281–290 of 512 posts
Ideas for questions - What % non-white male at junior, senior, management, executive and board levels? - Are all employees bias trained? - What is an example of an equality issue the company faced in the last year and how did they respond? - What is the pay gap between genders, and if not equal and when will it be equal? - How is the company contributing to addressing industry wide systematic bias? (meetups, philanth…
I hope not
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> Also, words like "high energy" and "passion" often reflect poorly as well. Interesting. Can you expand on this? I don't see "passion" as negative; it seems to just mean that people like their work.
In job adverts, "passion" is often shorthand for "willing to work unpaid overtime."
Limited to them its just an unhealthy lifestyle. But if used as some sort of a competitive advantage against those with families and interests beyond work this creates an unfair and awkward work environment.
There are people who look to fill a hole with work when the solution is to find a more balanced life. Workplaces should be alert to and proactively discourage this. Work is primarily about work, professionalism, not a place to socialize. And the 'bro culture', open offices show to an extent some workplaces encouraging it.
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If you have a workplace where women and minorities cannot discuss their issues without a white man butting in to whine "but what about meee?" then yes, that is a toxic work environment.
So "not a minority" means you're a white man?
But I'd be put off at seeing beer, free or otherwise at work. The brogrammer culture doesn't work for me.
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I will happily acknowledge all of your criticisms, since I agree with them. But I'll also point out a big problem with your suggested other questions: employers know that this is a hot-button issue for some prospective employees, and they will adjust their answers accordingly. There is a right answer when a female interviewee asks "Would your previous female reports be happy to work for you again?" - could you imagin…
Have you done many interviews? The solution to "people lie sometimes" is not to rely on correlation-to-a-correlation Ouija board bullshit, it's to delve and ask for more detail until you're satisfied the person isn't bullshitting. I want to know if candidates are smart and hard-working; I don't ask them "Are you smart and hard-working", and I don't ask them what their spouse does for a living based on some cockamamie…
But I'll point out that what you're actually building, with the procedure you suggest, is a mental model of how a candidate is likely to perform in a role, given the information that you can find out about them. It is still a model, and you make a number of assumptions in it (notably, that past performance may predict future results, and that a candidate's description of how they handled a project is actually how they handled it, and that information about how they handled it is more predictive than asking them to do a shortened project in front of you). Some of those assumptions I'd agree with, some of them I wouldn't. My point is that these two questions are ones that a couple different women I know have found predictive of how a manager will treat them, and that these women are fairly high-up in their careers and generally satisfied with them. They are not necessarily the questions I would use, but because I will never be in the situation that they or the OP is in, they are probably a lot more relevant to the OP's situation than any mental models I use.
Silicon valley culture used to be that way, and is still that way. The cube farms was the prevailing best practice. Then the pendulum swung to the other side with the new kids entering the workforce and wanted open office, work families, and all that. Which then created the cargo culting from others entering the process. Now we're on the bubble of the pendulum swinging back. So it goes.
As a counterpoint I've met and managed people who preferred open office arrangements. Which only really only proves that generalizations are bad. I agree also that we're likely at the full extension of the pendulum on the open office trend. The formal/informal observation for me is key, some people want work to be more like their college dorm. They are in fact "living" at work and eliminating any notion at all of a w…
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> If you work for a company that makes negative assumptions about you because of your gender/race, you'll have a worse experience than when they make positive assumptions. What's wrong with just not making any assumptions based on gender and race?
The only problem with doing nothing is that it generally results in the status quo: organizations that are not diverse. This is not to say that positive assumptions is the answer, but that's not what most organizations aiming at better diversity are doing. Also, you have the additional problem that some folks noisily pretend to be not making any assumptions based on gender or race: cf the numerous recent court ruling…
Somebody who is blatantly and obviously biased is easier to deal with as the person receiving the discrimination - you can clearly tell that they are biased and that you aren't the problem.
Somebody who seems to be - but isn't obviously - leaves you constantly doubting yourself (especially in a culture that has rewarded/looks up to that person).
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I can prove you wrong. I want and like open floor plans, and have never had buyer's remorse. I'll rule out any cube farm for any future job; I hate the isolation.
It is unfortunate that companies can't be flexible and give employees the environment that the employees find will make them more productive. So one group of people could be seated elbow to elbow with headphones to avoid some of the distractions and another group of people would have personal offices with a door where they can concentrate - that way everyone is happy.
While it's definitely distracting, there is a type of conversation that occurs which I have never experienced in all my years as a cube farmer. If I want isolation, I can go sit somewhere else or work from home or a cafe. It feels like the default being not isolation makes all the difference.
I am a woman of color and to be honest I totally lucked into it. From the perspective that I work for a large, old company: * Get a sense of how the company embraces (or doesn't embrace) flexible work arrangements. Can an employee leave early to run errands or pick up kids and make up the hours that night or on a different day without having to jump through hoops and/or get looked at like they have two heads? My theo…
One thing I absolutely love about my current employer is that it is written policy that if you're absent less than four hours in a day, you don't have to report it as PTO. Of course, that same policy also tells you not to abuse it. I think that's pretty fair.
It feels really good knowing that if I have a doctor's appointment first thing in the morning, I can come in an hour or two late, and I won't be either forced to burn sick time or stuck in the office at night making up the hours.
Compare that with the last employer I worked at, which was a defense contractor. For those of you who don't know how defense contractors work, federal law requires that every employee's hours be accounted for, so I'd have to either make up the hours or take sick time every time I had a doctor's appointment. Don't get me wrong: they were fairly progressive for a defense contractor (nobody bat an eye at the purple stripe I had in my hair at the time), but they were still subject to a whole ton of federally-mandated bullshit that I'm glad to be rid of. I sucked it up when I worked there because I got paid really well, but now that I'm out, I don't miss it.
Ideas for questions - What % non-white male at junior, senior, management, executive and board levels? - Are all employees bias trained? - What is an example of an equality issue the company faced in the last year and how did they respond? - What is the pay gap between genders, and if not equal and when will it be equal? - How is the company contributing to addressing industry wide systematic bias? (meetups, philanth…
While these are all important questions, I wonder if there's a different way to word them. My first reaction if I was looking to hire would be "this candidate is looking to make waves, better find someone else that won't be constantly emailing HR." And I know that's not what you're meaning.