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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

My take is; there is nothing wrong with looking for this stuff but relying on it is short-sighted.

Personal experience of mine is; people who spend a lot of non-work time on side projects and open source bring a specific energy to their work. What they are usually not good at is turning up for work, getting their head down and diligently burning through some work. Instead they tend to be ideas people and leaders.

All organisations need a balance of personality and experience to be effective.

So get excited about Bob because he is an Open Source advocate and regular conference speaker. But also get excited about Alice because her experience is right and when she interviews she is dedicated and detail-oriented.

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I agree with this one. People that have side projects are generally driven: they are more eager to com up with ideas and are motivated to pursue ideas and projects that they find interesting. Which is great if their ideas are being pursued, and only a distraction if their dayjob needs them to focus on something less exciting or even something they have a distaste for.

I disagree, I think side projects are a sign of being able to put their head down, day in - day out. They have a certain divergent way of thinking that I think might be significantly valuable for companies looking for that type of thinking, especially in a crew of people that don't maintain and assist open source or create their own side-projects. I think this could go either way of course, but it's not a set in stone thing to say side project-people are a 'type.'

I will agree with the balance issue, I do think they can tunnel vision, as I'm guilty of it. On trying to create features they feel they need. WTS, I feel strategic in my cause of prioritizing what me and my users could benefit from.

I know Alice and Bob are mega-classic foo/bar-style example names, but I also feel like it brings an unnecessary implication to use gendered names as examples when talking about hiring.

Relax, Bob is transgender. You can't make assumptions like that without asking for pronouns first. Duh. :D

I can't tell satire from reality anymore.

I'm being very sincere. It feels out of place here for the masculine example name to be the outgoing FOSS-contributing self-driven one ("ideas people and leaders") and the feminine example name to be the one who is good at showing up on time, keeping her head down, and being told what to do.

If they were reversed, you could take offense to Alice being the head-in-the-clouds, undisciplined, and unreliable one while Bob is focused, hard-working, and gets the job done.

Of course that would be equally silly, because an example is just an example and there's no reason to read this sort of thing into it.

"It's you who's drawing all those dirty pictures"

The Rorschach Test

http://bouldertherapist.com/html/humor/MentalHealthHumor/ror...

Hey now I didn’t say I was offended, just that it seems out of place in such a context :)

Poe's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

1. Is the suggestion to use unisex names like Alex and Taylor instead? Do we have to say Candidate A and Candidate B?

2. Did you find Alice was a negative gender stereotype in the post?

I actually had the opposite impression: Bob is a free spirit/idealist who can’t focus on his day job but Alice is a practical/good employee who gets stuff done. If the roles had been reversed I think it would have been more likely to raise a flag for me. I can how someone could have the opposite interpretation, that Bob is a thought leader and Alice is a simple worker bee. It seems to depend on the reader's interpretation.

I know we're all searching for ways to become morally outraged, but it feels like no rational person would draw this conclusion, particularly considering that Alice and Bob were originally created as generic placeholders when discussion cryptography. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

There's no need to imply I'm morally outraged when I posted this in about as un-outraged a manner possible. It's easy for you or I to think it's ridiculous when we have knowledge of the history of these names as examples throughout computing, but it feels like no rational person could look at them in this context and not think that a person who lacks that background knowledge may draw the wrong conclusion.

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