Telephone numbers? I found that I identified a lot more with area code 206 than 425 or 253, just as I identify a lot more with an @gmail.com address than @hotmail.com or @aol.com.
- Kaytlyn (female, youngish, spelled unconventionally)
- who graduated from WSU (the rival of my alma matter)
- who has a 253 area code (my least favorite suburb)
- who uses Papyrus for headings (my least favorite font)
- with the email address [email protected] (triple yuck)
I would want to get that person in for an interview and explicitly check the subtle biases of me and other people who are making hiring decisions.
True story: when I was in college I had a classmate in my database class who was so good-looking it kind of hurt to look at her. I never once explicitly thought that she was a dumb blonde, but I was surprised when I found out that she was just brilliant. Similarly, I worked on a group project with a few prototypical "frat boys" with their Abercrombie sweaters and backwards baseball caps, and found myself surprised that they were smart as hell, too.
I just want to give people an honest chance to be brilliant and not have their resumes passed over for bullshit reasons, even subconsciously.
I wonder how a surname like "Lang" would fair. It is either Germanic of Asian, though it seems to be primarily Germanic in practice but seems strongly Asian to people who are not familiar with it[0]. If there is discrimination keyed off of "Asian-ish sounding" names then it might be apparent when looking at these sorts of names.
[0] I know a germanic "Lang". Apparently he gets asked how his family got that name a lot.
I'd like to think that we could genuinely make a fairly well balanced system for meritocratic selection. Yes, it's a lot of work and there is always room for error however I'd like to think that ultimately the STEM industry favours these kinds of methods and they could be improved on so we'd see some kind of futuristic system that we saw in the Starship Troopers narrative (as a crazy example that in the movie at least, no-one complained about). Maybe we just need a ton more data to be able to make better predictions. But I also think that face-to-face interviews are ultimately needed as others have mentioned: cultural fit is important to a degree as well.
On that note it reminds me of the Declara article I read (about the founder Ramona Pierson), where data is working to pair relevant people.
Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]
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[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-discriminates-agai...
[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-30/jpmorgan-s-mistake-...