Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

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>We rightfully discriminate during hiring based on whether or not someone chose to attend university, whether or not someone chooses to espouse racist views, whether or not someone chooses to use or avoid certain technologies, whether or not someone has chosen to develop (or not) their social skills, whether or not someone chooses to move to the location of the proposed job offer. These are great and useful.

We discriminate on those things during hiring because all of them are directly relevant to the job. If you have a social job, you need good social skills. If you work with other people, then someone who makes the people around them or certain groups of people they work with/could potentially work with feel unsafe shouldn't be there. If you have to use a certain technology to do your job, and there is no reasonable workaround for that, then they aren't suitable for the job.

Discriminating on literally ANYTHING else, on ANYTHING that is not relevant to the job being done, is blatantly awful and should not be promoted on any level of any organization. This shouldn't even be a controversial issue.

>this is not an argument for hiring people who are "just like me", or an embracing of the status quo. This is an argument for exercising judgement on specific topics which should be universal in a civilized culture.

What those specific topics are, or what you think should be "universal in a civilized culture", is completely up to each person. That's pretty much what political opinions are. And this type of thinking is the basis of a lot of discrimination that we should not be promoting in absolutely any way. If someone had a religion that promoted war , would you not hire them? What about if someone is from the south, and you haven't heard them be racist but you know how those southerners are. Is the law literally the only thing that's preventing you from saying no to these questions? If the answer to any of these are yes, then you are contributing to discrimination that has absolutely no place in the world.

> Discriminating on literally ANYTHING else, on ANYTHING that is not relevant to the job being done, is blatantly awful and should not be promoted on any level of any organization.

Why? Organizations are always subsets of the world in which they operate, and I don't see how being picky about the types of people with whom one associates is any sort of inherent injustice (other than the fact that, if applied improperly, it may hinder or otherwise impede/impair the organization, or (again, if applied improperly) deny opportunity to the disadvantaged on the wrong/unjust basis).

If I theoretically wanted to never hire people who are, say, sports fanatics, what's bad about that (outside of the fact that it may or may not make my team perform better or worse)?

Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?

You seem to approach it as something inherently bad, and I'm curious as to why, because I don't see any (external) harm whatsoever in it, and I should be free to make bad(?) hiring decisions that potentially kneecap (or benefit) my own team/company if I choose.

In fact, given that people working within the team/company are entirely opt-in, I see the ability to shape a team on other important social axes using these sorts of methods as a very important competitive differentiator (for better or worse; one would hope it results in competitive advantage) with regards to attracting and retaining talent (from relatively insignificant "your coworkers won't be ashtray stinky" all the way up to things like "your coworkers won't be TERFs").

What's the social/moral downside? Is there one?

I'm not going to explain to you why discriminating on things not relevant to job performance is bad. The fact that we have horseshoe'd our selves back to this conversation is honestly appalling.

Appalling viewpoints. We should all strive to do better and stop judging others for their decisions.

I don’t smoke but I’ll hire a smoker!

> Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?

Aren't you precisely making the point that you would be discriminating on something relevant to the job being done?

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