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Hello, Mr. Robinson.

I don't doubt that you are a nice person, within your own culture.

However, when you refer to someone else's most deeply held beliefs as "barbaric rituals", perhaps we can be forgiven for jumping to conclusions about whether you are bigoted toward them. I am not a religious man, but for this conclusion I don't have to practice mass, or auditing, or wearing temple garments, or kosher meat production. We can't be sure which of these (or whatever other religious ceremony) you mean when you say "barbaric ritual", but it really doesn't matter which one, does it? Essentially every religious practice is someone else's barbarism.

Is there any other meaning to "barbaric ritual" than "religious ceremony I find distasteful"?

Had it occurred to you it might be an off-the-cuff flippant example used as a bit of a joke? did 'penguin murdering' not give you a clue that this might not be a serious example intended to refer to someone's religion?

British sense of humour lost in translation I think.

Perhaps in reference to "penguin murdering" he means people who sacrifice penguins to make sure that linux machines run correctly?

Or is there a religion that does murder penguins and he's referring to that?

Yes, I meant it in a flippant and off-the-cuff manner.

I have no interest in a person's religion. In fact if anything, I find religious diversity in the workplace a bonus. I've worked with Catholics, Protestants, Pagans, Muslims, Jews, Satanists (they're fun!), Atheists, Agnostics and I think one Scientologist/Freezoner who didn't want it widely known. So be it. Diversity and different viewpoints on the World and different ways of thinking are good.

So yes, there are other meanings. Plenty of other meanings, especially in a sentence that is clearly flippant.

I accept your apology in advance.

  I am not a white male bigot who hires people like me. I 
  work with women, non-white, non-atheist, non-Christian, 
  non-liberal, non-leftist, non-English (I'm British), 
  people all day, every day and have done so for many years.

A lot of what candidates expect and interviewers ask comes from what other people do/report having done. Think of how often different companies ask the same brain teasers - and how common it is for companies to ask brain teasers!

I'm sure you don't discriminate - you just want to see my holiday snaps on facebook out of general interest. The problem is it makes looking at people's facebook profiles the norm; today you're doing it, tomorrow every employer is - and they're not all as open-minded as you.

  The fact you assume a potential employer who is betting a 
  substantial amount of money on you is interested in your 
  personal life for any other reason than to  understand you
  better and to make sure you're going to be a great fit, is 
  cynical, naive and misguided.

According to "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan [1] when identical resumes are sent out with traditionally black or white names, resumes with white names get 50% more call backs, across all industries.

I don't think it's naive or misguided to worry about employers subconsciously discriminating.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/mullainathan/files/emilygreg.pdf

You aren't going to fix that problem by hiding their real names, because the moment they turn up for interview the bigoted response is still going to be there.

So let's have some transparency, and deal with the actual root cause of the problem: racism, anti-Christian or anti-atheist sentiments, and wholesale bigotry in general.

Obfuscating names and past-times and religions might allow people to game it as far as first interview, but how does that help anybody, compared to actually dealing with the root cause issues?

I honestly couldn't think of many things worse than discussing Scientology at a job interview.

It's not necessarily that you are racist or misogynistic or whatever, it's that there are undoubtedly people out there who are and making something like this standard practice would make it a lot easier for them to discriminate.

Saying "you wouldn't want to work for anyone who discriminates anyway" is almost as bad as discrimination because you are essentially encouraging people to accept prejudice.

Besides discrimination is not necessarily the person's own prejudices but perhaps they are worried that their clients may be prejudice. For example maybe you have a company that goes into people's homes and installs equipment or whatever and you know that at least some of your customers are BNP members who wouldn't let a muslim cross their threshold.

I don't know about penguin murdering or whatever, but it's probably difficult to draw conclusions from stuff like that without some kind of evidence.

It's not that people don't trust your intentions, it's that it's psychologically impossible to be objective when you're not doing blind evaluations. Anyone who's not a member of $regional_cultural_majority is relatively better off having you evaluate their work history and skillset than they are in trusting you to pore over their Facebook feed.

it's psychologically impossible to be objective

You should have just stopped there.

I don't want to do blind evaluations.

If I'm about to give somebody £50k a year and spend 40-60 hours a week basically living and working with them, putting my job on the line on the promise they can deliver, I don't want to be blind. I want to see everything I can.

It's not because I want to be nosey, it's because I want to know it's going to work.

