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Comment by noamsml | Hacker News Reader

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that consuming cultural artifacts that happen to correlate with liking engineering has anything to do with liking engineering. If you think liking Star Wars is necessary for being an engineer, you're probably missing some pretty good people who just aren't that into Star Wars.

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Perhaps you should find this high-school age person and inform them that the coping mechanisms they have found on their own are not suitable for the world at large. This isn't the CEO of a tech company outlining the hiring process we're talking about, it's a lonely teenager trying to find like-minded people.

Sure, you will miss people, and you will miss good people. But since there is (according to you) some correlation, it might act as a heuristic, employed when it is simply not feasible to implement better tests.

But what if it's a better heuristic for finding young men than engineers?

I would argue it is also a very good heuristic for finding Star Wars fans. Your point being?

My point being that if 80% of programmers are young men, and knowledge of Star Wars jokes (or whatever) can find young men at an 80% accuracy from a general list, but good programmers at only a 64% accuracy from a list of programmers, you should just cut out the rationalization and just hire based on sex and race. You haven't discovered a heuristic for hiring good programmers, you've discovered a heuristic for confirming your own preconceptions, and for reenforcing stereotypes.

Take false positives into account – you will find more young men who are not engineers than Star Wars fans who are not engineers (for suitable values of engineers and personal experience). Since such false positives are extremely annoying[0] when looking for interesting people in a party, you want to minimise them first, not the false negatives.

[0] A false positive takes you n minutes to discover and abandon, whereas a false negative ideally doesn’t concern you at all, assuming there are enough interesting people.

There seems to be a correlation between geek culture and liking engineering, but I'm not convinced there's correlation with being any good at it. I'd say there's negative correlation if any.

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