You can have all the skills and education you want, if employers are unreasonable about their hiring and requirements, you have no control or recourse. You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good.
Yes, and the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups since networks tend to be biased toward similar people.
“… detrimental to low socioeconomic status groups, within which minorities are over-represented”.
FTFY, not to be a pedant, but to highlight the fact that many white people from certain backgrounds also struggle with this, while well-connected minorities largely do not.
In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network effects since the demand for minorities who can jump through all of the hiring hoops greatly exceeds the supply.
Yeah, certain minorities can benefit from programs that value them above others, but the above and beyond results you talk about come after the main connections are made. This doesn't extend to all minority groups either, like those with invisible disabilities (after all, it's mostly about how things look).
...in isolated pockets where those things exist.
Outside of those places, minorities have their slider set to something-other-than the easiest difficulty level.
As a white guy in generally good condition, my slider was slid all the way to easy. My road was still super hard - but it was easier than it was for women, brown people, etc.
In 1990 I moved to FL and ran headfirst into no connections=no work. I did the Make Your Own Luck thing. Hundreds of brief introductions led to a few relationships. A few of those became potential leads. It was a years long process. The eventual successes hinged on a few, key connections with people who saw something familiar.
If I hadn't been familiar, I wouldn't have been remembered past the introduction.
Sad Eastern European noises, aka "You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of master"
Seems to me that minorities (Asians) are quite over-represented in tech.
Many people are of course racist and don't count Asians as minorities...
My hot take is the labor market was very tight, employers thought they were going to get a deal on folks with the layoffs [1] that took place over the last 2 years, but the labor market still remains tight so they continue to search for "diamonds in the rough" at lower costs (which leads to this mismatch at scale). Offshoring is cost optimization to continue to realize desired profits in a high capital cost macro, and there is probably some knock on effect from software development tax code changes [2].
This has been previously discussed in detail on HN 12 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414135 I would suggest that times have changed since then and disparate impact lawsuits are now more likely to prevail in 2024 than in 2012, so the in-effect aspect has increased since then.
I know quite a few CEOs who confide in me that they would rather give IQ tests but do not because of their concerns over legal consequences. Clearly this is anecdotal but this sentiment does seem to be pervasive and extensive and repeated throughout the internet over a long period of time.
It would be helpful if you could list some of these companies that publicly state they give IQ tests. I've only heard about this as a practice at hedge funds and even then it was public knowledge / gossip but not publicly stated.
In my brief search for such companies I came across this; https://nypost.com/2022/03/15/silicon-valley-firm-apologizes... which is a company that has now apologized for giving IQ tests and is being warned about the legal consequences for having them.
My assertion is that IQ tests are already known to have disparate impact and with laws as they are in effect they are illegal. My next assertion is that aptitude tests will suffer the same fate as IQ test because they too will be shown to have disparate impact for the same reasons. That not all such aptitude tests have been sued already under this law does not make them safe from lawsuits as the burden of proof is on the company using them.
You cannot use the absence of lawsuits for a list of companies that you are keeping secret as evidence of absence of legal liability.
There are test prep firms for it much like you’d find for the mcat or gre.
Other info I found on it suggests that it’s easily gamed which is something real IQ tests are designed to be resistant to.
I’m not trying to ‘no true Scotsman’ this but it would be helpful if the company described their test at least as an intelligence test. They seem to describe it more as a personality test; “Discover the PEAK Performance Assessment from Procter & Gamble (P&G) tand get an insight into how your personal profile matches the company's needs.”
My specific focus on IQ tests is to be less opaque alternative to leetcode, the P&G assessment seems to be similarly and perhaps more opaque and thus, for now, confers the same protections from disparate impact lawsuits.
Here is official AON documentation (who also use P&G Switch) on Switch calling it a Deductive Logical Reasoning test.
https://assessment.aon.com/aon.assessment/media/files/factsh...
Nope, it just has to be shown to be relevant to the requirements of the job.
So you call it an "employment skills assessment," make 80% of it indistinguishable from an IQ test, and add some domain-specific questions related to the industry or the position.
P&G has done this for a long time, among other companies.
As best I can tell 'Judge Wood ruled that an older state-certification test, which was intended to measure teachers’ knowledge of the liberal arts and science, was racially discriminatory.'
Elsewhere I'm seeing "The court found that Black and Latino teachers clearly passed these tests at lower rates than white teachers. In order to prove that this wasn't illegal, the defendants had to show that the test actually demonstrated what it promised: that teachers who did well on the test would do better in their jobs."
It seems to me that the error was using the wrong test and it was the wrong test because it had disparate impact. What it does not appear to be is a case that is not about disparate impact because it instead had errors.
(I'm writing as if I think real IQ tests are a good idea, and they are not --- in fact, that's my whole point: there's a mythology that IQ tests aren't used because they're illegal, but they are not that; what they are is ineffective.)
If men get into traffic accidents more often than women, then clearly there is something wrong with the cars and car manufacturers should be sued for their discrimination?
In the Eastern bloc, agriculture was immensely held back because everybody had to follow the ideology and adjust their science and methods to "I god damned said so!" of the rulers. Seems like America is curious about following the same path.
Perhaps a proxy for a corporate IQ test would be net earning per employee which is often pretty public information.
The military branches world wide also generally hires and promotes on merit and testing. So it's nothing strange.
But consider: the hiring pipeline looks pretty much the same for all companies? Why is that? Well, they mostly use similar services to manage hiring, and those services all have similar features. But those features aren't great: they've narrowed the hiring pipeline to squeeze all candidates for all jobs down to the same sort of toothpaste that can be squeezed through the pipe.
Are the employers unreasonable? No, they are following what is considered HR best practices for attracting and vetting talent. But that process is broken, therefore the majority of companies are struggling to find talent.
The process is both homogenized across the industry and fundamentally geared towards preventing false positives - hiring the wrong person. That filters out many people that might have been hired, blowing up the number of false negatives - not hiring the right person.
Companies can't find candidates and job seekers can find jobs because the tools and processes for connecting candidates with jobs is both broken and homogeneous across the industry.
I don't think it's right to consider networking/knowing someone to be luck, exactly. Networking is a skill and a tool, and has consistently been presented as that for my entire career. As a result, I go out of my way to try to make those connections. I go in to the office, I have lunch and drinks with coworkers, I say Hi to people I recognize from chat at large meetings, I make friendly conversations on chat and email. When someone I have made a connection like that with leaves, I say goodbye and pass them my personal email address. It is difficult, I'm not an outgoing person and I have to make conscious effort to start those connections. But it has paid off, I've received several job pings over the years, and when I was ready to move on from a job recently I took up one of those pings on the offer. It wasn't luck, it was a skill and resource I specifically put work in to cultivate over years.
Cold-applying is the absolute hardest route to getting hired. A big part of your career is doing what you can to make that your last resort when job hunting.
Cold applying should be the most fair and introduce the least bias. My entire life has been cold applying.