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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

Actually, you point out a flaw in this model. Hiring has to be very specific - you need people who you can hang around with for a month and they don't drive you crazy with their teeth grinding or something. So my hiring would have to be very careful and would have to lean towards people who are similar in age and interest to the rest of the team.

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True. For our startup we experienced the same; we were working with a team of 3 and we could just camp out at one of our houses for a week and do dev'ing during the day and relaxing/drinking in the evenings. When we hired a 4th guy to help out these weeks turned from awesome and productive to a sluggish pita week. He produced great work but hanging around with him in the evenings was more stressing and tiring than all the work together.

Similar age and interest? You can't discriminate based on age or interest - that's illegal

I would not put out an ad asking for people to hire, rather I'd work with people on project basis, and if I found one that is a good fit, I'd ask him to join. Would that be illegal also?

Seems unlikely. Also, given how small your company is, it'd be nearly impossible for someone to prove you've discriminated based on any particular factor, as opposed to just being selective. Not enough employees to demonstrate a pattern. So I doubt this should even be a concern for you.

I assume you're talking about the US (apologies if you aren't) - interest is not a protected class.

The following are protected groups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

I'll also state the obvious here - I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't trust legal advice you receive on the internet.

In the real world, and especially in small companies, people eventually hire people they like and get a good feeling about. You're just not allowed to air your preferences in certain areas or restrict the /chance/ to different people. Behind closed doors, though, nothing is any better than before all these laws. If one didn't want to hire someone with quality "X", is their back-room thinking /really/ going to be entirely non-discriminatory? No chance.

Large companies can get in trouble if they seem to have a demographic pattern different from their industry, though. If you're the only Fortune 500 company in your industry that somehow has almost no black employees, someone will probably notice/sue, arguing that it's implausible you could have a demographic skew so much different from your competitors without a discriminatory policy (i.e. can't be explained just by the demographics of qualified people). Then they'll hope that during discovery they find some smoking-gun emails about it. But yeah, if you have 50 employees, nothing much will happen.

I totally agree. It won't work in big companies, but small companies staffed by small-minded (or, sometimes, simply "realistic") people make up a large chunk of the economy. Some discrimination laws even preclude companies under a certain size, because when you only have a handful of people, it can be both practical and necessary to hire to spec.

I guess a legal alternative is to headhunt rather than advertise positions. In the tech industry, I suspect this is a lot easier (thanks to open source, blogs, etc) than elsewhere. Surely there aren't laws against a company hunting down people they want to hire, rather than hanging out their shingle and waiting for people to submit résumés.

> Large companies can get in trouble if they seem to have a demographic pattern different from their industry, though.

Interesting metric. What happens if the difference comes about because you are more fair than your industry's average?

Say you have more female employees. Could a man sue you?

And how do you tell that `more fair' from `less fair'?

It's a gray area, but you usually have to show a pretty big difference that couldn't have been to due to anything but de facto discrimination of a kind that would've been illegal if it were official policy.

The main reason the idea was introduced was because, during the civil-rights era, a bunch of companies and even state/local governments abolished their official "no blacks" policies, but nonetheless unofficially still didn't hire blacks (or, if they had low-level black workers, had a de facto no-blacks-in-management policy). So the 1964 Civil Rights Act is intended to ban that sort of unwritten-rules discrimination. The background of Jim Crow laws was a motivator as well, since many didn't officially impose any restrictions on the basis of race, but used proxies that happened to correlate well with race; and the Civil Rights Act was intended to do away with all those roundabout methods, too.

Thanks for the explanation.

That's not a lot different from how you'd do hiring for a face-to-face company though.

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