411–420 of 426 posts
Reminds of a recent prudential billboard. "We spend more time reading billboards than planning for retirement." Great, if you aren't doing your job of planning then I'll use someone else!
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I interviewed for an internal position once and got similar feedback, by phone, from the HR person. She was on the phone with me for about an hour and, in all honesty, that rejection phone call made that one of the best interviews I've ever had. I didn't get that job, but it gave me a lot of constructive advice and I ended up getting the next one I interviewed for.
You'd probabbly apply again sometime right?
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Fortunately, EEOC considers national origin equally important to protect, and 'accentist' is likely adjacent enough that your lawyers will not support you going there.
Someone from deep rural alabama vs someone from illinois - they're both from the same country. both 'white', both have same qualifications. one has a deep accent that is hard to understand, one doesn't. Please define how making a decision based on accent would be 'racist' (by any EEOC definition).
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We always get these kinds of responses when interview testing is mentioned. This isn't some high-level algorithm analysis on a whiteboard with a panel of examiners grilling you. This is a simple test of basic competence. It's like interviewing a candidate Formula 1 driver and asking them "so which bit's the brake pedal?" If they can't tell you that instantly then they shouldn't be applying for the position in the fir…
I had to twitch my feet to all three imaginary pedals to figure out the brake is the middle one. Even in this metaphor doing and knowing how to do are distinct skills.
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This gets right to the heart of the issue, IMHO. Hiring has become such a litigation-prone process that companies are now incentivized to leak as little information as possible. It's sad because nobody wins -- companies get sued for petty nothings, candidates who have been wronged have no recourse, and candidates aren't given the feedback they need to improve themselves. Our startup isn't hiring yet, but I must confe…
Hiring has become such a litigation-prone Where? I've never seen anyone sue a company for not hiring them, and no company I've ever worked at has been sued for not hiring someone. If it was litigation-prone, I'd expect to see some litigation. I don't work in the US; maybe this is a weird US thing? Maybe people who do work in the US can give us some numbers? What proportion of companies one has worked for have been su…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6067331/Swedish-Musl...
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Someone from deep rural alabama vs someone from illinois - they're both from the same country. both 'white', both have same qualifications. one has a deep accent that is hard to understand, one doesn't. Please define how making a decision based on accent would be 'racist' (by any EEOC definition).
Cursory research suggests that you would likely be liable for excluding an "ethnic group" if you refused to hire people with southern accent; "southerner" is an actual example I found in USG hiring guides.
again, if you have 2 candidates that have equal background, skills, etc, you have to make a choice if you can only hire one. it seems that any decision you make could be challenged on some point.
The 'alabama' accent might just be an accent they have, and they're not from alabama. But they still have an accent that is difficult for people to work with. If you have another candidate of equal experience and credentials, but who is easier to understand... do you hire the person who is harder to understand precisely because you might get sued otherwise?
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> they’ve just shown that they’re not going to be able to write clean code unsupervised. The opposite, shown they can’t write supervised under the gun, which never happens On the job.
If we’d ever had somebody crippled by interview stage freight, I make be able to take that seriously. The coding skills you need to pass our test is writing a for loop that mutates a dict. We’ve never had anybody forget how to do that in our interview, but we have had people come up with remarkably inefficient solutions to the problem. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people’s problem solving skills (which i…
> remarkably inefficient solutions
The first one usually is. As the problem gets clearer, better solutions become obvious. That takes relaxation and calm thought however, e.g. Archimedes in the bathtub.
> I don’t think…exponentially less efficient
Doesn't need to be a large difference. With multiple candidates, even 10% is decisive.
There's also the psychological factor of knowing something makes the "knower" think it's easy while the others believe it's hard.
I do lots of interviews as a contractor, and must say they have little to no bearing on my ability. In the real world I've solved every problem encountered, given some time. Interviews almost none, the few successes depend on whether I wrote the same algorithm in the last two weeks by chance.
A random throw of the dice at the craps table would be just as accurate and less stressful for all involved.
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My friend works for a large consulting company (you've heard of them). They were hired by a client who needed to reduce their labor costs by 10-15% (read: fire people) because they were hemorrhaging money. The team of consultants asked to NOT be given any performance data - and recommended that the consulting team handle the layoffs and fire randomly - this immunized the client from any discrimination lawsuits and wa…
The team of consultants asked to NOT be given any performance data I call shenanigans, because people are not made redundant, positions are. Who gets laid off is related to their job not existing anymore, nothing to do with them as an individual person.
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>they just end up wasting a minority's time. They also waste their own time, so there's some good coming out of it. But I wouldn't say unintelligible accent is racism. I've met some unintelligible people that were born and raised where I live. An accent is also something you can change (even though it's hard). So it would be really valuable feedback to the person who's not getting it.
_You_ wouldn't say an unintelligible accent is racism, but a civil court might. It's valuable feedback for the candidate, but it's high risk (high magnitude, even if chance of happening is low) and near-zero reward for the company.
I can usually predict quite well who will hire me based on my interview experience, but I've been surprised some times where I got hired after I thought I failed completely at the interview. This may sound weird, but in that case I usually assume the company couldn't find anybody else, which is also a red flag for me.
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Well that sucks for the person if they were rejected because of their accent and no feedback was given. All that hard work in preparing for interviews and you don't even know for sure why they didn't pick you.
This is a small part of why anti-discrimination laws are harmful. Companies can't be honest because they need to cover for potential discrimination lawsuits. If you go a step further, a truly racist company is never going to hire someone of a race they look down on, but they can't put anything on a job description about it, so they just end up wasting a minority's time.
- peoples accent improves in the first months of them practicing (with you).
- my understanding of non-native English speaker (Thai, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, etc) improved in weeks of exposure.
So I don't think anti-discrimination laws are harmful. The situation may not be as confortable for a few weeks but eventually it does not get on the way of productivity.
edit: added my native language, French