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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

I was referring to the discrimination rant

even candidates that might fit a poorly implemented affirmative action program are likely getting auto-rejected

nobody knows if its helpful to mention their race or disability, or whether its hurtful

My "discrimination rant" is informed by my ex-girlfriend being hired for an M&S/OpenCL job as a non-programming mech-e. Why? Because all the work was already done and it would look better to the government client to have a female, black engineer sit around in a SCIF doing nothing all day. Stuff like this is absolutely rampant.

This is absolutely true. Government contractors have what is effectively diversity quotas. People will get hired to fill the quota regardless of what they actually do. It’s absolutely not true that diversity hires are all useless, but there are significant incentives to create diversity numbers in order to gain a government contract. Hiring 100 people to do nothing and get the lucrative contract is better than hiring based on need and not getting the contract.

It’s clear you just want to be heard but that doesn’t prove that’s what happened to your application

“assumption” doesn’t imply a lack of truth, it points out your inability to know that out of all possibilities, which possibility applies

it means there is no point in doubling down on your data point of 1 in 1 niche industry when there is this other industry wide practice occurring as well

an industry wide practice that would affect minorities applying as well as existing employees alike

I’m not an HR person, but I’d be surprised if the ATS bouncer algorithms even have access to the eeo information, and making assumptions about ethnicity based on name seems unlikely to be a feature. Sure, someone could code their own solution easily enough but I really doubt that’s a common enough occurrence to warrant discrimination accusations at the auto-reject level.

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