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Comment by HeatrayEnjoyer | Hacker News Reader

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It is when 90% of hiring decisions go in favour of the 'unprivileged' despite them making up a far smaller percentage of the total population.

Lol. I have to assume people who think like this are working over time to find an excuse for their failures.

I do a lot of hiring, and the moment I have to take race, gender or sexual preferences into account, is the moment I will give a big fuck you.

I will not discredit the competencies of anyone that I hired or will hire in the future.

The thing is, there is a lot of unconscious bias where race and gender are taken into account already, in a way that reduces hiring changes for people who are not white cis hetero males.

At least that has been the case in the past sadly. So companies are now sometimes over-correcting by applying positive bias towards minorities

So you want to make the problem worse by actually giving everyone a reason to believe the white cis hetero males are more competent.

Nice one.

Edit: Also, do you ask candidates their sexual preference and if their current gender was the gender they were born with? WTF???

1. I explicitly didn’t mention sexual preference. The negative bias toward minorities that has historically been part of the hiring process has been based mostly on immediately visible properties of the candidates, like race and gender

2. I’m not suggesting anything to make any problem worse. I was just observing why companies are over compensating. I’m not voicing any opinion on that. But if you want my opinion: we should remove bias from the hiring process as much as we can, either way, so that all candidates have equal opportunities

3. “WTF???” comes across as overly emotional and does not serve any purpose in a leveled discussion

> I explicitly didn’t mention sexual preference.

I based it on your statement of "white cis hetero males". That's also why I did the WTF. I agree with you it doesn't serve the discussion much :).

> we should remove bias from the hiring process

I agree with you on that one. In the end, capitalism will favor hiring for competence and not the other attributes discussed here, either avoiding certain groups or favoring them.

No worries!

Regarding capitalism favoring hiring for competence, I’m afraid history has not shown this. I’ve seen in my own environment that male candidates were hired where more competent female candidates were available. And this has been consistently shown throughout history. Minorities really did have less chances in the past, despite capitalism.

So I think the question is how we can hire for competency while giving everyone equal opportunities.

What I meant with capitalism is that the company that hires the more competent female candidates will have an advantage over the one who refuses.

I’m not 100% convinced of that. I think many companies will be successful despite not hiring the best people. In fact, for big corporates this is the norm.

Feedback: I had to read that twice to realize that I resonated with your perspective.

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