Comment by shayaknyc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shayaknyc | Hacker News Reader

While I completely understand that by eliminating negotiations for new hires helps to level the playing field, this is just a short-term bandage on a much larger wound.

I would have much preferred she change their hiring policies to educate their hiring managers on how NOT to be biased against women and to NOT penalize women who negotiate for themselves. Treat women who aggressively negotiate their own salaries THE SAME WAY YOU WOULD IF IT WERE A MAN! Education, ultimately, is the answer to a long term solution. It would also help to make sure you have an equal balance of sexes that comprise your hiring team to truly level the playing field.

For a capitalist society, if you're a stronger negotiator, then you should absolutely reap those benefits, and if you're a weaker negotiator, then you have something to strive for and improve. By eliminating it altogether, I'm not sure how you can achieve sustainable, long term success. This decision also seems to undermine or belie the accolades thrown on her for being a Feminist icon in the tech/vc world. If you're trying to level the "playing field" then LEVEL it, don't eliminate it.

Being a good negotiator is not well-correlated with being a good performer on the job for most jobs, perhaps least of all for software engineers (who tend to be conflict adverse and not particularly socially adept). It's absurd that playing hardball during hiring negotiations counts for more than anything I could possibly do once I'm actually working a job.

If anything, awarding massive rewards to stronger negotiators is a market failure in a capitalist society, in the same way that paying more to taller or more attractive people is.

If that's true, that it's not well-correlated, why haven't companies figured this out yet? You'd think someone would be paying attention when there's money involved.

I'd say several reasons:

1) People are people and ingrained biases and social pressures are incredibly powerful forces.

2) The amounts of money are tiny ($1,000-$20,000) relative to a large company's operating budget. It's the same reason businesses overspend on airfare and SaaS products.

3) The hiring manager isn't spending their own money. It's no skin off their back if they pay a new hire an extra five grand.

Unfortunately, you can't simply educate biases away. Oftentimes they are unaware of their biases, and if you make them aware, it is often only in a pedagogical setting; not one where they are actually trying to make relevant decisions.

This is especially true during an interview scenario, where people largely make decisions based upon intuition and "culture fit."

Treating everyone exactly the same still doesn't fix being socialized to negotiate less hard.

Is it actually better for capitalism to pay people based on negotiation rather than job performance? Is that a settled discussion in economics? (Obviously negotiation skill plays some role in overall skill, but that's not an answer to the question.)

How could you pay someone by job performance?

Anything you use to measure their job performance then becomes the metric that is optimized for. And the things you can easily measure are almost never the important things that you need out of an employee.

It's possible that negotiation is the least bad option of what to measure, but that's a far cry from being a capitalist ideal.

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