Certainly the cultural compatibility will need to be evaluated eventually, it's just not in a minority candidate's best interest for that to be involved in the first-pass filter. If you'd like to know about my non-work interests we can talk about weight lifting and camping during an onsite interview.

I want to be firmly cemented in your mind as a competent developer before you find out what I wore to last year's Halloween party or who I favor in the upcoming election.

So fine, don't show me Facebook - it's just that's the one source of info everybody has.

I'm going to be much, much more interested in your github profile, posts to mailing lists, etc.

First thing I do when I get a CV is not go to Facebook - I google the email address. If there's contributions to tech mailing lists there, the rest of what I see is going to have to be pretty shit for me to rule you out for interview, to be honest.

Your stance falls into the classic case of "understandable, but unacceptable".

What you are describing here is a situation that implicitly guarantees prejudice. You are looking for a near-guarantee that "it's going to work" - which is to say, you're going to implicitly exclude people who are unfamiliar to you.

This can play out in any direction - race, culture, religion, orientation, lifestyle.

To be blunt, it all comes to this: as a society we value inclusiveness and equality more than your right to a bit more peace of mind.

I don't doubt that you approach this with the best of intentions, Mr. Robinson, but FWIW I would never work for you so long as you demand the private details of your employees' lives.

Too many people have put too much stock in the fact Facebook was mentioned.

Let me rephrase it: I want to see HN, github, blogs, twitter feeds where they talk about tech and work and so on.

I'm not going to demand access to Facebook. I'm going to look at their public profile. If they add me on Google+ I'd expect to be in a circle for bosses/peers, and to see stuff that's pertinent, not pictures of their goldfish or what they had for dinner last night.

Is that still open to prejudice? Sure. Am I going to exclude people who are competent but I might not get on with? Possibly. But isn't that actually a good idea? Would it not be crueller for me to hire a waterfall tech who hates agile and who really wants to work in Enterprise IT rather than startup development, and for both us to be really miserable than for me to just realise early on that despite his CV scoring high on the startup development bullshit-bingo cards, they are simply not going to be a great fit?

I have never - and will never - hire/fire or select interview candidates based on religion, creed, gender or even necessarily experience. It's about ability, mindset and evidence of performance. Every time.

It's not that you're prejudiced, it's that you shouldn't be invading a candidates private life in the first place without telling them.

For instance, what do you think of someone who doesn't have a Twitter feed at all, and whose Facebook you can't access?

That's exactly what I had in mind, but this person seems to feel he's outright entitled to this information because the first notion he showed up to defend is that he only has 'non-racist' intentions with the contents of someone's private life. That's great dude, why not try not being a creeper with no sense of professional boundaries while you're at it?

I shrug my shoulders and decide they've decided to lead life a little differently to most working in the startup scene. Good for them, means they might not spend an hour a day updating SN profiles.

I'd ask in the interview "do you enjoy social networking?" and if they said "No", I'd want to explore what aspects of tech startups they do enjoy. If they said "Yes", I'd just accept that they'd locked it down and move on. I've actually done this.

I think too many people are flipping the fuck out about the Facebook aspect.

I would actually prefer github profiles and mailing list contributions. They're much better evidence of ability, mindset and "cultural fit" within a work team, but there are actually very few devs who have anything to show on that front.

I once asked for a github profile, received the username and... it was empty. Not one project. They hadn't even forked anything. I don't think they quite got the point. :-) I interviewed them anyway, they were pretty solid but they had an air of "programming is just a job" compared to other candidates who were more "I absolutely love coding" - it's easier to get the latter group more fired up about building something cool than it is the former, and so they edged him out. Github was a good early flag for that, and I will no doubt use it in future as a barometer of engagement.

However, it is not the sole arbitrator, and not everybody can commit to coding in their downtime because they have other commitments. So fine, show me what you do have.

I do not want to see "private" information. I want to see public information. I am not going to ask to sift through all their holiday photos. I just want to see what they've put out into the public domain, and get a taste of how they think professionally.

No, it is not 'professional' just because you feel entitled to that information and have labeled it so.

The lives of your potential employees are their own, their time spent outside of work belongs to them. That time does not belong to you, it's not on the table, it's not up for discussion. It is, in fact, fucking creepy that you feel like that because you're offering a pittance of a salary you should be able to rummage through the contents of someone's life looking for things 'you don't like'.

You have no respect for the lives of your employees, else you wouldn't expect their social network profiles all lined up and waiting for you to hold judgement over, looking for 'barbaric rituals' and other unfunny comments. It's that simple.