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To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

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Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#381

Post by nscalf »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #353
nscalf wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down…

> companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". > Sure, we probably miss some good peo…

> You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit".

Do/would you hire any person who can answer your questions? There are plenty of smart people who are entirely unenjoyable people. Not liking someone is not discrimination.

> So you'd reject a candidate because of comfort and enjoyment? Even though the candidate could make you tons of money? That's very discouraging.

You seem to be implying that someone who is smart can obviously outperform people who are less smart. A good team is more than smart people, and a successful company is more than smart people. There is a big difference in the effectiveness of teams that are happy versus miserable. If a brilliant individual makes the rest of your team miserable, that's an awful tradeoff. If you think it's okay to do that, that's very discouraging.

> There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. A person with Asperger's communicates differently than a person without Asperger's. You chose to interpret that difference as rudeness. Instead of understanding the cause of the differences and adapting to it, you simply eliminated the candidate for the sake of your own comfort.

So instead of feeling insulted or threatened due to rude behavior, you should ignore it because it's your fault? If a guy is aggressively hitting on a girl, is it her fault? Should she change her behavior? Of course not. If you behave in a way that diminishes a collaborative work environment, why would the work environment be responsible for just putting up with the way you behave? You don't have to be the life of the party, but you have to at least act professional. If you can't pull that off for a single interview, you probably can't pull it off indefinitely in a professional environment.

This does matter to me, but the reality is that not everyone is a good fit for every setting. The whole point of interviewing is to find people who are going to help you move forward in the best way possible, and if you come into an interview and upset everyone you talk to, there are no data points to indicate that you being a smart asshole is going to help us move forward.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#382

Post by nscalf »

wysifnwyg wrote: post #356
nscalf wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work actually is a social club. You don't need to love everyone, but you shouldn't feel uncomfortable. If you're unhappy at work, your work will suffer. If you're excited about what you're doing and you have your team's back, then you will deliver more value. Excellent engineers can be a good find, but teams build excellent things. There is a reason everyone doesn't work in isolation.

Unless you own the company, you don't pick all your managers, coworkers, and clients. It's an exceptionally valuable team skill to be able to work with someone you wouldn't invite out for a beer. Learning to work with different viewpoints and behaviors builds character and makes one more competitive. Effective managers know this.

You don't need to pick all of your managers, coworkers, and clients. That's the point of vetting a company culture before you join. In general, the culture should be a reflection of a shared ideology for business and interpersonal behavior. There is a ton of room for variety within that, but it pins some underlying important traits.

Being a good culture fit does not mean you have to like them so much that you're inviting them out for a beer. And in order to really be a long term competitive company and team, you need to be able to be unified first. If there is significant internal turmoil, or people are unmotivated, uncomfortable, threatened, etc. you will never be competitive. "Building character" is generally code for "deal with this crappy situation", and life is too short to make people miserable. You can get a diverse group of people without making all of them unhappy if you select for people who can work together.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#383

Post by nscalf »

blablabla123 wrote: post #361
nscalf wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down…

>Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. "Culture" has been deemed the #1 important in hiring in the startup culture in the last 5 or probably 10 years. Even large old-school companies seem to go for this. The reality is this: just open Glassdoor, a newspaper or tal…

I have no research to point to, but my personal experience is very different from this. Sure, everywhere has it's own downsides, but that does not mean that a company is either terrible to work for or everything is failing. That's a really naive stance to take, and it's very defeatist.

> ... that's probably also why so many found their own companies or just freelance.

Fair enough, if you're in a work environment where you feel this way, I suggest trying to find a better work environment, or doing like you said: start a company or freelance.

I personally know a lot of places where they have had almost no churn in 5-10 years, they're having a lot of success, and everyone is happy and mission driven. I'm totally willing to say they may be the exception, but don't write off the work environment as a whole. Or do and go find your own thing, but don't just be unhappy.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#384

Post by nscalf »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #343
nscalf wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down…

> Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. This is the same reasoning that has been used in the past to deny opportunity: to people of colour, to women, to LGBTQ+... to people who didn't attend the "right" university or college... This kind of active bias is harmful…

Expecting a minimum amount of professionalism to join a professional environment is not the same thing as discriminating agains people because they are a part of: women, people of color, LGBTQ+, etc. That's a pretty extreme comparison. It does not lock a work culture into a monoculture or degrade flexibility and responsiveness to change, and it does not directly impact the bottom line, that is a ridiculous leap to make. It actually does the opposite. Having a culture where people are collaborative, professional, and respectful allows you to get things done faster and take feedback and criticism in a more productive manner.

> I have often heard this from people in real life, from the cisgendered/male/caucasian/heteronormative/neuronormative, as if making space for people who aren't exactly like them is going to drive them into some lower social caste.

There is a significant amount of people crying discrimination for everything being said that they don't love. People are less willing to join in discourse, and people are less willing to disagree about something and remain cordial. There are definitely people who are suffering from discrimination, but there are also people saying they are not succeeded because they are being discriminated against, while they actually suck at what their doing and need to work harder.

> Do you and everyone at your organization always present a level-headed, calm, non-confrontational demeanour, or are you or anyone else ever ruffled by anything? Including lack of sleep, lack of caffeine, family crisis, friend crisis, personal crisis, unplanned bill, crashed computer, or anything else big or small? If not, perhaps there are unnecessary risks with making a major judgement based on a single data point.

