Beware of fake, dishonest attempts at establishing an "objective" hiring process
In the tech industry, I've seen good people, full of good intentions, invest serious time in developing what they felt was an unbiased, fact-based system of hiring, but they were blind to extent their own preferences were being treated as facts.
A specific example of this: there was a CTO, a man I've worked with and who I largely respect, who put serious time into developing a code base, and then deliberately adding some errors and redundancy to it. This code base would then be given to job candidates, as a homework assignment. Could they find all the mistakes, fix them, and remove all of the redundancy?
Many people in the tech industry now rely on tests like this, which are seen as being more objective than older job interview techniques. But this overlooks how much of the assignment is actually subjective in nature. In particular, what does it mean to reduce redundancy in a code base? Anyone who's done much programming is aware that one can refactor a code base almost to infinity. One can create more and more abstractions. At the extreme, one can create a new programming language where the program is represented by just a single character, perhaps the letter "w"":
w
There it is, the whole entire program that runs a major website. Of course, you also need to create a compiler that knows how to parse that letter into a lower level language that would do the real work of running the website. But if you ask a software developer to remove the redundancy in your code base and they come back to you with code that has more than 1 letter in it, then they've clearly failed the assignment.
Am I being ridiculous? Yes, absolutely, because I'm ignoring nuance, subtlety, reasonableness and proportionality ALL OF WHICH ARE SUBJECTIVE. If you want a truly objective standard, one needs to accept absurd, surreal, and almost psychotic behavior, because that's what human behavior becomes when you try to remove all subjective factors.
Does this mean the hiring process can never be truly objective? Yes.
Does this mean the hiring process must be unfair, unjust, corrupt and cruel? No.
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Beware of fake, dishonest attempts at establishing an "objective" hiring process
In the tech industry, I've seen good people, full of good intentions, invest serious time in developing what they felt was an unbiased, fact-based system of hiring, but they were blind to extent their own preferences were being treated as facts.
A specific example of this: there was a CTO, a man I've worked with and who I largely respect, who put serious time into developing a code base, and then deliberately adding some errors and redundancy to it. This code base would then be given to job candidates, as a homework assignment. Could they find all the mistakes, fix them, and remove all of the redundancy?
Many people in the tech industry now rely on tests like this, which are seen as being more objective than older job interview techniques. But this overlooks how much of the assignment is actually subjective in nature. In particular, what does it mean to reduce redundancy in a code base? Anyone who's done much programming is aware that one can refactor a code base almost to infinity. One can create more and more abstractions. At the extreme, one can create a new programming language where the program is represented by just a single character, perhaps the letter "w"":
w
There it is, the whole entire program that runs a major website. Of course, you also need to create a compiler that knows how to parse that letter into a lower level language that would do the real work of running the website. But if you ask a software developer to remove the redundancy in your code base and they come back to you with code that has more than 1 letter in it, then they've clearly failed the assignment.
Am I being ridiculous? Yes, absolutely, because I'm ignoring nuance, subtlety, reasonableness and proportionality ALL OF WHICH ARE SUBJECTIVE. If you want a truly objective standard, one needs to accept absurd, surreal, and almost psychotic behavior, because that's what human behavior becomes when you try to remove all subjective factors.
Does this mean the hiring process can never be truly objective? Yes.
Does this mean the hiring process must be unfair, unjust, corrupt and cruel? No.