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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

On the point of legal risk, I’m concerned by the authors naïveté in believing that as long as you’re not actually discriminating based on race/sex/religion, you won’t be accused of it.

The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and maybe even in court. Not worth it. No matter what, you lose. And what’s the upside? You gave some random guy some feedback.

This is the world we live in, unfortunately.

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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 was, according to the senior consultant, the most cost effective way to handle a layoff, once the cost of litigation was factored. The client signed off on the plan and the consultants executed it. The client was a big (>10k employees) tech company.

This is the world we live in, unfortunately.

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.

I'm not quite sure I understand. Calling "shenanigans" generally means disagreement but your second sentence is entirely consistent with what I wrote - the company had overscaled and needed to eliminate redundant positions, regardless of whether those that held them were high performers or low performers. If you are disbelieving my claim, what evidence could I provide to convince you that it's true?

I think this is a misunderstanding. If I understood correctly, you are saying the company needs to reduce its size and therefore randomly eliminate people at some positions (say, need to reduce engineering by 10%), while the other commenter was challenging the fact that the company needs, as a whole and independently of the position to reduce its staff by x%.

Both are possible.

>the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent

The existence of that pattern by itself might be enough for a company to be guilty of discrimination. If a policy disproportionately harms a specific protected class and they can't show a legitimate business reason for that policy, it is illegal regardless of intent. It is called disparate impact.

No. Any data exhibits random patterns, especially if you try too hard.

If you check for 10 patterns, each at the 95% significance level (p<0.05), there's a 40% chance of getting at least one false positive. Look for 20 patterns and that goes up to 60%.

That's why science requires you to formulate a hypothesis before running the experiment. And why finding a pattern through data analysis does not warrant a witch hunt.

And here you're forgetting about the significance of the patterns themselves.

95% significance of the fact that no women or ex convicts were hired for the job? Seems significant enough that a newspaper would write about it.

95% significance of not hiring a guy who looking too much of a hipster and has too many tattoos? Not sure, to be honest - I can see how society (and newspaper writers) would easily dismiss that as bs.

Don't try to abstract it away as otherwise it just seems you're justifying something absolutely ridiculous.

I don't know what to tell you. It isn't my opinion. It is the law. [1] You can't just saw "No." and be done with it.

It also isn't about setting up a witch hunt. It is about protecting people from discriminatory practices even when the discrimination is neither overt or even intentional.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

simsla is giving a reason why that's a bad law – they're not disagreeing that this law exists. A law can have been well-intentioned by legislators yet get abused in practice.

Good point about the disparate impact doctrine. More reason to say as little as possible about your hiring decisions. Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to that kind of scrutiny?

The upside is that you've treated a human being with decency. People you treat decently in rejection help you with later hires. If you're going to argue the fantastical downside, you should at least acknowledge the possible upside (which my company, and apparently TripleByt, have both experienced).

That’s why I said it’s unfortunate. I intended to capture the logic of why things are what they are.

And as much as it’s great to help someone out with some feedback, it’s not so great to risk the livelihood of your employees—you know, the people who actually depend on you to provide for their families—and the survival of your company for it. Sometimes doing the right thing requires you to have some perspective and be cold. This is one of those situations.

I think you're way overblowing this, but it's possible you know more than I do. What makes you think "either willfully or accidentally mis-interpreting rejection feedback" is a meaningful threat to any company? Have there been cases where companies were wrongfully sued for such a thing that I'm not aware of? And have they gone out of business as a result?

I've read an awful lot of employment case coverage and don't remember seeing anything like that. What I do recall seeing are people getting hammered for flippant comments _during_ an interview, but that's an entirely different thing.

Given how few companies give interview feedback, I would predicted very little in the way of lawsuits involving that. People can't "willfully or accidentally mis-interpret" what you don't say.

The real question is, "If people gave interview feedback, would they get sued for it?" I think so. Doubly so if the feedback was at odds with the candidate's self-image or if it is written. (It is a lot easier to file a lawsuit based on what was written to you than your memory of what was said.)

More importantly HR departments universally say so. And as long as HR departments say so, managers will follow their advice and not give interview feedback.

HR departments say so because if no one ever gives interview feedback, no one will ever get sued for giving the "wrong" feedback. They are like the legal department in that they will never look to help a company actively gain a competitive advantage, and certainly never to do the decent thing by people outside the company's management.

Then it's correct to never give feedback. Company getting sued is not a competitive advantage.

>You gave some random guy some feedback

I've noticed you've used "guy" 185 times in the past 5 years, but only used "girl" 58 times. This is a statistically significant difference. You will hear from my lawyers.

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