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by alfalfasprout 1129 days ago
I've gone back and forth on this and now am firmly in the feelings > process camp if you have competent folks making the hiring decisions and you train everyone well in avoiding unconscious bias.

The reality is that strong soft-skills are crucial to hiring the best talent and those skills cannot be "objectively" tested. Even software engineering to a large degree requires a lot of design-related traits that require subjectivity in assessment.

2 comments

An often overlooked job requirement is that you have to sit next to this person for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. There are no leetcode tests for that.
You can test soft skills. Evaluations don't need to be objective, they just need to be consistent.
Doesn't 'subjective' imply 'inconsistent' unless you have one subject doing all the evaluations?
In that case, wouldn't that select for generally likable people? Idk sounds like evolution to me.

Of course, though, that's going to encode some existing biases in the data, but we could keep adding them to protected classes if society thinks they're worthy of inclusion.

That last part is pretty flawed today and changes slowly, I admit, but overall this system sure as heck solves more problems than I could come up with. At least, I think it converges over time.