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Comment by ldd- | Hacker News Reader

Key difference . . . names are chosen by a person's parents, while email addresses are chosen by a person for themselves.

Focusing on the name, which the person can't control, instead of on the person's accomplishments (resume), which the person can absolutely control, would seem to be an indicator of bias.

I don't think your point holds up.

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You don't think that your parents' income or education level has an effect on your later success?

And sure, it would be better to ignore names and focus on a resume -- but people rely on subconscious cues all the time. If your only goal is to find good candidates as quickly as possible, a subconscious cue which is usually correct works to your advantage -- whether it's "people with degrees from Harvard are stuck-up snobs", "people who write their resumes in LaTex are good coders", or "people with weird names like 'jewyl' are useless".

Making important decisions based on stereotypes rather than facts tends to be frowned upon these days. And (at least in the US) it opens yourself up to huge discrimination suits if you base your discrimination on protected classes like gender or race.

I'm not saying that people should do this. Only that they do, and (barring legal consequences) it's advantageous to do so.

This just seems odd given that you have a page of information which is probably a lot more informative. But that's kind of the definition of racism -- even in the face of evidence that would contradict your stereotype you'll cling to your stereotype.

Sure, you have a page of information which is more informative. And you have Google, which is probably even more informative. And you could start phoning college professors and get even more information.

There's a point where the cost of gathering information exceeds its value. Unfortunately, that point sometimes comes halfway through reading a resume.

When you're comparing the candidate against someone else with the exact same resume that differs only by name, the rest of that information is not useful, because it doesn't help you distinguish between the choices.

But isn't that the point of the statement. It would be like saying that if you saw the candidate in person and they did the job equally well, but one had dark skin and the other light skin, so we used their skin color to distinguish -- but then trying to argue that skin color isn't really a proxy for race, since some black people could be lighter than a white person.

To me it just sounds like racism covered up.

Thanks for this. I swear the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves their biases aren't about race are amazing (note I'm not calling anyone racist here).

First thing we all need to do is be willing to flat out admit our own faults without any rationalizations. That's the only way we'll ever be able to overcome it.

I would only consider racism a fault if it leads you to make bad decisions. In the hypothetical situation where two candidates differ only by their race, that won't happen.

Interesting logic. Of course people's resumes don't reflect the entirety of the candidate, so it is likely that basing decisions to move further based on race will eventually cause you to pass up the better candidate. Sounds like a fault to me.

The alternative of ignoring race gives you two identical candidates. If choosing a particular race consistently gives you worse results than choosing randomly would have, that's still evidence supporting racism as a general rule - you're just being racist in the wrong direction.

I just don't buy that it does. We're not picking two random people off the street here. These are people who have passed all the filters needed to have their resumes sitting in front of you. From education, to experience, to HR, to phone screen, etc. If, at this point, the two candidates still look identical, I don't think race gives you any meaningful signal. The black candidate has already proven that he has risen above any disadvantages he might have statistically faced. In fact, this should even be a plus in his column because he had the determination (or raw intelligence) to overcome his disadvantaged lot in life and be sitting in front of you, on equal footing with a white candidate who (statistically) had many advantages given to him.

Which statement? That wasn't the point of your statement that the resume provided more information than the candidates' races. It actually provides no useful information if the other guy has the exact same qualifications. Your example is the same. They do the job exactly the same, so you decide based on the skin color. What would you think about someone who tells you "you should have just decided based on their performance?"

This is not completely true. Of the 10 or so people I have hired, 3 had resume names different from their legal names. One had a Pakistani name, another was chinese, and one had a ghetto name.

It is well known that you can put whatever name on your resume you want. It is not until after you are hired that you have to submit documentation.

In response to cperciva's comment . . . Statistically? Sure . . . on an individual basis? Should be irrelevant . . . that's why we base employment decisions upon the resume of the individual and not based upon the resume of the parents.

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