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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

> They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc.

In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.

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Which protected characteristic does "personal relationships" fall under? It's vague enough to mean almost anything you want it to be, and I struggle to imagine any sort of successful prosecution.

Discrimination of sexual orientation, for example, depending on how it's asked. Just one of those areas best left alone in an interview

There’s a reason interviewers in the US won’t (or shouldn’t) even ask if the candidate has a spouse. If they ask something about that specifically, and the answer indicates some kind of protected status (a man says “my husband” or reveal which place of worship they got married in) and they then decline the candidate, the candidate could make the claim they were denied because they’re gay or practice whatever religion or something else.

Asking personal questions could be seen as a way to elicit information about a protected status and thus give a rejected candidate ammunition for a claim, whether warranted or not.

It’s best to just keep questions focused on the workplace.

I think people vastly overstate the amount of actual risk companies are taking when they engage is possibly illegal behavior, especially on this forum.

Having been on the sidelines for spurious claims of this nature, these sorts of lawsuits are a huge risk: the cost of mounting a defense can easily bankrupt a small business, even if the claims turn out to be baseless.

Even in the case of complete innocence, it often becomes a he-said-she-said situation, and the outcome boils down to which side presents the best set of “facts”.

I use quotes there because my broader experience with the court system routinely shows that it does not need be burdened by the “truth” or “facts”. That is probably because the regular cast in those venues are literally trained and practiced liars.

I think it also depends on how big of a company. If someone (say perhaps, GP) mostly has experience in smaller companies, they might not have had the law of large numbers bring the lawsuit cudgel to bear on their company before.

But if you're at a large enough company, you're absolutely getting sued for this from time to time, so you'll have the "how to not get sued" training before you're allowed to interview.

(Edit: this isn't limited to interviews. There's many, many examples of things that large companies will not touch due to legal risk, that smaller companies will... either due to lack of knowledge on the legal risk (maybe no legal department even exists yet?) or intentionally as a gamble)

Likely true, and I’m sure many companies go unpunished despite engaging in it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, and probably the kind of thing that could ruin a small business if they did get caught up in it.

Never ever prompt someone to discuss personal relationships in an interview. The moment the conversation drifts into religion, family status, child count, sexuality or gender makeup, or any number of other things, you can easily run afoul of state or federal laws, or open yourself to discrimination lawsuits.

Women in a committed relationship can enter a medical situation that renders then unable to work for 6-9 months, + 2 - 3 years of leave afterwards. Men don't, that's just a month or two twice.

It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.

Employer fishing to see if the person is married, which will require additional dependents on health insurance. Married is possibly more likely to have kids and take more time off for them or maternity/paternity leave.

Even just an IQ test [1] or teacher licensing test [2,3] opens them to illegal discrimination, so that's not saying much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

[2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-...

[3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...

Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients.

The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.

Yeah if you're willing to go into a decade-long court fight then maybe they'll allow you to use a test (where the burden of proof is on the employer to show the test is necessary, i.e. guilty until proven innocent). Or maybe you'll be liable for millions of dollars in compensation. And even something as seemingly reasonable as an IQ test for a knowledge work position is illegal.

No it isn't. This Griggs v Duke Power meme is an internet myth. Practically every white collar job can use IQ tests to qualify applicants, and a few very large companies do exactly this.

You call it a myth yet it was a real case, with that real conclusion, and the subsequent case of New York having to pay for daring to require a teacher licensing test was also real. You can't just dismiss real examples by calling it a "myth". You also omit that "very large companies" almost universally have DEI departments and affirmative action policies to shield themselves [1]. And it is still the opinion of law professors that such tests are legally risky [2]:

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, using IQ tests could violate the law if the tests are shown to have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities or women, and are not job-related, New York University School of Law Professor Samuel Estreicher told The Post.

Estreicher added that the use of IQ and Myers-Briggs tests also risks violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars companies from requiring applicants to take mental or physical examinations prior to offering them jobs.

“To avoid legal risk, companies shouldn’t rely on these tests,” Estreicher said. “They should just be talking to job applicants.”

Lydia Brown, a policy counsel at advocacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology, said trying to quanitfy an applicant’s intelligence is a ” rather slippery concept.”

“Employers need to really carefully consider whether their test is actually measuring a quality or trait that is necessary to perform the job — and that’s a legal standard,” Brown told The Post.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...

[2] https://nypost.com/2022/03/15/silicon-valley-firm-apologizes...

Key element of your quote: “if the tests [...] are not job-related”

There’s nothing magic about IQ tests. Any hiring criteria that isn’t sufficiently linked (the threshold here has always been low, and the trend has been to lower it further) and is also shown to have an uneven impact by protected class is a problem.

And now we're pretending to not understand chilling effects. And again ignoring how New York had to pay for asking teaching-related questions to prospective teachers.

The (well-known) companies that sell general cognitive testing services for employment applications have logo crawls that include household names with deep pockets. It's an internet myth.

The reason general cognitive IQ testing isn't more commonly used in employment settings is that it doesn't work very well.

IQ testing in white collar US employment is not unlawful and several household name companies openly perform general cognitive assessments; the companies that provide those tests have logo crawls just like every other product company. Griggs doesn't say what you think it says.

IQ testing is uncommon in US employment because it doesn't do a good job of selecting candidates, not because it's unlawful.

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