't think the majority of hires at large companies in the past were corrupt. Certainly that hasn't been my experience hiring people at large tech orgs in the present, and the process hasn't changed terribly much really. Given the scarcity of technical ability, we simply can't afford the corruption.

You seem to be discounting the meritocratic process by which people end up graduating from high-ranking schools. Prestigious law firms for instance will only consider graduates from specific institutions, specifically because they act as a filter for talent and ability.

You also seem to be conflating the hiring of people who are culturally similar to corruption. In fact there are many benefits in collaborating in a culturally homogenous environment. Maintaining such an environment in order to reap those benefits has merit too.

I guess it depends on your definition of "corrupt" and where you draw the line between corrupt and not corrupt. Would it be the tech recruiter's fault if there were, for instance, a pipeline problem that sharply limited the diversity of their candidate pool? I don't think so, but that wouldn't change the reality that the pool itself is a reflection of corruption elsewhere in the system. I don't know how you could possibly argue otherwise when black people and women were effectively excluded from many industries until relatively recently.

The "meritocratic process" is laughable. Legacy admissions have always been a critical component of those systems, especially once wealth was no longer an adequate filter; allowing a few newbies through the sieve in order to conceal the real purpose of the ivies—perpetuation of an elite caste—has been the game for a long time. As universities are pressured from the left (getting rid of standardized testing) and right (getting rid of any sort of racial consideration in admissions), legacy will only become more important as an attribute. That a few people beat the odds doesn't at all imply that the system is fair or that that solution is scalable.

"Culture fit" is realistically both important and historically has been a really problematic thing to conflate with or consider alongside "merit." It is a tough problem and I don't have a great answer to it.

I would define "corrupt" as hindering the profitability or stated objectives of the organization[1]. If a team hired to get the job done happens not to be diverse, that doesn't mean the hiring is corrupt. For instance, winning NBA teams don't tend to be very diverse, but I don't see anyone seriously suggesting the NBA draft is corrupt.

By that token, if your company tends to hire a certain sort of person, that is by no means an indication of corruption. I certainly don't see what's inherently corrupt about submitting a job application, going through interviews, and ultimately being hired, mostly by strangers.

When you say you want the solution to be "fair", what do you mean exactly? If a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by Chinese people hires only additional Chinese people, with the intent of maintaining the efficiency of a culturally homogenous environment, is it fair? Does it matter? It certainly isn't corrupt. Doesn't this apply to every business and any culturally discriminatory hiring criteria?

1. This does a pretty good job of describing cronyism https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

These legacy admissions are also the reason most Ivies can afford to do need-blind admissions.

Even granting that the current admissions truly are need-blind (which I think it is reasonable to dispute), the smallest Ivy endowment is still over $4 billion. We’re not talking about a state university using full freight foreign students to subsidize in-state students because they have no other choice.

There’s no reason sticker price tuition at Brown needs to be almost $60k a year, and it is scandalous that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale charge tuition at all.

> I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours

Please read some autobiographies of people from diverse backgrounds trying to break into atypical careers, the topic of imposter syndrome and anxieties about wanting to be taken on one's own merits regularly features.

I don't disagree, but my point was that they shouldn't. Clarence Thomas famously wrote about believing that his own success was tainted by affirmative action, and later he was indeed appointed to the Supreme Court primarily because he was a black conservative. That doesn't mean he was unqualified or less fit for the court than previous appointees, no matter what his own insecurities were, and it also doesn't mean that he or our society would have somehow been better served by Clarence Thomas not being given any of the opportunities affirmative action programs may have afforded him.

The deeper problem is that there isn't really a solution here. The old system wasn't neutral and instead actively discriminated against huge swathes of the population. That the beneficiaries of that system never doubted their worthiness doesn't make the old system better, and any change that impacts them will suffer from the same aspersions about a lack of "merit" that we are seeing now.

> Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions.

What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?

This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.

If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.

On the other hand it must be nice getting paid above your abilities, which is (one of) the common outcomes of diversity hiring, isn't it?

What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? But somehow, that isn't a problem for you?

> What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability?

Is it actually same ability though? IIRC the men vs women difference disappears once you control for hours worked, for example.

The only tangible benefit I've ever heard of was qualifying for contracts with diversity quotas.

Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.

What is that saying about "tell me what your incentives are and I'll tell you how you'll act"?

Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a project which one of the selling points was that it was designed and implemented by women.

He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?

Honestly, I'm mixed. On one hand that's basically false advertising. On the other, I despise external incentives that aim at gender, so anything that hacks this sounds good to me. I'll probably slant to the former though.

