Somehow many people in this thread are jumping to rebut the idea of meritocratic hiring. I'm with you on that. I think meritocracy is a naive idea and it's actively damaging when hiring teams think they can boil the talent of candidates, and their effectiveness to do a job, down to some objective and comparable score of merit.

I also don't give a shit about making my page loads quicker. That's rarely what the world, or the business for that matter, needs.

What I'm talking about is the specific phenomenon of discriminating against a candidate based on their gender or race, and whether people think this is okay.

I'm concerned with the process of hiring software engineers because it's something I have to do daily, and have done for a very long time. I'm coming here to talk about it (rather than other social issues) because I think others here have experience in the same area.