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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

Is that any more elitist than judging the resume by grammar or by the prestige of the schools, former employers, and references it lists? Hiring is a situation where you're literally looking for the best: it's by definition elitist.

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Unless the job is handwritting then it is unnecessary gatekeeping. And strikes me as elitist if they're trying to filter out lower classes.

Just because other practices are also elitist doesn't make this virtuous.

My point in bringing up the general elitism of hiring is this: people judge reliability, capability, and dedication by all sorts of clues, though the specifics differ by culture. I don't really see a problem with handwriting being one. A dedicated, capable, responsible person will, in a culture where good handwriting is considered a sine qua non of employability, develop excellent handwriting, because they want to be successful and are willing to work at it. In Elizabethan England, a young man wasn't fit for society unless he could join in a song and improvise harmony, and you can bet that the most dedicated, ambitious young men made sure they could do so. Neither is more arbitrary than some of the criteria the American hiring process relies on.

Many jobs don't benefit from these arbitrary signals. And people are born with diverse capabilities. So digging for weak signals causes systemic harm to whole groups of people. Folks who may be more than qualified for the work in question.

Let's learn from mistakes of the past instead of repeating them out of laziness or tribalism.

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