
To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews - nkc407
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191018-where-75-of-workers-are-on-the-autistic-spectrum
======
stared
As an Aspie/ADD, I have never passed any formal interview, even for an intern
position (sic!). (You can compare and contrast it with my GitHub/Resume/blog
to make a judgment.)

Fortunately, many times (even for mid-size companies or research institutes)
the hiring was less formal. For small startups, where it is informal, I didn't
feel at a disadvantage. For big, I don't believe I can pass through the first
filter.

It seems that there are so many hidden assumptions people take on: what should
be on Resume, how should one present oneself, where it is fine (or de facto
expected) to exaggerate one's accomplishments or hide one's weaknesses. And
that an irrational feeling of being weird is often an instant no-hire.
Moreover, many symptoms od ADD are taken for laziness, sloppiness, or lack of
motivation. Many symptoms of Aspie are taken for rudeness, ill intentions or
trying to dominate (breaking a social rule => (s)he thinks (s)he is above it).

(I've heard it so many times about people interviewing others, as "(s)he is
smart, passed all test, but weird, I don't like to work with her/him". At this
point, it is systemic discrimination. I the same places, remarks about one's
ethnicity or gender wouldn't pass (rightfully!). Sadly, other areas of
discrimination like age or class are given a pass.)

At the same time, I know a lot of people good at "big talks", and making a
good impression, who got hired almost everywhere. Also, they make it easy to
persuade the right people to give them recommendation letters, even if their
collaboration was minimal.

~~~
core-questions
> I've heard it so many times about people interviewing others, as "(s)he is
> smart, passed all test, but weird, I don't like to work with her/him". At
> this point, it is systemic discrimination.

No, that's a misnomer. Systematic discrimination implies the system itself
codifies this behaviour - but instead, what is codified is _team fit_, which
is often based heavily on intuition. Humans are capable of being good judges
of interpersonal compatibility, and the best interviewers employ an
appropriate amount of intuition in the process because only a limited
interaction is possible and every bit of information available deserves to
have some chance of being factored into the assessment.

Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get
along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need
behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs
are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers.

It's good that small companies are often able to accomodate folks like
yourself, but expecting big companies that more often than not are looking for
cookiecutter, commodity employees that will fit the HR process lifecycle. If
you need more input and aren't demonstrably going to produce more output than
the average worker, from their perspective you're not the best choice to hire,
period.

Of course, I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who vehemently disagree with
me, claim that it is in fact systemic discrimination to want something like
"team cohesion", and will make you a protected class soon enough.

~~~
antoinevg
> Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to
> get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we
> need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their
> specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our
> coworkers.

Or try it like this and see how it feels:

"Let's face it: for white people, a lot of black people are very hard to get
along with ..."

~~~
core-questions
Hey, if you want to make it a racial thing, that's your problem. I find people
"go to the well" for this sort of argument when they can't actually argue with
the real premise.

~~~
antoinevg
You mistake my intent.

I'm not trying to "go to the wall" because I want to win an argument with you.

What I'm trying to do is use an example of another kind of discriminatory
behaviour which is socially unacceptable to demonstrate to you that many
people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them.

But hey, if you don't care about that kind of thing then it's not your problem
I guess.

~~~
TeMPOraL
GP pointed out a real, existing problem, and trying to deny it by pattern-
matching into a racial problem isn't helping either of them.

> _that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly
> for them._

That probably speaks more about those people than about GP.

Having worked and being friends with people who most definitely fall into the
spectrum (didn't get confirmed diagnosis, though), it does present very unique
challenges in terms of teamwork and workplace organization, challenges that
gender or ethnic differences don't bring in. It takes special company
architecture and open-minded people to make it work; your typical 9 to 5,
crank out code and kill tickets off Jira software company won't.

------
shantly
> Terms like these – or interview questions such as ‘where you see yourself in
> five years’ – can be too general for people with autism, as many with the
> condition can find vague questions particularly hard to decipher.

Pretty sure it's not just autistic folks who have to have prepped & memorized
some bullshit in advance to have any kind of "acceptable" answer to those
sorts of questions. Not to take away from the broader point of the article nor
what this company's doing.

"Tell me about a time you've dealt with a douchebag at work" is one that
always gets me. I just have to make something up for it. 15 years of working
and I'm... pretty sure I haven't. I mean, not really. Not a good answer
though, so here's some fiction I invented & memorized for you. Hope you like
it.

