[beebmam]

It's called a conflict of interest, and anyone who has a conflict of interest in a given business situation should absolutely be removed from making any decisions around that conflict of interest (and they should be more than forthcoming about those conflicts of interest). Standards of Business Practice 101.

[pyuser583]

Interviewing someone from an opposite “frictioned background” is not considered a conflict of interest in law or ethics.

“Conflict of interest” is when someone has a clearly defined interest, usually in something of value, that opposes the interests of someone they have a duty towards.

In ethnic prejudice, there’s no clearly defined interest.

I know this sounds pedantic. But when a conflict of interest arises, the next questions are “when did it begin?”, “when will it end?”, “how big was it?”, and “can we mitigate it somehow?”

You can’t do any of those things with ethnic bias.

Ethnic bias is bad, but it’s not a conflict of interests.

[mattzito]

> In ethnic prejudice, there’s no clearly defined interest.

> Ethnic bias is bad, but it’s not a conflict of interests.

Okay, so - for sure, if you're from an opposite "frictioned background" and you can interview someone neutrally, you should be able to.

But if you have an ethnic prejudice, you literally have an interest against the person you are interviewing.

> But when a conflict of interest arises, the next questions are “when did it begin?”, “when will it end?”, “how big was it?”, and “can we mitigate it somehow?”

(one example) > when did it begin?

hundreds of years ago

> when will it end?

not soon

> how big was it?

the US literally fought an entire war over it

> can we mitigate it somehow

Yes, by having a variety of people from different backgrounds interview the candidate.

That wasn't that hard, was it?

[ericpruitt]

> But if you have an ethnic prejudice, you literally have an interest against the person you are interviewing.

The original comment by throwaway_dcnt -- "Example problematic pairs for candidates/interviewers (not including the cast situation) include: Indians and Pakistanis, Serbians and Bosnians, Greeks and Turks, Chinese and Japanese." -- doesn't make any qualifications. I read it the same way that icelancer seems to: they make the determination themselves, assuming it's going to be a problem without actually establishing that it will be. If that is the case, that is literally racism.

[hef19898]

Maybe not in the legal sense of conflict of interest, a kind of conflict of interest non the less.

[pyuser583]

The way that you deal with ethnic bias and conflicts of interest is very different.

For example, employees are required to declare a conflict of interest. Declaring ethnic bias is a firable offense.

Imagine a mostly white business in rural Georgia where all the employees have declares they have racial bias against Black people.

As a result, they avoid hiring Black people because they don’t trust they can fairly evaluate their skills.

Realistically if you applied normal conflict of interest rules, it would be very hard to make a company more diverse.

[sokoloff]

I agree that genuine conflicts of interest need to be addressed.

It seems absurd to declare a-priori that “no Indian shall be the unsupervised leader of a Pakistani (nor vice-versa) because that’s a conflict of interest”.

[beebmam]

I didn't say that. What you've said here is a straw man

[InvertedRhodium]

The original comment that spawned this discussion definitely was.

> One thing I recommend to my hiring managers is to not allow people from frictioned backgrounds to manage and interview people from the other side.

[albedoa]

Huh? You said it is a conflict of interest when people from frictioned backgrounds are allowed to manage and interview people from the other side. It's right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523177

What is the strawman?

[icelancer]

You cannot assume these things because of protected classes having potential issues with one another. Not all Indians have caste issues with other Indians, and excluding them on the basis of nationality/race is strictly prohibited.

[namdnay]

wouldn't it be deeply discriminatory to assume that person X has a conflict of interest with person Y based solely on their religion, ethnicity or nationality?