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Comment by mutagen | Hacker News Reader

Which of our business practices company policies are going to be discriminatory, detrimental, outdated, and headline worthy in 60 years? I realize IBM's policy had its roots in a post war era but even the memo 'temporarily' rescinding the policy reads wrong.

Immigration policies? They're really a governmental issue that has become heavily politicized but they seem to me to be ripe for change.

Intellectual property? Will there be progress made or will we still be arguing about copyright length, patent trolls, and trademark infringement? IP issues don't seem to be in the same category of basic human equality, though at times they reach that point (drug medication?)

Universal healthcare? Work/Life balance?

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Mandatory urine testing seems vaguely creepy/invasive already, at least outside a narrow range of machine-operator type jobs. If you're working as a clerk or programmer or something, imo a company should limit itself to judging whether your work product meets its criteria. If it doesn't, they can lay you off, and it hardly matters whether the reason is that you're a pothead, just lazy, bad at your job, actively trying to screw with the company, or some other reason. Delving into your bodily fluids to try to determine if you're a good employee is weird.

> Mandatory urine testing

I don't think these are the "IP issues" to which he was referring.

You are shameless.

Actually, drug testing is a good measure of impulsivity and distractibility. If a person cannot manage to pass a drug test, they lack self control and are likely to do things like bitch out customers and break expensive equipment.

The self control aspect of drug tests are probably a pretty good proxy for IQ—ADHD is correlated with a substantial 10 point drop in IQ.

You could just as well test for salt consumption as cocaine. The point is to check whether the applicant can hold their shit together for a few days for something as important as a job.

Drug testing is also a good measure of how big-brotherish a company is, and whether it's worth working for. This swings both ways.

Yeah, that's how I take it. I don't ingest any substances that would cause any problems on a drug test, but it's a huge red flag for me that the company most likely 1) is run by bureaucrats; and 2) wants to control my private life. More viscerally, I just find the whole "report to a facility and urinate on command" thing unpleasant and weird and will prefer companies that don't subject me to such indignities. And some companies demand it several times per year!

The point is that it's very easy for a company to measure the metrics they should care about (i.e. quality and quantity of work output) rather than making random correlations.

An IQ test is also a good proxy for an IQ test: but there would probably be an outcry if companies started basing performance reviews directly on an IQ test.

[citation needed]

The ADHD data is from Russell Barkley's research textbooks.

Parental leave, and childcare more generally. In a society with privatized child-rearing where increasingly both parents work, the childcare issues are just brutal. For parents and children.

This feels like something that (together with healthcare) should be decoupled from the employer as much as possible.

It may be reasonable to handle childcare and healthcare individually with privatised services. It may be reasonable to have them handled centrally for almost everyone by the government, as in Scandinavia.

But having to rely on your relations with employer for these issues is just begging to be abused, and often is - where the employees are sufficiently vulnerable, they get abused even more by this.

Completely agreed. Mandating that employers pay parents not to work is hugely problematic; for starters, it creates an economically rational incentive to avoid hiring women of childbearing age. If society believes that having children and taking time off to raise them should be encouraged, then society should pay for it, not individual businesses.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, parental leave is shared by both parents. Out of the 16 months total, each parent is guaranteed two months, and the couple can divide the remaining 12 months as they wish. Many still give the woman all of it, but there's a growing trend to split it equally. Among my peers - university educated upper middle class - everyone splits it equally.

And, when parental leave is mostly split equally, you remove the basis for discrimination against women in this area.

By requiring that the male parent take part of the parental leave, it encourages men to get more involved with their children and family life and being a father. Which is a good thing IMO.

(This is presuming there is exactly one man in the relationship, there could be 0, 1 or 2)

Of course, if (as is often the case) the woman prefers to focus on children while the man prefers to work, you harm both parents.

Correct. However part of the thinking/motive of this approach, is that many men who want to focus on children are not able / comfortable with taking time off, and programmes like this help them. The theory being that this approach harms less people than "no restrictions which in practice means women take all the time off".

That preference is for the most part a social construct that is further reinforced by the salary gap between men and women. By encouraging couples to split parental leave equally, you lessen the hiring discrimination against women in child-bearing age, which in turn lessens couples' preference for letting the least-paid parent take the most parental leave, and thus you have a positive spiral leading to more gender equality.

Cases where the 'free market' fails, are cases for mandatory governmental regulation.

I personally struggle with the idea of offering benefits based on your family status. I realize this is not a protected class and probably isn't because it is a very common form of discrimination. People with children generally receive preferential treatment and additional benefits than their single/child-free coworkers.

