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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Hi! Randomly scrolling here but I read your compensation page in the handbook [1] and have a question:

Since compensations are set by/in coordination with the candidates, but are not shared with others, how do you avoid systematic bias? IIRC studies show pretty clearly that e.g. women (for whatever reasons, but let's not go there) systematically negotiate for lower salaries. Do you have processes to at least monitor that to flag if there are indeed such imbalances?

Just asking out of interest. Very nice description & interesting concepts overall!

[1]: https://handbook.opencraft.com/en/latest/team_compensation/

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To still answer you on this -- we don't differentiate in the hiring or compensation process between men and women, but I review the numbers from time to time. And we don't actually seem to have any issue with this, without any specific effort.

That makes me wonder what the results of studies based on processes closer to ours would say. Our numbers are not large enough to be representative, but one unique aspect of our compensation process is that it doesn't have _any_ human decision element for a specific application, thus there is no possibility of gender bias on our side in the determination of compensation. There is still the self-bias on the candidate side, but I wonder if it is helping, to know that there won't be a judgement of worth, only the application of a predetermined rule that applies identically to everyone.

And thanks for the kudos, I'm glad you appreciate the concepts -- we put a lot of heart in it. :)

I don't doubt that you're asking this in good faith and it's a legitimate question. However, it's offtopic in Who Is Hiring threads, so I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31948012.

It's offtopic in Who Is Hiring threads because this isn't a feasible place to have an expansive discussion about a topic that is important, general, inevitably controversial, but tangential to any specific ad. Fairness is a factor too, since the same question applies to and could/should be asked of dozens (if not hundreds) of organizations in these threads.

It's a question, of course, that people are welcome to discuss on Hacker News in general, and there have been many such discussions and debates over the years.

Fair point. Thanks for elaborating! :)

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