Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

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> Imagine you work for the customers' support team: you unblock the client, the client is happy, and you also fix the public doc to unblock anyone after you… That’s all great. But at large organizations (namely: Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) people ask: should we have a CS team at all? Isn’t that objective unscalable and trying to satisfy people a feature we shouldn’t have because every solution should be a product, not a process?

First on the "scalable": CS is most definitely scalable, the question is how much. Without using any tooling whatsoever I dare say it scales in O(N*(log N)^2). I can understand the will to optimize it, and with good tooling, I have no doubt it can become sub-linear, which is more than enough. Anything sub-linear wins money with growth, so no need to "make it a product" (which I read as: Put a team of O(1) to replace those people, but maybe I'm misunderstanding)

Anyway on to my point: Your Google example proves TFA's point: Google having broken CS is one of the major pain point against Google most people here have. Another Google pain point can probably be explained by misuse of KPIs: Google products that keep getting killed, and replaced, again and again.

Even the best people are subject to "the spreadsheet mentality". Even when they are aware of it! My employer's founder bought back the company to stop focusing on the company's share price. Musk would like to take Tesla private. France renationalized EDF which was already >80% own by the state. etc.

I suspect The Spreadsheet Mentality (when it comes to people management) is reinforced by the radical blank-slate/egalitarian civil rights law and enforcement culture relating to employment in the US. There are many legal landmines around Officially Noticing and Considering various differences between individuals, so thinking of people as interchangeable cogs is the most legally defensible approach.

You’re using super obfuscated language so it’s hard to follow what you’re actually saying. It sounds like you’re saying because you can’t evaluate people with lazy mental shortcuts like race or religion, which would be illegal, you have to try and determine their actual merit, which is harder, and that is the source of corporate spreadsheet hell. Consequently, businesses would spend less time in spreadsheet hell if they could just go back to discriminating against classes of people that are now protected by law. Is that really what you mean?

It's possible to read the post you're responding to a lot more charitably than that, and I think it would be more along what HN aspires to be to do so.

I understood his point to be that due to the heightened scrutiny given to all questions of discrimination nowadays, any sort of "holistic" evaluation was abandoned in favor of supposedly objective "Spreadsheet Mentality" evaluations.

This certainly has advantages, not only against conscious discrimination, but also unconscious biases (the infamous "team fit" ending up in homogeneous team composition). But it has large disadvantages as well, in that all employee contributions which do NOT easily fit into the few "objective" metrics are disregarded, which can lead to employees' value to an organization being substantially distorted. I find the rating scales I've seen a highly imperfect fit to the entire contribution an employee can bring.

And the underlying assumption that such rating scales are objective and not subject to manipulation or biases is highly questionable. Ultimately, it all comes down to a manager's judgement, and a bias does not disappear if you dress it up with a numerical weight.

> I understood his point to be that due to the heightened scrutiny given to all questions of discrimination nowadays, any sort of "holistic" evaluation was abandoned in favor of supposedly objective "Spreadsheet Mentality" evaluations.

This is exactly how I read it. Effectively, if you fire someone because you don't think they're doing a good job, you might be accused of racism/sexism/ageism/etc; even if your analysis is completely correct (and, presumably, there was no -ism involved). If you have a spreadsheet (effectively, a paper trail) of their work accomplishments, you're much safer.

precisely, which ends up (in a large legally threatened corporation ) causing hiring and HR to be a racist quota system in a spreadsheet mentality with all kinds of unspoken and unrecorded workarounds in reality

I think their rephrase was the charitable version. Now at least if that person did not realize how they were coming across they do now.

I understood both readings of my post and left it vague.

For instance: consider the plight of an all-white all-Muslim company who would face a possible lawsuit for not hiring a black guy who says he loves to eat well barbequed Southern-style pork in the office for lunch daily. Is hiring discrimination in this case racial, religious, dietary or “team fit”?

To me, any answer other than “it is none of your damn business why we hire anyone” is against the First Amendment’s assembly clause.

Oh, so you're intentionally mixing up traits that are intrinsic with actions or beliefs that people choose. It looks like you're trying to construct a 'gotcha!' and I dislike it.

I dislike it too, which is why I am against the law as currently drafted.

> lazy mental shortcuts like race or religion

I think he's saying the opposite - you have to work backwards to ensure that your results don't end up such that you can be accused of having done so, regardless of how you actually came to the conclusion.

Yes, that is what I mean. I also genuinely believe that if we just go back to the First Amendment default of complete freedom of contract and freedom of association (no legally protected categories) that the market will sort things out just fine. Racist companies will lose to companies that hire competent people of all races.

The remedy of the existing civil rights legal regime was much too strong and too far-reaching for the disease of Southern racism, which has largely been eliminated anyway.

I am for the prosperity of all races in the US.

The existing civil rights law does not accomplish that, it encourages racist thinking in a spreadsheet mentality.

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