He's close. The real bias is against extremely good looking guys named Rene who are also way smarter and charismatic than everyone else. Terrible bias.

I dunno. "Rene" sounds a lot like "renege." Which probably means you'll sign on to a project and abandon it halfway through or something. Very sus.

(I wish I could say my early interviewing rubrics were any better than this. We have come a long way as a people, we Silly Valley programmers.)

That kinda makes sense, unless you want Rene to be your replacement.

Isn't that the definition of affirmative action? Which most companies claim to do (e.g Google [1]).

Admittedly Google also claims not to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics, which is somewhat contradictory to the definition of affirmative action as positive discrimination [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/eeo/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

The Wikipedia article did not define affirmative action as positive discrimination.

“Affirmative action (also sometimes called reservations, alternative access, positive discrimination or positive action in various countries' laws and policies)…”

It calls them the same thing

No. Positive discrimination is a form of affirmative action in various countries' laws and policies. Positive action is another. Positive action is not positive discrimination. Paragraph 2 mentioned merely targeting encouragement for increased participation even if you did not know what positive action meant.

The text attests to both our interpretations.

1) By saying x is sometimes called y under some circumstances, the text implies x (Affirmative action) is equal to or a subset of y (Positive discrimination)

2) The second paragraph also suggests examples of affirmative action that wouldn’t constitute positive discrimination

The text would support your interpretation if the article ended after the 1st sentence. And the 1st sentence did not mention positive action.