Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

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Well it wouldn't be that outlandish to do truly blind programming interviews.

Just use a collaborative editor and possibly wacom stylus (can't be any more cumbersome than the traditional whiteboard), plus a text chat interface to conduct the interview. The interviewer interacts with the candidate in real time but doesn't see him or her.

Where cheating is a concern you can have a different employee (who does not provide interview feedback) monitoring the candidate over a camera to ensure they're only using the approved terminal, not phoning a friend.

Any medium to large-sized software company should be able to pull this off, and it would eliminate the possibility of gender bias in the interview results.

>wacom stylus

That might not work as intended. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology),

>Uniformly the research indicates that gender can be determined [from handwriting] at a significant level.

Considering the subject is graphology, of course, one may question the quality of the studies cited but at least the journals like Journal of Applied Psychology appear legitimate.

In my experience, at the hiring level gender bias works towards normalizing the current skew of modalities. It is after hiring, when growing leaders and assigning responsibilities that bias is more often clear.

I agree with you that this would be a great experiment. However, that won't stop any potential bias once they get the job.

simple. require everyone to work in cubicles that are closed off where your coworkers cant see you. all voice chats must be done without video and with voice modulation technology so that gender can not play a role. Also, the persons name must always be changed to J Smith to not hint at gender or race.

Or change the name 'J. Doe' so you can't even tell if they are alive or not.

Agreed, of course. But I still think it's a good idea to eliminate one opportunity for bias if we can.

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