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Comment by chadwickthebold | Hacker News Reader

This blog post really misses the point of the previous discussions about using Github as a recruiting screening tool. It's fine to use it as a small 'plus' factor, but to screen candidates who have no public code portfolio out is silly, counterproductive, and discriminatory.

Also, for a guy who graduated with a degree in Sociology he sure does talk like an asshole.

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Well, of course it's discriminatory. The purpose of a hiring process is to discriminate in favour of the kind of people you want to hire and against the kind of people that you don't.

I don't think this article really misses the point of the previous discussions so much as it argues that the issues raised in the earlier discussions are outweighed by the usefulness of a code portfolio as part of a hiring process. That's still debatable but it's something that reasonable people can disagree on.

I believe the parent was trying to say that it's potentially illegally discriminatory in the US due to the fact that FOSS is gender and racially biased hugely in favor of white male participation. If you use it is a screening tool to cull candidates, there's probably a case for you breaking US hiring laws.

That strikes me as unlikely. I might just be naive, but I can't imagine being sued for filtering candidates on their code portfolios.

This is a genuine and non-rhetorical question: how does it differ from academic qualifications? Both are unpaid work that a person undertakes [partly] in order to prove their value to potential employers, but nobody is getting sued for filtering candidates based on academic qualifications.

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