~~~
missosoup
Never in my entire career have I been asked the 'where do you see yourself in
5 years' question. It doesn't even make sense in the tech world. In five
years? There's a good chance your company/business unit won't exist and I'll
be 1-2 jobs on from this one mate. Don't worry about it.

It sounds like a hollywood movie cliche you'd hear at an interview scene. I'd
laugh if I got that question in an actual interview.

I'm sure it made sense 30-50 years ago when people spent decades with the same
employer, but anyone asking that question today is just indicating how out of
touch they are with the real world.

~~~
shantly
I think I had that exact one once early on. I did actually get an "if you
could go back in time a couple years, what advice would you give yourself?" a
little while ago, which 1) threw me, because I wasn't expecting much of that
formula crap from this place, and 2) I hadn't prepped for, so I just punted,
being able to think of very little other than things unrelated to work but
also lame, cliché, or "don't interview at that place, you'll have to answer a
dumb question and then you'll feel like an asshole when you can't". I tried to
deflect with a joke but it didn't work. Oh well.

I've consistently gotten the "tell me about a time you fucked up" and "tell me
about a time you worked with a douchebag" ones. And simple "tell me about a
time you disagreed with someone at work"-type ones. Not every interview, but
often. And unless you've actually had an experience that happens to make for a
good answer to those, you've basically got to make something up. Even if you
_have_ fucked up tons of things and worked with a bunch of douchebags—the
questions are weird because if everyone answers totally honestly some people
will have way better answers, especially if they're also good story-tellers,
because they've been lucky ("lucky") enough to have had an experience fitted
perfectly to a good answer for those questions.

Even for the simple "time you disagreed" one, I don't exactly file away
details about little disagreements in my head, so I can't form a satisfying
tale from those—almost all of which were pretty boring anyway—sorry, so here's
some made up bullshit again. Which will be better than most people's best
_honest_ story anyway. What the fuck was the point of these, again?

[EDIT] I actually think being a smidge _less_ psychologically stable and well-
adjusted might make it easier to answer some of these! Hahaha. Shouldn't have
read the Stoics so much in high school, I guess.

[EDIT, responding to edit]

> I'm sure it made sense 30-50 years ago when people spent decades with the
> same employer, but anyone asking that question today is just indicating how
> out of touch they are with the real world.

Yeah the honest answer, based even on my _relatively stable_ employment
history, would be "somewhere other than your company, with a 15-20% pay bump
(by the time I leave—30% over what you're about to offer me now), probably
attained leveraging something I learned here". Just following the trend line
here, don't blame me :-)

~~~
K0SM0S
I'm curious, what do you think is a "good" answer?

Because, from the interviewer standpoint, here's what such questions are
about. Prepare to have your mind blown, maybe.

1\. Hiring is by far the most stressful, unpredictable, career-destroying part
of a manager's job. And that's as an employee, if that's your business
(founder, entrepreneur) you're scared shitless that a mistake may plain and
simple ruin your business, and you along with it (not just financially, the
stakes are much higher when it's your company).

So the 'soft' questions are attempts to weed out 'problems'. Get this through
your head: when interviewing, experienced managers are not "selecting the
best" but rather "avoiding the worst". And these questions... they're
crapshots in the dark — “how the hell am I supposed to know if this person is
OK/normal or a piece of work?” It's even more blurry from the interviewer's
side. So they just try to get a 'feel' for it, intuitively.

Your answer? It does not really matter (specifics, context, etc). The _real_
question is: _are you 'normal'?_ Are you honest / reliable / well-adjusted /
not too weird / not too aggressive / not too whatever makes life difficult for
everyone (starting with you). It's really just that. (anyone who claims
drawing psych profiles from interviews is basically BS'ing or a trained
clinical psychologist, and don't fall for HR stuff, they're so full of their
'methods' because they know it's just super-human to judge people accurately).

2\. What are the risks of a bad hire? Well, whatever they are, you are
responsible if you signed that person in. You, the manager, will face the
consequences — it's your team, your doing, your mistake. HR, if it exists, is
usually just there to fit some bean counter + legal requirements. They won't
feel the heat. You will, daily.

People lose their job over bad hires. They fail their mission. It's a stupidly
high-stake decision given what little means are at their disposal — which is
why some companies begin to think about it and adopt really different
processes where they onboard you progressively and judge in very real terms,
real work, real collaboration, if you're a fit or not.

