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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Why is this on HN? Are we supposed to debate racism in the insurance industry now?

I'm not going to comment and say I flagged this, because I want to stick with policy. But I have no idea how the community is supposed to participate in this story in a productive way. Looks like chat-bait.

It's a very interesting anecdote, from which nothing useful can be gained except a lot of excessive speculation and bickering.

EDIT: I apologize if I'm being old cranky guy again. Perhaps something positive will come of this. Perhaps the reason to post it here is for our productive analysis, and not just to rehash a tried-and-true method to steal thousands of productive man-hours from hackers across the globe having the same arguments about the same things they've always had -- the role of appearance or naming in sales, the bias of the culture, and so on.

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> Why is this on HN?

I think it's very relevant.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

In my view of the world, there are people who are operating by imitating certain people around them. Then, there are other people who are figuring out underlying things about the world around them. A culture's or subculture's illusions and myopia about itself are a great place to mine for an information asymmetry.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/06/09/ballerinas-and-inform...

Well if nothing it's a slight hack in the experiment she pulled except she didn't appear to end up with a job out of it. But she did seem to prove that monster is lying when they say the "diversity" options won't hurt you.

Also be aware in your company maybe? There are good people out there but maybe HR is "misfiltering" them for some reason.

Again, it wouldn't be a wild assumption to assume this problem in the tech industry and it's a signal that small enterprising startups might be able to scoop some better candidates because other companies have sadly stupidly passed on them.

> But she did seem to prove that monster is lying when they say the "diversity" options won't hurt you.

I don't think there is any indication that the race/gender option on monster had any effect. If there was any racial bias, then I think it is more likely to be from switching away from a clearly ethnic name than the "diversity" information.

Monster may or may not be lying. There are at least three things that changed:

1) A new profile might get different responses from an old one. 2) A name will likely be propagated differently than the diversity options. 3) The diversity option.

I find there's a pretty common belief amongst programmers that we're in some sort of post-racist society, or that the tech world is somehow a "meritocrasy". In many discussions about women and sexism on HN, lots of folks talk about how these issues aren't real and that women and minorities actually have an advantage in the hiring process.

This article could be seen as another piece in that ongoing dialog.

It makes an interesting and specific factual claim: that "diversity questionnaires" are actually being used, en masse, to filter out non-white applicants. That was certainly a surprise to me and I think it would be a surprise to a lot of people.

Maybe as a community of developers, technology enthusiasts and designers we can talk about the horrible layout of the website that was linked and atrocious logo that looks like it was done in Microsoft Paint. I agree that subjective subjects like racism aren't a good fit for HN. While some I am sure would be able to debate this topic without bias or throwing around factually incorrect arguments, we've all seen what happens between fanboys when Apple, Microsoft or Google are involved.

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