Dear Hiring Manager, Please Don't Shun Me | Hacker News Reader

Dear Hiring Manager, Please Don't Shun Me

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13 pointstaylorp18 comments

"My name is Jamal and I have dreadlocks. I'm old enough to be your father."

"For a woman, I'm rather butch."

"look at my Tweets and Quora responses rather than my bald head"

So this is about a woman who is "old enough to be your father", who has dreadlocks on her bald head?

Maybe I'm not up to date on the lingo, but how is "I'm actually a tiger once I warm up to people" positive? Is being a "tiger" some sales term for a people person?

Maybe I'm not the target audience, but this piece was just all over the place. I recognize that getting a job is hard, especially if you are different in some way (or in this case, every way, to the point of many contradictions).

Hiring is hard, too. Hiring the wrong people is bad, often much worse than missing out on good people. The point here seems to be "hire everyone," which is simply bad advice.

EDIT: Wow, a lot of replies! I probably missed the point of the article, especially as I've never worked anywhere big enough to have a "Hiring Manager" (although I've worked for plenty of discriminatory people, current position excepted).

I guess I expected a powerful anecdote, kind of like the "AirBNB isn't for black people" thing, but this article was actually something impossible to actually relate to. Especially, since the first paragraph vs the rest of the article is where most of the discrepancies lie.

I'm clearly just too far outside of the scope of this particular conversation.

I got the impression that the intent of the article was "hire based on the skills for the job, not on how well someone aces an interview." There's always biases going into interviews, whether the company is a tiny startup, or a huge multinational corporation.

People get written off in interviews all the time for worthless reasons that have no bearing on job performance. This article is encouraging interviewers to recognize bias and look past it.

Then again, an interview might be all you have. Just out of college, trying to get a start in an industry dominated by old timers with no easy way to prove your skills other than certifications and experience?

Please don't hire Old Joe with 20 years experience for an entry level IT job making $40,000 just because he applied for it. Young Bill here is fresh out of college with only an internship on his resume, and if Old Joe gets the job, Young Bill gets the shaft. Worse yet, they both end up working at McDonalds because a contractor with a visa would do it for $30,000 and no benefits (and then the company will complain that there's a tech worker shortage).

I see it far too often.

The point here seems to be "hire everyone," which is simply bad advice.

I think the point is that everyone has superficial differences, and that you shouldn't let them cloud your judgment.

"So this is about a woman who is "old enough to be your father", who has dreadlocks on her bald head?"

Come on, dogg, this can't be your first go-round with this kind of writing.

um the writer is obviously using several individuals who deviate from the norm to make the point - you really didn't get that?

Interpretive reading is hard. Read that in Barbie "Math is hard" voice. :)

MM yes one would have hoped that any one working as a professional in IT and participating on HN would have you know a proper adult reading age.

Maybe its time to bring back what newspapers do you read as a filter for professional jobs.

Read that in the voice of Walter Bishop or Rodney Mckay :-)

Yeah, I got it, I was responding to HN poster "larrick".

I believe the desired effect was to present a whole bunch of different types of people that get dinged by HR people after a resume made it through the filtering software.

Anecdote here instead of data, but I know someone who took off 10 years from their resume including military service because they received no calls with that resume; presumably being too old for the jobs they wanted. With the 10 years gone, they received calls non-stop.

As for the point of the article being "Hire everyone", I took it to be, "Take a look at everyone that's initially qualified." Now, granted, if someone doesn't have the background, then sure, toss it. But if you see that someone has X years of Technology Y which is what you're looking for, but they're named Jamal and they're 50 years old, why not take a look at them? They've at least met your requirements, and some older people work well with younger people and vice versa.

Signed:

> Sincerely yours, > > Everyone

The author is just listing stereotypes that employers usually treat as negative signals.

> Hiring the wrong people is bad, often much worse than missing out on good people. The point here seems to be "hire everyone," which is simply bad advice.

No, the point is "don't stereotype" - just because someone has ADHD, an accent, dreadlocks or is old doesn't mean that they will not be friendly, effective, loyal and smart.

> Hiring the wrong people is bad, often much worse than missing out on good people. The point here seems to be "hire everyone," which is simply bad advice.

I keep seeing your first statement repeated in various forms. Is there anything other than anecdotes to support the assertion? It seems like one of those "common sense" or "self-evident" truth things that, on examination of actual real-world data, likely isn't quite as valid as it would seem.

Also, I didn't get that the point was "hire everyone," so much as "don't let superficial appearances interfere with a decision making process".

I'm under the impression that accurate data on hiring success is essentially non-existent.

Some of the contradictions and non sequitur points might be due to this piece being written by Jeff Giesea as an illustrative device, and not by an actual person-on-the-street. It's signed by "Everyone", so you could read the article as a cross-section of experiences brought to the interview process by a teeming mass of aspirants. As for Giesea's point he's trying to make with this article, what I took away from my reading of it was "don't judge a book by its cover".

This is interesting as a conversation starter or somesuch. But, there is something a little servile about it.

"See me for all that I am. I'm proud of who I am."

We know that shallow aspects of a person play a big role in a person's career, multiplied by feedback loops of self confidence. An ugly person is less fortunate than a pretty one. Someone who conforms to a preconceived notion of what a star manager/lawyer/graphic designer is supposed to look and sound like has an advantage over someone who does not.

But there is something inherently shallow in a hiring process. It's not optimized for fairness (as a school admission process might be. It's based on resumes and interviews. It's not surprising that shallow details matter.

This plea to be "given a chance" rubs me the wrong way. Slightly. I don't know exactly why. It feels like a sort of sad desire that the world be more fair.

>It feels like a sort of sad desire that the world be more fair.

I don't understand what's sad about that desire at all.

It feels defeatist. Not in general, but in this case.

I interpret it like thus:

The hiring process (like mate selection) is literally evolution at work. (unfettered capitalism)

Choosing someone with inferior qualities no matter if technical, personal, or physical will always rub people the wrong way because it's instinct in our lizard brain telling us it's watering down the human race.

Human beings are way more primitive that we like to acknowledge and life is way more brutal and unfair than we like to acknowledge.

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