3\. The ugly truth of hiring is that we hire the people we like. Period. Full
stop.

We hire the people we like. It's proven by countless psych studies. Whether
you're aware of that or not does not make a difference — you can only select
for what you think is right, and what is right is: 1. candidate can do the job
and 2. _I_ (thus others) can work with candidate on a daily basis. This kind
of sentiment is not about skill, history, it's about being able to share a cup
of coffee without feeling awkward, being able to disagree about a technical
point and still come out together as a team on the other side once a
decision's been made by whoever's in charge — might be none of you in the
interview room, c-execs and whatnot.

So as a candidate, the worst answers you can give are _anything that doesn 't
help to ease your interviewer's fears_. Anything that doesn't tell them in so
many words: "don't worry, rest assured I keep my cool, I'm reasonably
balanced, I don't hit people or yell, I won't ruin your
company/division/team." That's really all we can try to ask before the fact.
So whatever the question —hard, soft— ask yourself: what are they afraid of?
And your answer should simply solve for that. It's that simple. Convince me
I'm not making a mistake by taking you in. Convince me I'm not a fool for
trusting you.

If you pass in that regard, and your skills match the job, then you'll get
hired — unless someone had a better human contact with the interviewer(s), in
which case skills don't matter much, it's all about feeling comfortable with
each other.

Remember this, a famous saying in management / entrepreneur circles: “You can
always train someone (to meet whatever skill is required), but you can't
change them (personality likely won't change).” Hence why “we hire a _person_
, not a profile.”

Most managers would rather hire someone really nice and train them for 3
months before they're operational, rather than make a bet on a weirdo —
whatever their expertise. The obnoxious genius is just about the worst choice
you can make, whereas a great personality will always be an asset provided we
can elevate their skill, and/or pay them less until they acquire the desired
skillset.

4\. About 'honesty'. Honesty isn't sarcasm: nobody expects you to marry the
company, not even the interviewer thinks that for themselves (and founders /
entrepreneurs are not clueless about job hoping these days). The '5 years'
question isn't about that. It's precisely screening for the "great personality
but training required" cases: if we hire you, will you be willing to evolve,
to learn, to get better and meet our needs, our standards of quality?

Thus anything that says: "I see myself getting better" is a good answer.
Anything that says: "I don't care / I just do this to eat and pay the bills /
I have no interest whatsoever in improving myself or my work" will get you
rejected (unless that's what they're looking for, to exploit you until you
burn out, in which case you should see yourself to the door for your own
sake).

Just my 2cts, from a management / consulting standpoint.

Remember: those people on the other side of the table have much, much more at
stake than you or any candidate; you may get hired or not (so you either win a
job or lose nothing) while they risk losing their own job / mission and the
upside if they succeed is only to continue said mission with no perturbation.
It's a much more daunting proposition for them, and yet they _have_ to go
through it and ultimately make a choice. If they take too long, budget might
slip through their hands. It's a jungle for managers out there.

____

Bonus: Now let me tell you what's even worse to go through than a bad hire as
a manager: firing someone. Some people literally fall in depression over this.
Quit their job, even. It's a drag. It's really hard. You can't imagine how
horrible it feels unless you've been there. Hence why you'd rather do it as
little as humanly possible, and that means not screwing up the hiring process,
which itself is very much imperfect...

I hope this gives you confidence that, however you want to see it, you very
much have the easy part as a candidate. There are very few bad answers if
you're honest _enough_ about _who you are_ (again, specifics, contexts, made-
up stories, who cares as long as it tells the truth about you), which is the
whole point. Know this: "courage" etymologically means "telling your truth
with all your heart". It's about vulnerability. Courageous people, who know to
show some vulnerability, are those we can trust because we can 'feel' them,
for real, we know who they are. The "mistakes" question is partly just that:
tell us you're human. Tell us you make mistakes. Tell us you learn from those.
Tell us you didn't know better, not always, but you know more today than you
did yesterday. Then, we can relate. We can trust you with _our_ mistakes. We
can grow together. We can count on you to support us.

And I know, I know it's not like that in every company, far from it. But it
should. And there are plenty of very 'normal' people like that. They may not
have the words to spell it like I do here — I just read a lot so I have these
words now, from much smarter / more experienced people. Now, so do you.

