Beekey Cheung is a software engineer with a large amount of enthusiasm for economics and a passion for education. He loves mentoring other programmers and is currently building an application to te...
You bring up an excellent point. People will definitely act differently in different contexts, such as talking to women vs talking to men. There are so many to try out though, different races, different age groups, or even different regions of the same country. It is incredibly difficult to test out all those contexts without having them work at the company for months. Even then, you may not have someone on the existing team with a certain background. And then you'll only find out someone you've hired has conflicts later on.
I don't have a perfect answer here. I don't think a personality test will solve this problem because what would the abstract question be? "Do you hate people of X?" It would probably be more subtle, but most people would understand what the question would try to get at and provide an answer they think is acceptable rather than an honest one.
Part of me has wishful thinking in knowing that software development is a pragmatic endeavor. I'd like to think that the best developers focus on that pragmatism and know logically that they should focus on what a person can do rather than that person's background.
Yeah, it's definitely impractical to have the candidate sit down with someone from every background. Not to mention that puts an undue burden on minorities (if 2% of your company is black and you want a black engineer on every interview slate, you're asking them to spend significantly more of their time interviewing than anyone else). I don't have an answer.
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You bring up an excellent point. People will definitely act differently in different contexts, such as talking to women vs talking to men. There are so many to try out though, different races, different age groups, or even different regions of the same country. It is incredibly difficult to test out all those contexts without having them work at the company for months. Even then, you may not have someone on the existing team with a certain background. And then you'll only find out someone you've hired has conflicts later on.
I don't have a perfect answer here. I don't think a personality test will solve this problem because what would the abstract question be? "Do you hate people of X?" It would probably be more subtle, but most people would understand what the question would try to get at and provide an answer they think is acceptable rather than an honest one.
Part of me has wishful thinking in knowing that software development is a pragmatic endeavor. I'd like to think that the best developers focus on that pragmatism and know logically that they should focus on what a person can do rather than that person's background.
Yeah, it's definitely impractical to have the candidate sit down with someone from every background. Not to mention that puts an undue burden on minorities (if 2% of your company is black and you want a black engineer on every interview slate, you're asking them to spend significantly more of their time interviewing than anyone else). I don't have an answer.