Sounds like she got all her work done on time.

Well, someone definitely got all her work done.

Goodluck getting her to help solve an issue in her code in a timely manner

It sounds like, if that timely manner is at least a day long then she'd get it done reliably. I think the only issue you could possibly see here is one of labour exploitation if she was sending the work off to someone else - it might be that she specifically shouldn't be paid but you as a company would really like to get in touch with whoever is on the other side.

Or it might just be that some people are introverted and crack under pressure whenever the spotlight is on them but, once they have quiet time to themselves, they can really power through problems.

The description of the scenario isn't nearly enough for us to get any grip on what was going on without making some huge assumptions, but the facts that we have are that she tended to really struggle when coordinating with coworkers and that she completed the work expected of her - there could be numerous explanations and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.

> and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.

It's a story a friend told me a long time ago. I didn’t and couldn’t fact-check it. The husband’s theory came from the fact she apparently mentioned her husband was also a software consultant.

I had a friend who's wife worked in tech and even had a patent but she could barely code and could barely make her way through real world, on the job, tech problems. Her husband (my friend who worked in a major tech company) every night helped her do her work and she happily told us about it.

I have a relative who is severely dyslexic, whose spouse will revise/rewrite/advise on written communication extensively. But they know better than to take a job where written communication is a large, critical part of the work!

If it's an important email, my wife will review and fix it before I send it. If you need good writing skill, you should definitively hire my wife!

I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done.

I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.

Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.

I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).

Sounds like the real value play for your employers is to keep you in the communications side and add a zero to your paycheck.

(Someone who has jumped on airplanes to both keep and lose clients)

If it's external & important, I get a proof reader.

My (professional) written communication is a strong point for me. What kind of job has mostly sending emails as the work?

We were a Linux System Administration consultancy. The product wasn't the e-mails, but nearly everything we did for our clients was designed/planned, scheduled, organized, and documented in e-mail. Yes, sometimes we would work on things with the client on the phone, those were usually followed up with an e-mail about what was done.

These e-mails were copied to our internal mailing lists so that they could be peer reviewed and someone else could be cross-trained on it in case the primary wasn't available. Also, every task we did had a one sentence description written up that would be shared with the team, again as a kind of peer review.

Ok, thanks. All my Linux skills (which weren't many to begin with) are basically gone since it's all cloud now.

What's running in the cloud if not Linux?

If you run "serverless" It's all hidden from you.

Not to mention it's all deployed with Terraform now. You can stand up and configure thousands of servers without the command line

FreeBSD!

Product/Software support. Above the Tier 1 level, at the stage where you're talking with the Dev team directly.

Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need someone who can understand either the code or the developer's comments, but can then put it in layman's terms.

Edit: DevOps, too.

I'm in a DevSecOps role and hate it.

Why downvote my experiences?

I didn’t, but I suspect people were hoping for something more substantive. What about it don’t you like? Is there something specific to this thread that relates to your role and reminds you why you hate it?

Your comment did nothing to further the conversation or take it in an interesting direction.

It was a direct reply to "DevOps too".

I asked for examples. I replied to that response stating that I'm already DevSecOps. Not sure what else they would be looking for. If they had additional info, maybe they should chime in.

In my team, Duty Managers / Service Delivery Managers / Operations Managers. Communication in every which direction is #1 skillset I look for in the team (as well as being organized, disciplined, eager to learn, sense of ownership).

A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-ordinate, plan and inform. Customize medium, format, length, message for each group to enhance understanding. Develop spidey sense of paranoia against assumptions, misunderstandings.

"eager to learn, sense of ownership"

Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie your hands means one is given all the responsibility without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because of that.

Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.

Downvoting on HN is fickle; sometimes it's the point that's being made, sometimes it's how it's being made. I think asking "have I meaningfully contributed to conversation" is part of it... but a lot of downvotes comes as emotional response or simple disagreement. You can choose whether to take it seriously and grow/change to satisfy it, or be yourself and take votes in passing.

That being said - sad to hear you are not eager to learn and don't have sense of ownership; you are correct that disqualifies you from some roles (most, in a way, but recruitment process is all sort of obscure and counter-logical).

For what little it may be worth: it mostly comes back to the old proverb of "courage to change things you can, accept things you cannot, wisdom to know the difference, and zen to make peace with it". I try to coach my team members very early on "these are things that are part of organizational machine; satisfy them so you are done with them. These are the things where you can make a difference and where most of your value will be concentrated. Focus on those once you've fed the machine".

I think part of disillusionment, at least it was mine, is the feeling that somebody somewhere, and ideally ourselves, should have all the necessary power. In reality, we all operate within constraints, more or less visible or scrutable.

