Posts filed under 'discrimination'
One of the nice things about the social networking sites such as LinkedIn, is that they allow me to reconnect with people I worked with years ago. I recently re-met a colleague from my undergraduate days, and a colleague I worked with 25 years ago.
I mentioned to one of these colleagues’ peers that I’d know this person for over 30 years. His response was, “You don’t look old enough to retire.” !!!! My silent response: I’ve got news for you, buddy: people who start to work at 22, work for 43 years if they retire at 65. Maybe you missed addition in elementary school.
What I actually said was, “I’m not. Hey, with one in college and one soon to be, Mark and I may never retire. Even if I was ‘old enough to retire,’ why would I retire when I’m still learning and having fun?”
If this had been the only couple of conversations about ageism over the last couple of months, maybe I could ignore it. But when I met a colleague of long-standing (an old friend) at a conference, his hair was dark brown again. I asked him why. “I’d been passed over for a promotion to the C-level, so before I started my new job search, I dyed my hair to look younger.” Another C-level colleague asked me to explain to his staff we’d known each other for a few years, not the 15 years we’ve actually known each other and worked together.
Once I have more than one hand’s worth of data, including, Age and Agile Are Orthogonal, I decided I wasn’t nuts about this, and people in our industry are discriminating about people over 40 or 50 or 60. (Until they meet me 
HR folks: you and I know it’s illegal. Hiring managers, not only is it illegal to discriminate based on age, it automatically removes people from your consideration who may turn out to be some of the best employees you can hire. Some benefits of hiring a mature candidate can be:
- With any luck, the candidate has emotional maturity. That makes the candidate more able to ease into a team.
- More often, I see more mature candidates who are happy where they are. They don’t want your job. They don’t want to backstab you to get ahead. They want a reasonable job for a reasonable pay. Moving up the ladder makes no sense to them.
- They want to do good work, and they know what that is.
- They know how to pace themselves.
- They know (more than young candidates) how to evaluate options and not just pick the first option that appears.
Not all mature candidates are perfect. I’m certainly generalizing here. But let’s be clear: Turning 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 does not prevent someone from being a great employee. Will you have trouble getting that person to work a lot of overtime? I hope so–lots of overtime means lots of mistakes. Will you get someone who may have more adaptability? I hope so. Will you get someone who doesn’t have to be taught what a good job is? I hope so. I can’t guarantee these things, but in my experience, a more mature candidate can be a great employee.
Don’t discriminate based on age or what you think the person requires for salary. At least do a phone screen. You won’t be able to hire someone cheap to work all hours, but remember, you get what you pay for. Don’t rule a candidate out because you saw the date he or she graduated from university. You might get someone with one year of experience many times, see What’s a Year of Experience? But you might just find a great candidate who can help your team jell and help create a great product. Ageism is not helpful. Don’t help make it part of our industry.
June 24th, 2008
I just read Penelope Trunk’s Quit work for a while to have kids. Your career will be just fine.
I hope it’s true. I don’t understand how it can be true for highly technical people. I hope I’m wrong.
I took off 3 months when each of my children was born. I didn’t want more time off–I wanted to go back to work. (Have you ever tried to attend to your biological needs when you have a colic-y baby? Impossible. Work was so much easier.)
But I’ve certainly worked with (mostly) women who felt trapped. If they took time off, they felt as if they could not re-enter the workforce.
I’ve been talking to some women who took 20 years off. They haven’t kept up with the field. They are not employable as developers today. They certainly could be if they can learn a modern computer language, and learn how to write requirements without shall statements, and how to work in a collaborative team, and how to continuously integrate their code, and more things I take for granted these days, but are new ideas to them.
But, these are new ideas to new college grads too (except for the language), and the new grads don’t have the same maturity as a woman in her 40’s or 50’s.
The whole point of feminism was to give everyone a choice (men, too). It’s refreshing to read this, even if I don’t believe it yet
January 30th, 2008
In his comment, Gregbo asks what I mean by “bad” judgment.
Here’s an incomplete list:
- Frequent job changes, at least one job a year for several years
- Months of no discernible work or lag times between jobs.
- Titles that appear to move up and down the ladder.
There are more, but those are the common ones. Sometimes, people take jobs because they need a paycheck or health insurance (or both). Those people tend to feel as if their jobs are sucking the souls out of them. If you see a resume like that, don’t discard it. That candidate wants a good job–and may almost be desperate for a good job.
I once had a job for two weeks. The same week I was hired, I got a call to report to headquarters in another state, where they laid me off. I made a bad decision to take that job. Luckily, the hiring manager at my next job thought it was funny, and didn’t consider that small interlude a problem job.