To me, the future should be free of workplaces offering parental leave and children benefits as it discriminates against those that 1) don't want children or 2) can't have them.

It's not "discrimination" any more than having bathrooms is discrimination against people who have a catheter and urine bag, having a company parking lot is discrimination against people who don't have cars, having retirements benefits are discrimination against people who drop dead at 64, or having birth control covered by insurance is discrimination against the forever alone.

Under 20% of women are still childless by 40-44 (i.e. the practical end of their child-bearing years), and that number seems to have peaked. That means 80% of women (and presumably men assuming things are at least somewhat symmetric) will have children at some point. It's a basic biological function that is relevant to the large majority of the population at some point in their lives that society has unsurprisingly found a way to accommodate.

Not to mention that having and raising children generates a large positive externality. You benefit in the present from the assumption that people will continue to have children in the future. E.g. investment into Silicon Valley is modulated on their being tons of 18-25 year olds to watch advertising 10, 20, 30 years from now. Raising an educating a future taxpayer is literally an investment in the country and in all the businesses that will still be around 10, 20, 30 years from now and need young workers.

"... having a company parking lot is discrimination against people who don't have cars ..."

Interesting comparison. It's not unusual for companies to offer a cash alternative for employees who don't use the company parking lot.

Maybe child care will end up something like that. For example: providing a cash bonus or complementary gym membership if the employee doesn't make use of the company daycare program.

And offering medical leave discriminates against the healthy people.

Perhaps ideally it would be just a general sabbatical period. Those who have children can use that time to fill the traditional maternity/paternity time and those who cannot/will not have children can use that time to do whatever they please.

I realize this is not a protected class

FYI, family & marital status is a "protected class" in the EU. (Though we don't use that 'protected class' terminology).

How do you feel about the idea of universal child care?

I figure as long as we have no major criticism with public school, we shouldn't have too much of a problem extending it all the way to the cradle.

> Which of our business practices company policies are going to be discriminatory, detrimental, outdated, and headline worthy in 60 years?

If the next 60 years are anything like the last 60 years then holy crap the changes will be huge.

* outdated Offices. There will still be buildings in 60 years but office parks and sprawl in general will be gone.

* detrimental 40+ hour work weeks, screens, sitting, just about any physical job today. I'd like to think with the increase of technology the number of actual hours people work will drop considerably

* discriminatory

- Requiring someone to physically appear or give any indication of race/gender/age during an interview. I could see this becoming the norm in 60 years where you interview people wearing suits like in a scanner darkly.

- General acceptance of the gradient between gay and straight.

* headline worthy

"US Presidential candidates Toshiko Abe, Jennifer Summers, Linda Powell Jr and Frank Lancaster to debate the digital constructs of Douglas Adams, Anthony Burgess, Jon Stewart and Mr Rogers. Moderated by George Carlin's head in jar." ... gotta have hope!

As far as I know, some orchestras do this already. When interviewing a new person, the applicant plays behind a screen. Once they started doing that, they found they were hiring more women. (i.e. there was a previous subconscience bias against a women)

"gotta have hope"

Ehhhhh, I wouldn't hope for "digital recreations" based on someone's subjective impression of a person :p

Some of the rest sounds nice, though!

>>detrimental 40+ hour work weeks, screens, sitting, just about any physical job today. I'd like to think with the increase of technology the number of actual hours people work will drop considerably

This hasn't been the case in the past 60 years. What makes you think it will be the case in the next 60?

The trend over the last 100 years has been that as we increase our productivity we increase our wants. More stuff, more work. Bigger houses, more food, more cars, more stuff.

I imagine this will start to flatline, and increasing demand isn't going to be sustainable enough to fully employ even half the workforce. I could be wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_i...

Discrimination based on employment status (for example, discriminating against people who aren't employed when applying for a new job). A few states have laws making it illegal already.

I suspect that CAPTCHA will be viewed as a symptom of a mindset of bigoted superstition, and treated with the same disdain as witch hunts and cargo cults.

Comical statement, but CAPTCHA's were indeed created because of need (bots exist, and aren't make believe!).

The only way CAPTCHA's will be considered bigoted is when the AI spammers use become sentient and take umbrage against being discriminated against for not being human.

Probably any company that supports "traditional marriage", ie excludes same sex couples.

In office workers vs remote workers - but I have a dog in that hunt.

Profit sharing

You think profit sharing will seem conceptually outrageous in the future? Or the opposite?

The lack of profit sharing will seem outrageous in the future :)

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