Ultimately, life is imperfect, professional life included; it's a life's pursuit for most of us on how to grow our own acceptance and peace with it. Sometimes we make that change within ourselves, sometimes we are able to make an external change that aligns more with our priorities.

Best of luck!

That proverb holds a lot of truth.

I would add that treating the company's money as if it is your own also works quite well.

Never get too attached to a user story/task is another important lesson. Sometimes a task has to go, even though you disagree.

To OP I'd say that you should really try to rediscover the desire to learn.

That and being able to quickly locate related information for a task are two of my most important skills.

To add to your point of treating company's money as your own -- "Tracking Money" will help understand a lot of corporate priorities and explain a lot of decisions. --I-- may want to update something because "it's the right thing to do / makes for cleaner code / etc". But the management probably has a reason (good bad or ugly) for their own priorities. Advice I read mid-way through my career is "understand your manager's goals and reasons", and it was so simple and yet so... shocking to so many of us techies. We always expected manager to understand our recommendations and priorities. Hubris! :)

(in Public Sector, "Tracking Money", interestingly, did not work as well; but "Tracking Personal Status/Blame/Credit" worked well. The two should be equivalent but in my limited experience there's differences)

Sometimes downvoting is purely to move a comment down when there's another comment right below it that's being pushed up (with an upvote).

In a sense, it's almost like a comment got 2 upvotes.

I once was a team lead for an team of outsourced software developers. It was the worst part of my career. The whole outsourced team was awful. Wholly incompetent.

I had the responsibility of delivering a product, but I didn't have the authority to fire these folks who were a net negative on the project. I would have been happier with implementing the whole project myself, which I mostly did.

I too was unmotivated, but the stress of being responsible was unbearable.

Perhaps some people disagree that "most organizations" give responsibility without authority, but I've seen it happen a several times in my career.

I have also been bitten by this and I also ascribe it as the worst part of my career.

A warning to anyone who hasn't experienced this, if you're ever tasked with doing this the correct answer is "no" followed by "goodbye".

I’ve left positions for similar reasons.

Another strain of this is forcing some COTS application to work via a million hacks and integrations (usually via consulting resources) when a fundamental architecture or application change is needed. Responsibility coupled with the resource and authority to execute is stressful in its own way but it at least allows one to more easily own their failures.

You know what they say, if you can't change your workplace .. change your workplace!

> Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted

There was more there than feelings. Saying you know how most organisations work is probably it.

That's been my experience. I believe That's a universal truth when it comes to working in groups. You can't do what you think is best. You have to do what the group decides, or what the person in the leadership structure above you says. I'd be very curious to hear about company structures that don't have a top-down leadership/authority scheme.

Technical Account Management.

Recruitment

Ok, thanks

any customer facing job I guess. like sales, marketing, support, PR?

HR

Interesting, but I guess they don't get paid well.

Its relative. I know plenty of data nerds making 6 figures in HR.

6 figures would be good

Edit: Thanks! Looking at internal data analyst roles in my HR dept (weird that they aren't under a technical job code, so I wasn't seeing them before). Maybe I'll apply to one.

I guess this is like when companies try to use correctness and formatting of a resume for proof of attention to detail or communication skills or something like that—but people just pay for professional proofreading and formatting instead.

(it's proof for a certain kind of social and professional awareness, rather, I'd say, which is true for quite a few hiring norms, really, but doesn't mean you can expect a new hire to compose really good documents on the job...)

I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done. I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.

Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.

I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).

This why I've had to deal with very regressive HR on-boarding processes. I'm sick of companies treating new employees like their data doesn't matter and they can be required to sign up to any service no matter what the ToS is like.

> "My wife wrote all of those."

Of course.

You would never ever send an important email without getting it checked, or having someone write it, if it's not your thing.

I do like the way the replies to this seem like they are frankly, retarded.

I get you are single but if you don't understand how relationships work this might be a good start at retrospectively thinking about it.

Relationships are about teams of two putting the best of either forward.

This does not make you twice as good, it's somewhat exponential. It's even more powerful when you decide to do it for life.

(And single people use friends, this is exactly how you apply for jobs, with the help of others if available)

What if you need something urgent and the wife is not available?

You're looking at this from the wrong angle. First that person needs to have basic competencies for their job, before involving someone else.

> I guess we should have hired his wife!

Classic comment.

That sounds to me like it would meet the legal definition of fraud. A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.

> A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.

