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Comment by philipov | Hacker News Reader

When they thought of the name, I wonder if any thought was given to the alternate reading of PoC as "People of Color"

PoC has stood for "Proof of Concept" for a long time, so probably not.

It is amusing to read it as "People of Color || GTFO" as a statement demanding racial equality in companies' hiring practices.

Its use for "people of color" goes back to at least 2004: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=poc

The use of the term Proof of Concept goes back to at least 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_concept#Usage_history

I'm less clear on when PoC came into vogue, but I think it was likely in the 90s.

Edit: Actually, reading more carefully, you can find "proof of concept" at least as far back as 1967.

Different communities, different dialects. I suppose this journal doesn't come from the community that would read "PoC" as "People of Color".

I think Proof of Concept predates your genre of terminology

The oldest sense of a term is not necessarily the predominant one; nobody is going to read "moron" or "imbecile" and think of clinical terms today.

> nobody

Well, almost nobody, because that's what I think of when people use these terms to degrade others.

While I presume you mean to say that you think that people who go around calling others morons are the real morons, you've written it in a way that suggests you think such a thing is linked to clinical mental retardation.

I don't get these people that would block the title of a publication because one possible definition might be construed as rascist.

If anything it describes a certain hegemony by these disaffected groups as they slowly claw more and more of language as their own...

There's actually a way to get that. Use work-hire tests.

Work hire tests are anonymous and unbiased. Either candidates can do the work, or they can't.

You have to set it up so that the work-hire test is all that matters, though, which ~nobody does.

I'm familiar with tptacek's writing. :)

This will get off-topic quickly, if we allow it to.

In situations where a subthread is already off-topic and destined for the bottom, I try to make a substantive contribution. It's possible to pull out some interesting conversation even from the dregs.

It's true that it grows the subthread, but the [-] button exists now.

except not everyone has the time or interest to do a ton of unpaid work for companies they're applying to

> a ton of unpaid work for companies they're applying to

Okay, that's a logistical objection to work-sample tests, which is easily rebutted with, "Simply don't assign _a ton_ of unpaid work" to your candidates.

The process we use for hiring software developers at my current employer:

  1. Clone this git repository.
  2. Build a trivial feature (e.g. adding a search feature to an
     existing blog platform).
  3. Send a patch or pull request.

Everyone who's being considered gets the same task, and we base our decision off of several factors: Did they implement a working solution? How much new code did they need to create (knowing that the framework does 99% of this already, and is documented)? If so, did they write unit-testable code? Did they write unit tests? Did they find any of the intentional vulnerabilities?

It should, realistically, take most people 2-3 hours at most to complete this task successfully. If they're familiar with PHP development, probably 15-20 minutes. Furthermore, it can be completed at their leisure.

If that seems unreasonable, contrast it with the cost of taking a day off work to get dressed up and perform an in-person interview during business hours with complete strangers who are scrutinizing you for fitness, with a very high chance of not getting accepted.

The burden of work-sample tests shouldn't be on candidates; the burden should lie with the company to ensure they're collecting objective facts about candidates rather than making subjective decisions.

They're not necessarily unbiased or even anonymous (in a meaningful way). The problem which is set might somehow favour applicants from certain backgrounds. The language used might be unnecessarily complex or use local idioms. The comments and variable names might betray the candidate as a non-native (but perfectly proficient) English speaker. If the candidate uses company hardware, the keyboard may be set to a different layout to what the candidate is used to.

There are lots of ways any test which (ostensibly) aims to test raw ability can be very biased indeed. A lecturer of mine once told a story about a horrible experience he had during an exam trying to whisper an explanation of the rules of Checkers to a student who was from a country where the game was rarely played - the possibility hadn't even crossed his mind.

Declaring the interview style you use as "unbiased" from the start seems like a great way to get complacent and have large amounts of bias creep in unnoticed.

What are some ways to counter this effect?

Be intimately familiar with, and fully accepting of and comfortable with, every culture that applicants may potentially come from.

Or, explicitly require / assume that all applicants be fully familiar with your culture.

Or, define an industry standard artificial culture - whether implicit or explicit - and require everyone on both sides to be familiar with it. This could include things like suits and golf for execs, hoodies and beer for techies, social justice activism for webdevs, etc...

I'm hardly an expert, though I'd probably suggest focusing on avoiding the four pitfalls I mentioned. Like any hard process, it involves working hard to achieve gradual improvement, learning from others where appropriate.

However, I can guarantee that resting on your laurels and calling your process "unbiased" from the start won't work.

Your test may work perfectly and prove that the only people who can "do the work" within your company's structure are a narrow demographic of $current_majority.

If your company structure/culture is broken your "unbiased" test probably will be too.

That can get you in trouble.

Under US labour law, any test where minority candidates don't pass at four-fifths the rate of others is presumed to be racially biased unless proven otherwise in court.

Judges don't have to study stats and end up writing most of these laws.

https://www.prevuehr.com/resources/insights/adverse-impact-a...

People with no background in programming, maths or engineering might treat the vertical bars as mere embellishments and read it as a racist slogan.

The solution to ignorance is education.

Even if someone refuses to learn, educate everyone around them and let social pressure either break their stubbornness or isolate them.

>Even if someone refuses to learn, educate everyone around them and let social pressure either break their stubbornness or isolate them.

Out of context this is a very ominous sentence.

Hah, I suppose it is! But sadly, it's the only effective solution I've found for dealing with e.g. actual Nazis that tried to encroach on my social circle.

I'm not quite sure how you get from "this can be misread" to "break their stubbornness or isolate them". Are people who might be put off by the title "stubborn"?

I was talking about the intentional racists.

I see, I had only thought of it in terms of people who might be put off. Those who actually open the book would soon realise that it's not that meaning.

Fortunately, there are no intentional racists in that title.

My coffee isn't working today, so I apologize if I'm off-point with my communication.

I am probably not the only person who assumed that was what it was.

In the context of the publication, "PoC" additionally stands for "Pictures of Cats". https://twitter.com/fbz/status/876554986569711616

I have to say I've never come across that usage of "PoC" before. "Proof of concept" and "piece of crap" I have.

I spend a lot of time in the communities where PoC is in active usage of that, and I didn't read it as that :)

I guess it's in a different mental context...

POC is used so little as "people of color" that it's not even in the most promoted uses in the Wikipedia lemma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POC

I've seen it frequently used on American websites, and on numerous articles submitted to HN (social issues in the US being a frequent topic of inquiry)

I don't think it's surprising that people would read it that way.

Sure, but it would be surprising to read any uncommon acronym out of context and presume knowledge of what it means.

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