If you go into interviews thinking "I'll reassure them, I'll show them they
can trust me, because I'm worth it, because I'm reliable, because people can
count on me, because fuck I'm _likeable!_ " then I assure you: you're 50% in
already. Compared to all the others who will try to hide who they are, in fear
that they might not get liked, well guess what: _don 't know, don't care,
won't take a chance. Next._

All the world needs is you at your best, you becoming better, growing,
sharing, caring, empowering. These are the true rock stars. And make no
mistake: nobody's born this way. All those who became that pretty much
engineered it. It's the truth in "fake it 'till you make it", it's not
actually _fake_ but rather "play the part as best you can", i.e. elevate
yourself to this ideal vision of you you have in mind. Before you know it,
it's not a vision anymore, it's become real, the real you. Great managers and
entrepreneurs know that, they only wish you knew it too, so we can start
working together tomorrow. Today. Yesterday. Where have you been all this time
without us? ; )

~~~
shantly
> So the 'soft' questions are attempts to weed out 'problems'. Get this
> through your head: when interviewing, experienced managers are not
> "selecting the best" but rather "avoiding the worst". And these questions...
> they're crapshots in the dark — “how the hell am I supposed to know if this
> person is OK/normal or a piece of work?” It's even more blurry from the
> interviewer's side. So they just try to get a 'feel' for it, intuitively.

Oh, I get it, I've been on the other side of the table, plenty, and in more
than just a "pull in some dev to get their take" role. But you've gotta have
_some_ answer to those when you're interviewing and I need some prep + a
little fiction to avoid the possible red flag that comes up from simply
blanking on them. My goal is to get past them such that no-one thinks about
the answers again, not to wow anyone, which I know isn't what anyone's fishing
for with those.

~~~
K0SM0S
Aha... so you know. Hopefully my long piece will be useful to someone else,
then.

"Red flag", that's the expression I was looking for indeed.

~~~
shantly
Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to dismiss your post with such a short response. It
does give good insight into the Hiring Mind, for those who may not have been
there.

~~~
K0SM0S
It's fine, don't apologize. I didn't take it as a dismissal, and I was the one
to offer _entirely unsollicited advice_. No worries, and I do appreciate your
replies!

------
dawg-
This brings up the same core issue as all official diversity initiatives: as
soon as you talk about it, you destroy it.

When you make diversity a focus and celebrate yourself for being diverse, then
the spirit of diversity is ruined. It's like something out of a zen koan. A
truly diverse organization would not need to put out press releases and build
its brand on being diverse, nor would they need to start official initiatives
to select "diverse" employees (the very concept of an individual being
"diverse" betraying the absurdity of the whole enterprise).

You are left with a shell of the real thing - it's a commitment to aesthetic
diversity (even of the neuro- variety), without the spirit that diversity is
meant to represent. In a situation of aesthetic diversity, people are valuable
because they are "diverse", rather than from simply being people. Their
adjective ends up coming first (autistic, black, queer, etc.) and, at least at
the level of the organization, their humanity gets left behind.

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
This is 1000% true. Before getting into tech, I did odd jobs for years. I
worked in the restaurant industry, retail clothing, hospitals, landscaping,
etc. I worked in teams where I was the only man, teams where we were all men,
and teams with a somewhat even split.

Diversity was never anything more than a short HR training session, and that
was it. There was no advocacy, no talk of being "allies". And everything just
worked.

Even though I prefer working on diverse teams (diverse along any and every
dimension), I really dislike virtually all current activism that's supposed to
be about diversity. It just feels...gross.

------
JimmyRuska
A young recruiter asked me how I interview people. I asked him what his
favorite video game was. Super smash brothers, he said. I asked if he could
ask enough questions to gauge how much of an expert someone was. He said, "of
course!" Asking a lot of general questions about a number of things and
encouraging them to go into detail often shows if they've been there, done
that, and shared in the same blood sweat and tears. Especially when people get
excited, it's great to see how they thought about things and how they'd
approach the same problems knowing what they know now.

Hiring bad people in engineering can cripple your services. Adding code that's
hard to understand, has poor time complexity, or is over-engineered can add
more technical debt that any one feature is solving for, and reworking that
code can cost way more time than it originally took to write once it's part of
some production service.

~~~
rozenmd
> Hiring bad people in engineering can cripple your services. Adding code
> that's hard to understand, has poor time complexity, or is over-engineered
> can add more technical debt that any one feature is solving for, and
> reworking that code can cost way more time than it originally took to write
> once it's part of some production service.

So use code reviews prior to merging, and prevent that code from becoming part
of that production service. If they're then unwilling to incorporate that
feedback into their code, it might be time to review their contract.

Edit: Assuming people are capable of reviewing each other's code.