So that’s what I mean by a “bad” decision. Candidates can’t tell if a company is on the skids, or will cancel the project they got hired for. If you’re a hiring manager or a recruiter, you have the opportunity to offer the candidate a great start in your organization. Don’t let your prejudices about length of service persuade you to avoid this candidate.
September 17th, 2007
I received some great comments on Why Puzzles and Riddles Discriminate. Adam has a terrific list of the things he’s looking for when he uses “puzzles and/or brainteasers and/or random programs to test”:
- Do they give up right off the bat?
- Do they ask questions or sit silent pondering?
- Do they make different attempts or approaches?
- What areas (if any) do they get stuck on?
- Can they explain what they are thinking? If yes - great. If no - what’s the reason?
And, Craig and Eric disagree with my original post. I may not be able to convince Craig and Eric, but let me use Adam’s list and explain how the answers might be different when the interviewer uses a puzzle/riddle vs. using an audition.In the interview, the context is key to seeing how a person succeeds at work. If the context of the interview is congruent with the workplace, the interview can be a reasonable representative of how the person will interact with people at work. But if the context of the interview is different from the work, the kinds of questions and auditions are less likely to be useful.
I was working with a hiring manager and the interviewing team recently who liked giving what they called “technical puzzles” to candidates. But they’d had several problems recently: two recent hires quit, and one candidate walked out in the middle of the interview. I asked what they were doing for these technical puzzles, and was told they had several–and all of them were about developing a recursive algorithm. The problem was these folks didn’t do any recursion at all. In fact, they had a huge data transformation application, so the context of the interview didn’t match the context of the job. Once new hires realized they’d made a mistake, they reactivated their job search and left. And one candidate didn’t bother waiting until the end of the interview. He’d flipped the bozo bit on the interviewing team.
At another client, the interviewing team liked word riddles. The team traded off who got to ask the puzzle/riddle question during the interview. (That team had 5 people, each of whom had a different puzzle/riddle.) Because the interviewing team were not great at asking behavior-description questions or using real auditions, they missed bunch of people who were hired by other managers in the company (the new hires were successful). I was able to talk to the new hires and ask them questions to understand what the interviewing team was missing. Several of the new hires misunderstood the logic puzzle because English wasn’t their first language, and they didn’t hear the puzzle correctly. Two of the new hires decided that if that’s how the team evaluated potential candidates, they didn’t want to work with that team. And one of the new hires had attempted to explain why there was more than one solution to the riddle, but the interviewer couldn’t hear that.You might say that this interviewing team was able to hire into their culture, and you’d be partly right But in contrast to their interview questions, this team actually had a culture of looking into a problem several ways, debating how to do things, prototyping to see what solutions could look like–a much more collaborative way of working than their puzzle/riddle questions probed. The interviewing team shortchanged themselves by not asking questions/doing auditions that reflected the way they actually worked.
You’ve probably noted I haven’t addressed the discrimination issue here. No one would talk to me about that, because they were afraid (both the new employees and the interviewing teams) that I would be forced to go to a lawyer if I had data that said they were discriminating. But I did notice that in my clients’ large North American cities, those clients who rely heavily on puzzles and riddles have primarily-white, primarily male staffs (this is in contrast to other organizations who have much more diversity). I understand about the problem attracting women to the field in general (see MusingsonWomenandIt. But I could not understand the lack of Asians and other people who aren’t white.Our choices of questions that are not directly related to the job (and no matter how you slice it, puzzles and riddles are only indirectly related to the job) reflect our culture. It’s quite clear that the puzzles and riddles interviewers choose reflect their individual culture. And without meaning to, that culture primarily selects for people just like themselves.I do want to ask questions or observe behaviors similar to Aaron’s questions. But I want to see them in the context of what people do at work, specifically work in this organization. So I want to make all my questions and auditions as context-sensitive as I can. I want to know that candidates will succeed here, in this context.
August 9th, 2006
At last week’s Agile 2006 conference, I led a tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team.” I made a statement that some of the participants challenged:
Using puzzles and riddles discriminate against anyone who isn’t a (middle-upper class) white American suburban male.
(I’d forgotten the middle-upper class part when I was leading the session.) So, what everyone wants to know is: Where is my data?
First, let me explain why I said this. (This post is a bit of a rant.)
- Girls, for example, do not have access or the alone time to spend doing books of puzzles and riddles. It is socially unacceptable for even the geekiest girl you know to do this. A girl who spends time pursuing puzzles and riddles for her own pleasure runs the colossal risk of being ostracized from all the other girls. Boys tend to discover puzzles and riddles during middle school and continue to pursue them through high school. Middle and high school for girls is much more about social ability and social connections.
