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by nickhuh
4084 days ago
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I think what Microsoft is trying to say, and what the article is doing a poor job of communicating, is that the company believes that there are some autistic people who have much to contribute to Microsoft, but they are currently disadvantaged by current hiring processes which rely so heavily upon interviews. The idea of trying to find alternative ways to assess candidates that don't rely so completely on interviews/high pressure social situations seems laudable to me, even if in this article it was poorly expressed. |
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There is an obvious competitive advantage to any company that removes arbitrary and unnecessary barriers, aside from whats being discussed. If almost no jobs actually require that arbitrary barrier, the pool of applicants on the other side of the barrier will inherently have individuals better at the job than the pool who made it over the artificial meaningless barrier. Given a big pond, a small random sample of pond water will always have a smaller "biggest fish" than a larger random sample from the same pond, and if the sample size expands to the size of the whole pond, that fisherman will get the biggest possible fish.
The fact that this doesn't happen historically or currently despite the obvious financial advantage, shows that hiring and general office culture is obviously more influenced by primate dominance rituals than economic reasons. When you throw in some additional dominance rituals to compensate or rationalize away the reduced hazing rituals and membership rituals to "even things up", its going to be a hellish working environment for the folks who do get in.
Mix the above paragraph with the observation of corporate communication always indicates the opposite of what it explicitly claims. So a company that feels the need to say quality is job one actually prioritizes quality dead last after production goals and profit and pretty much everything else. Or a company that issues elaborate press releases about its diversity program invariably actually closes management ranks to all but old white men. You can handle an issue by "doing things" or you can dispose of it by "issue human interest press releases" so press releases mean it was decided nothing will actually be done. So you can assume a corporate communication of opening hiring to autistic people actually means it was completely and utterly closed to them and it'll remain that way but we'll talk nicely about it and issue press releases for the human interest spin on the news. We won't hire them but we'll talk really nicely about them instead.
So its kind of a "one step forward two steps back" story. Its actually signalling that autistic people would be better off working anywhere else. Which is a useful observation. And fitting in with the first paragraph, it means MS competitors have an inherent advantage over MS in having superior hiring policies instead of the MS strategy of instead talking about superior hiring policies.