People have always gone through their in-network to seek advice and find others to work with, since the beginning of time. It's how nearly anything really great or interesting gets done, actually.
Maybe we should shoot for doing better than how it's been done in the past? I think we can as an industry do a lot better than where we are currently.
I'm interested in hearing how you think the search for the most qualified candidates can be improved. Interviewing is, necessarily, a messy process and full of uncertainty.
I don't think it's any less bad to hire someone you don't know all that well because you share friends than it is to hire people because they're you're close friend or a family member.
The point is that it's exclusionary to outsiders, and outsiders tend to be the exact people tech needs more of.
Actually it is; it's how the term is defined.
So at least some people use the word that way.
> nep·o·tism - /ˈnepəˌtizəm/ - noun - the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. [0]
> Nepotism is a form of favoritism which is granted to relatives and friends in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, fitness, religion, and other activities. [1]
That's precisely the point - "close" relations. When we talk about business referrals, it by no means implied that the person being referred is a "friend" in the usual sense of the term (let alone relative). Usually it's just someone you vaguely know (by their work, and/or a chance encounter at a meetup or conference), but don't know too well personally.
And just because they come in via a referral does not mean, ipso facto, that "favoritism" is happening and all objectivity is thrown out the window in the evaluation process.
Our industry is uniquely, as in above-replacement-industry, plagued by a diversity problem, and I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.
It is not guaranteed that this always happens, but I am asserting it often is (as evinced by the "lack of interview" or "going by reputation only" as reputation is rife with bias), and that is a bad thing.
Violence is completely counter to my way of being - so No.
What is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes?
We keep going in circles - with this idea that person that someone in the company already "knows" (or who came in via a referral anyway) gets the job at the expense not just of a comparably qualified (but not known to the company) candidate, a hypothetical more qualified candidate. You just keep assuming that this what happens when companies act on referrals (and implicitly, that it happens a lot).
That's now that I see happening, when referrals are made. But if it's what you want to believe, then it's what you want to believe - and there probably isn't anything I'll be able to say to dissuade you from this belief.
And I'm confused about where I said anything about certainty. I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.
> Holding everything else constant, from job title to industry to location, female and minority applicants were much less likely to report receiving an employee referral than their white male counterparts. More specifically, white women were 12% less likely to receive a referral, men of color were 26% less likely and women of color were 35% less likely. [1]
This is not good. Can we agree on that?
[0] https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-to-use-employee-referrals-withou...
In between these opposite extremes -- your language clearly indicates that you think this level of what we might call "aggravated bias" (hiring not just someone in your network; but hiring them over a more qualified candidate, presumed to exist and be interested in your opportunity) is commonplace, or something close to it.
Such that in your mind, "including referrals in your hiring funnel" == aggravated bias (in the sense above), basically.
As to the bias stats you liked to: the findings interesting, to say the least -- if they can be validated. Unfortunately the link to the original Payscale "study" seems to be broken (if we can call it that -- since remember, this is the work of a private company, with products to push).
Can you show where I said anything approaching this? I do not believe this, nor do I believe I said or even suggested this to be the case.
You are quoting definitions which disagree with your assertion. You used the word incorrectly, and now you're doubling down on that rather than leave the word behind.
Better hope good recruiters aren't seeing this! ;)
But in this context, you used "nepotism" to mean "people one knows" and then leaned even further into saying it didn't mean "close relationships" but any relationships. That's just not what that word means, not how it's commonly used either. So that assertion is wrong.
I'm not sure a) why you think you have authority here, or b) why it's such a sticking point to the point that you've continued this conversation for over an entire day.
I think at this point the only real option you have is to admit the word must have either evolved since you learned it, or you may have learned it wrong/incompletely.
My use of the word "nepotism" was correct here, but more importantly, what the fuuuuuuck does it have to do with my larger point? This is, literally, the definition of pedantry.
It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this, or how it's undermining your primary point, but you do you.
Do you often abandon ideas because of a volume of people disagreeing with you? How do you differentiate that from falling victim to an ad populum logical fallacy?
> You've been antagonistic and personal to me
Apologies! Can you cite, specifically, where I was unambiguously this way towards you? I'd like to understand whether this is just you reading too much into something I said, or if I've genuinely made a mistake here. I suspect the former, but it could be the latter!