- The people who can afford to buy the puzzle and riddle books (to practice them and become better at them) are middle-to-upper economic class.
- Puzzles and riddles appeal to a limited number of personality types–types frequently found in high-tech jobs. In particular, they appeal most often to NTs, especially INTJ and INTP types. (NTs are visionaries in Do Your Interview Questions Discriminate For or Against Your Needs?
So, the people who practice with puzzles and riddles are the people who have the disposable income, time, and social acceptability to do so. I don’t know enough about middle class high school boys from other cultures, but I see this all the time in the US.If you’d like to see some other information, take a look at How Would You Move Mount Fuji?. There are some hints at the articles at Career Resource Center but no reference. I also wrote Brainteaser Interviews Showcase Lack of Interviewer Skill, not Candidate Expertise. And, take a look at Brainteasers Inappropriate for Job Interviews by John Kador, who literally wrote the book.
So, have I convinced you yet? Maybe not. Maybe you still think you need a way to know if this candidate is smart enough for you, or you don’t feel competent to start a conversation with something like a puzzle or a riddle to dissect.If you need to know whether a person is smart enough, use behavior-description questions and auditions. Don’t be afraid to ask the “What did you learn from that experience” question as a follow up from your behavior-description questions. If you need people who are smarter than the people we normally have in our field, use the job analysis to understand why. (I bet you don’t, but that’s another rant.)If you need a conversation starter, I have some ideas on building rapport already in this blog, but I’ll write another piece about building rapport. Tongue-in-cheek: Really, if you’d been socializing in high school instead of using puzzles and riddles to avoid social interactions, you might already know how to do this.
Joel discusses ways to really interview in The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing and he discusses auditions in The Perils of JavaSchools. So, if you’re looking for real discrimination data, sorry, I don’t have it. I only have my common sense.
Remember, the goal of an interview is to evaluate how well a candidate will do at work, specifically in your workplace. Puzzles and riddles may evaluate a certain kind of personality, and possibly even raw IQ. But they won’t tell you how well a candidate can work with your group or on your products. And that’s the point of an interview.
August 2nd, 2006
The war for talent is back on, according to Gretchen and Rob Merrill. Ok, I’ll buy that. I know fewer unemployed people and it seems as if people are finding jobs faster.But not all people. Those of us with gray hair are not finding it easier to find jobs. I have only anecdotal evidence, but several emails a week seems pretty strong anecdotal evidence to me.I think I know why.
- Hiring managers are not doing enough of a job analysis. Instead of looking at functional skills and domain expertise first, they’re looking at tools and technology first. See Four Dimensions of Technical Skill. Too often, hiring managers (or whomever screens resumes) are afraid of even looking at people who don’t have 10 years of experience with whatever technology they require.
- It’s possible older technical people are “more expensive.” When I work with hiring managers to teach them how to analyze their jobs, I see two common mistakes: thinking that salary ranges haven’t changed since they last time they hired; and thinking that someone with 5 years of experience has the same skill level as someone with 20 years of experience.
Hiring managers: don’t make the mistake of paying top dollar for anyone unless you’re convinced that person is worth it. But don’t shortchange candidates by arbitrarily setting the salary so low only someone with one or two years of experience can take the job. You’ll get the value of only one or two years of experience.If the war for talent really is on, then the people with gray hair should be able to find technical jobs more easily than they are now. Until I see that, I’m not convinced there’s really a war on.
April 21st, 2006
I was reading Andy Tinkham’s “Disproportionate amount of introverts in software testing” (post is now missing) and saw a comment that one person tends to discriminate for introverts in testing. I agree with the intent of the comment, that the hiring manager wants people who are organized and pay attention to the work. However, I don’t believe any one personality type has the market cornered on organization and attention.You can choose to discriminate for/against any number of personality types. Take a look at one of my previous posts for other possibilities.Although I think the hiring manager is using introversion as a shorthand for his organization requirements in a candidate, I like the idea of looking for people who are organized and pay attention to the details, if that’s appropriate for your group. I use behavior-description questions to ask about those characteristics:
- “Tell me how you approach testing a product.” Listen for planning and organization activities. If this question is too vague, try:
- “How do you organize a product’s testing?” Make sure you hear examples, how how the person would like to organize. If that question doesn’t work, try:
- “Have you ever been in a position where the testing wasn’t organized?…What did you do?”
I more often look for testers who are relatively flexible, who have multiple techniques for organizing their work, based on the product needs, and the reporting needs. If you need testers like that, great. If not, decide the kinds of activities you’d like to see the testers perform at work, not their personality types. You’ll hire the people you really need when you think about the person’s interactions and their output requirements, not their personality type.
Labels: discrimination, interview, personality type
August 4th, 2003