Nope, and no one expects anyone to be at their best 24/7. But if I get 1 hour to talk to you, and in that brief period of time you've shown me that you're rude, then I have to draw from the data points I have available to me. At the end of the day, there are a lot of people and not a lot of data points to make judgements from. This is a competitive environment, you have to be better than the other people being interviewed. If you're not, you don't get the job, even if you're having a bad day. A bad hire is really expensive and damaging to an organization, which makes red flags really important data points.

> How are you allowing the candidate the best chance to evaluate if you and your team will have perfect interactions with them?

There isn't a really good way to do it, you just give as many people as possible the chance to spend time with the candidate. No one expects all perfect interactions, just positive enough interactions that the team is okay with them. The team takes priority, not the candidate. It doesn't matter if you're smart, the team decides if you're an option to bring on.

On top of that, everyone gets this opportunity. It doesn't lean to everyone's strengths, but then some people will do better in the interpersonal parts and worse in the technical parts. There is a reason interviews involve multiple stages and multiple types of assessment. None of this is perfect, and you don't have to be perfect to get hired. You have to be good enough to enough people, and you have to be better than the other options.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#385

Post by perl4ever »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #284
soulofmischief wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I have found dealing with people that are Aspie/ADD (father and brother) How transparent you are in the fact that you are applying a completely anecdotal and personal experience to the largest possible generalization of ADD/Asperger's. That is very unscientific, and to people like me who deal with ADHD and a few other mental illnesses, downright offensive and prejudiced.

Aspie/ADD affected people often times accuse others, through technical language, how someone's feelings aren't important. Yes, it is unscientific. It's my own personal experience that Aspie/ADD people often can't understand how much pain they can cause other people.

How do you know it's not a symmetric relationship?

It always seemed inherently weird and self-contradictory to me to accuse someone of lacking empathy. How can failure to understand another person's feelings be other than mutual?

Everybody ignores the feelings of others on occasion due to lack of understanding, but also when their own feelings are powerful enough to take precedence. I think it's best to assume that any time someone is causing pain, or even awkwardness, it's due to one of those situations or maybe a combination. I'm doubtful that there are really any other kinds of people.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#386

Post by celdon25 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72
celdon25 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be happy to disagree with this post for reasons other than claims of "systemic discrimination". It celebrates behaviors that are linked with hypocrisy and arbitrary bias. The problem isn't that you're weeding out people who don't fit in with the team. The problem is that you're weeding out people as a result of invalid, inaccurate, arbitrary biases that are more likely to stem from animal-brain genetic instincts…

In defense of GP, you know why we haven't replaced all hiring interviews with standardized tests and statistical models? Gut instinct. People can make a good guess about how they'll get along with an interviewee. Machines can't just yet. And this is important, because while a mediocre person that fits in well with a team is only a minor positive contribution, a bad team fit is a negative contribution even if they're…

I'm not arguing against gut instinct being a necessary factor. My point is that when it's the only factor, and when people rationalize it as being the only factor, without any quantification, then that's the problem.

How do you define "bad team fit"? Can you make a checklist of things that are associated with "good team fit" and "bad team fit", and aim to assess for those items individually, before coming to a conclusion? You don't need artificial general intelligence to make a spreadsheet and a checklist. If you don't do at least this, how do you even know in your own mind what a good team fit really is? You don't need to have perfect accuracy with this list of criteria, but not having a list at all will be less accurate than any list you come up with in good faith.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#387

Post by y_tho »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #353
nscalf wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I'm getting this straight, in a setting where your entire goal is to make a company want to work with you every day, it's discrimination to turn you down because you did not make them want to work with you? Listen, companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. I turn down…

> companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". > Sure, we probably miss some good peo…

> There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole.

Someone may be rude because they're aspie or because they're assholes, but the end result is the same: dealing with rudeness. I rather not.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#388

Post by unnouinceput »

e-_pusher wrote: post #130
unnouinceput wrote: post #128

Wasn't this tried like a year ago at one of FAANG companies and an AI was put in charge for automation process and it hired only male, mostly white, and got a huge backlash? I can't quite recall the details nor the specific company but I do recall the backlash from feminists, so somebody help with a link please.

You are probably thinking of this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-t...

Yup, that's it, thank you

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#389

Post by sidlls »

gridlockd wrote: post #323
sidlls wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This way of thinking" is otherwise known as "civilization."

I disagree, but let's accept it as true for the sake of argument. This is civilization. The question is, is it still right and good? Being born into civilization automatically makes you indebted towards it, because of all its affordances? I think that's morally wrong, and I don't like this attitude as a matter of principle.

Each of us is born into some structure that human animals impose. Some groups afford more or less ability to individuals to contribute (e.g. by voting, putting themselves forward as potential leaders, etc.) to a discussion about whether the existing structures are appropriate. Couching it in moral terms isn't interesting, from a practical perspective.

Re: To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews

#390

Post by lonelappde »

y_tho wrote: post #387
matheusmoreira wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies have their own cultures, and if you're not a fit to that culture, bringing you on runs the risk of ruining the culture they have been building and making their employees quit. You can justify any kind of discrimination that way. I can come up with a number of reasons that would make women, people of color, foreigners or literally any other group a "poor culture fit". > Sure, we probably miss some good peo…

> There's a difference between having Asperger's and being an asshole. Someone may be rude because they're aspie or because they're assholes, but the end result is the same: dealing with rudeness. I rather not.

That's distressingly close to rejecting people because they sound rude for speaking AAVE instead of Received Pronunciation.
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