> rather than admit that nepotism means family and close friends, not "everyone I know,"
What's interesting here is that you think I ever said, "everyone I know". I certainly didn't mean that, and as far as I can tell, I never said that either. I look forward to seeing the specific language I used that caused your confusion!
> and it has hurt your core thesis
How would this hurt my core thesis, since it's not important to that thesis if the people being favored are close to the person in power?
> multiple people read your posted definitions and noted that they did not support your use of the word.
Noted incorrectly. There's nothing to be done if people write factually false statements on HN, but that's what they are; factually incorrect.
Further they're not "my* definitions, but definitions from prestigious institutions trusted to define English words.
> It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this
That implies there's something to see, when in fact there is not. What's actually weird is how you keep replying, yet with no new information or analysis.
> or how it's undermining your primary point
It cannot be undermining my primary point, as it's not related to my primary point.
> but you do you.
Oh I will, I do not need permission from you to do that. Again, I'm curious about why you take this position of authority, as if you have any control over my behavior at all.
If a hiring manager knows someone, the kind of worker and individual they are, they are in a great position to know if they should hire them.
Is it nepotism though? Your friends are not your family. Unless I'm missing some fine details of what nepotism means as a non native English speaker.
Besides, if you are a reliable employee, I doubt any reasonable company would miss out on an opportunity to consider a strong referral. Regardless of industry.
Referrals are welcome. Filling the managers roles with these type of relationships makes the workers below feel they have no opportunity at those top jobs.
The power base in the US is white middle class. It's not just software that is dominated by white men. Law, medicine, construction, management at corporations. Not just white men. Privileged white men and the few "diverse" people mostly come from a level of privilege that would make my white lucky ass sick to my stomach.
Nice comment.
It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that.
It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a position, but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions, and once you've found each qualified candidate, selecting the candidate that brings the largest difference in perspective (regardless of representation group) will be the best candidate. Given the saturation of straight white men in the SWE field, the odds that another straight white male will give the largest new perspective is not super high (though it is not zero).
The "action" here, if we need to walk away with one "thing" to do, is to saturate your pipeline with candidates from very diverse backgrounds, and then select the best candidate. It's a bullshit move to say, "only straight white men applied" if you did no work at all to reach out to other communities explicitly.
This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes:
1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening
2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview
3. 3ish in-persons to find someone worth an offer.
In other words, a hiring manager has to look at 300+ resumes to find one qualified candidate. So... imagine you get a reference from someone you trust. You go from 1 in 300 odds of finding someone who is basically qualified to 1 in 3.
This is after recruiters have pre-screened the resumes, btw. The candidate pool for Step #1 excludes all the people who apply to a senior SWE role with no Github portfolio, no relevant claimed skills, no degree and no work experience other than Burger King.
I'm curious to hear other people's experience, but I've literally never been in the position of "Do we hire candidate A or candidate B for this tech role?" It's always "Do we think A is good enough, or should we keep looking?"
> but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Sure, defining who is "optimal" is challenging but that's a cop-out. The situation is usually: Person A can't finish FizzBuzz (literally FizzBuzz) in 45 minutes in any language in coderpad, while Person B can do FizzBuzz, some easy recursion problem and maybe some kind of stats brain teaser. There is no world in which both of those candidates are "approximately the same".
Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
> Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like?
Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person.
Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
You have to proactively attempt to break this cycle in order to make any real progress, and a few ways to do that include being intentional about how you find qualified candidates (growing your recruitment pipeline to source from non-traditional groups), and changing your interview process in ways that allow for candidates who are qualified to move forward together, rather than do some kind of false stack ranking of your candidates, creating this incorrect notion that "only one" person for any given role is qualified, which is objectively untrue.
Stack ranking is bullshit when applied to employee performance, why would it be anything but bullshit when applied to the interview process?
Your "action" doesn't fit with the reality I've experienced.
The world of ideas is so high-dimensional that sex & race impact very few of these dimensions. Most straight white men are not the same.
By what metric is software dominated by white men? Are we counting Indians as white?
But assuming 100% of white software developers are men, 54% is still not within the normal range of the word "dominated".
Industry sanctioned nepotism doesn't feel like a good look for the SWE industry, especially given our diversity problems.