No, probably not. Speak to any business owner who has been in a lawsuit and they'll likely tell you it's not worth the headache. A close relative told me that even if a customer straight up won't pay for a done job, he'd rather forgo the payment then deal with a lawsuit.

Lawsuits usually have:

1) monetary costs - those lawyers are very expensive

2) emotional costs - take a big mental toll to deal with

3) reputational costs - it goes in the public record. Next time a potential candidate googles your company, it might show up that you sued a former employee. Hopefully they read further to see if you were justified in doing so....

4) opportunity costs - you (hopefully) have better things to do with your time

If you are big enough, maybe you have a legal team to deal with this stuff. But even then, you have to choose your battles. A hired lawyer is still expensive and it's not worth going after small battles, even the ones you know you will win.

Also, as others have mentioned, it's not unreasonable to have a friend or relative look over your email communications during your interview process unless you were explicitly asked not to do so. In fact, it's a smart idea!

The Ford dealership quoted me wrong on a trade-in payoff and later tried to get me to pay it ($1000). Letter in the trash. Next one came on a law firm's letterhead quoting a bunch of stuff about a contract. In the trash.

Never heard from them again.

More extreme one -- my auto loan provider accidentally double-charged my bank account for the amount of my car loan payoff (it didn't bounce, either). They instructed me to go through my bank to get the second charge refunded as fraudulent (which I was able to do and I was refunded and happy within 4 days), but then on their end they also sent me a refund check for some reason. When I received the check I gave my auto loan provider a call and they told me they were sorry there is nothing they could do and I would have to cash it, so I gladly got the remaining $6k of my car paid off for free by their own human error. I already had the certificate from them showing the car was paid off and the account was fully closed at this point. One year later and it's still fully paid off on my credit report. They gave me free money. The error on their part was their system had no way of handling "what if our charges are reported as fraud and get yanked back". Well, that and sending out a check after the fact.

It makes me wonder at what $ amount they would have begun to care about their error and tried to correct it.

I had a client once who refused to pay for one particular day of working. They paid everything else, but not that particular day, which was odd. (It may have been a day I worked from home and didn't push any commits, so maybe that was the reason.)

I think it was about € 600. I spoke to a lawyer, may have written a letter threatening a lawsuit even, but the lawyer explained that it just wasn't enough to actually start a lawsuit over. Even if you win, lawsuits take a lot of time and energy. I just dropped it. And them, obviously.

A different case from the opposite side:

I'm currently looking at a disagreement with my previous phone provider. They charged me too much over the past year. I called them about it, and they wanted me to prove we agreed on the monthly fees I claimed, and not the ones they claim. But they can't claim we agreed on their fees, so I just stopped paying and switched to a different (better and cheaper) phone provider (which I should have done a long time ago anyway). They're threatening to cut my phone which already isn't with them. They want money from me, but yesterday I wrote them a letter explaining they actually owe me money.

I expect this will go away. They may register me somewhere as a bad-payer, but there's an appeal process that I expect will side with me, because the phone company can't prove a thing.

There are laws against employer retaliation. If that employer never asked him prior and he never lied, what crime was committed? The employer failed to do their due diligence. As others have said, it's VERY common to request assistance in drafting resumes/emails/letters when pursuing employment.

> what crime was committed?

Several kinds and several counts of felonious fraud, all prosecutable, just for starters. If they signed their employment contract, which they most certainly did, that's perjury. If it was mailed back to the employer, that's mail fraud, a felony; if emailed, that's wire fraud. Position was remote, but if they ever entered the office, then as many counts of trespassing, at least, unless they took lunch and returned, which would double the number of counts. If they logged into anything, such as VPN, or Office 365, etc., each instance a separate count of computer fraud. The felonies here stack up high and rapidly. I'm not sure why you'd believe any mistakes made by the employer could possibly have any affect on the prosecutability of this and other similar criminals committing similar crimes.

Writing your own emails or resume isn't required or expected. Some people have assistants that do a lot of work by proxy of you. Its just very awkward that it becomes noticeable in a negative manner in the workplace.

> or expected

That's news to me. I have always assumed the resumes I have been reading were written by the applicants themselves. I guess I was wrong.

Resume preparation services are common and easy to find, and though I've never used such services I am sure many people do and I would not view it as unethical as long as the resume accurately summarized experience and qualifications.

Many college hires will use their college's resume writing workshop, and there are also commercial options.

Also, friends and family.

Why wouldn't you get the single most important document in the application process reviewed and rewritten?

I hope it was carbon black ink on papyrus ))

Unless they were making like $500k a year, it will probably cost more in legal fees than you would get back

The only people who win in a lawsuit are the lawyers.