~~~
Bootwizard
The last place I worked, the junior engineers reviewed the interns code. There
weren't enough senior engineers to review the junior engineers code, so we
ended up reviewing each other's code.

I was pretty green at the time, so we just ended up with a terrible codebase
after being there for a few years.

It was already bad to begin with, but that's because it seemed like what that
company does is churn through junior engineers and interns at the nearby
university to get their shoddy projects done.

TLDR: If you hire too many bad or junior engineers, you're going to lose
control of your project since you might not have time to review all their
code.

~~~
eru
Strong support from technology alleviates the problem.

If your linter already complains about bad indentation, your senior devs can
concentrate their limited time on more substantive issues.

Of course, that scaling by technology has limits.

------
seibelj
> Instead of using CVs and interviews, potential employees undergo a basic
> competency assessment in which they are evaluated against 25 desirable
> attributes for software testers, such as the ability to learn new systems or
> take on feedback. Following these initial tests, potential staff undergo a
> week of working from home fully paid.

They still have an interview. It just isn’t like a traditional interview. You
need to pass a test and then prove your ability for a week. It’s really a
week-long interview.

~~~
kbenson
It's not an interview if they're paying you, it's a conditional hire for a
week. Calling it an interview is like calling actually starting a job after a
barrage of three interviews the _fourth_ interview. At some point you're
torturing the meaning of the word to pointlessness.

~~~
monsieurbanana
If the tasks you're doing that week are purely for assessment purposes and the
environment is completely different from the actual work place (as it takes
place remotely), I'd say it's closer to a paid interview, which isn't new,
than a classic trial period. It isn't that much longer than the process of
some big companies, if you add all the interviews together.

I certainly understand people who think otherwise though.

------
renegadesensei
It's a fine line companies walk. They want to build a cohesive company
identity with aligned values and goals, but they also want diversity, which
makes all of that harder. So you have these "culture fit" interviews which are
really just conformity checks. "Are you going to get on people's nerves?" is
really what they want to see, and the right answer varies by environment.
They're asking, "Are you one of us?" No surprise people on the spectrum
struggle reading that and end up being either too honest or just too awkward.

"Be yourself" is terrible advice if you want to work at a startup and you're
at all out of step with their culture and worldview. As one such person I have
learned to mask whatever needs masking.

~~~
watwut
Cohesive company identity with aligned values and goals is not endangered by
people with Asperger or whatever on position of coder or admin. The way more
bigger threat to that goal is selection of people for management and
leadership level. Who gets rewarded and why.

You can talk about cohesiveness and shared values till your face is blue, but
if people lie, manipulate, intentionally misinform, are antagonistic in order
to throw competition down, it wont happen no matter how autists were refused.

Like, we come back to social skills of developers topic every other month. But
actual cohesiveness culture depends way more on middle management which tend
to attract and select people who cause way more drama and ineffectivity then
people with asperger.

------
pwim
Any hiring process will by definition favour certain kinds of candidates at
the expense of others. Having a week long paid trial is a great way for the
company to be less conservative about who they try out, but will also mean
they’ll miss out on candidates who are already employed and unwilling to take
time off or quit their job to participate in it. In the end though, if they
can tap into an undervalued candidate pool though, they should come put ahead.

~~~
tzs
In this case, the week long paid trial is work from home, and I did not notice
anything that said that the work had to be done during normal businesses
hours. It should be possible for most people to fit that in around their
current employment.

~~~
arthens
> I did not notice anything that said that the work had to be done during
> normal businesses hours

It doesn't seem an unreasonable assumption.

Having them work outside of business hours (isolated, no real time
communication) on an standalone project (because self-onboard on a large and
complicated project isn't reasonable) wouldn't really be a representative test
of if they can work in a team and on a real project. At that point you are
really just paying to solve a larger coding test.

> It should be possible for most people to fit that in around their current
> employment.

I highly doubt that most people would be able to fit ~40 hours of work on top
of their normal work schedule. I'm single and have no particular obbligations,
and I would still struggle. No way a parent of a young child or someone who
has a dependant parent/relative would be able to fix that much amount of work
in their schedule.

And even if someone manages to do 2 full time jobs for a week, would their
output really be representative of their skills? I certainly wouldn't want to
be judged on the quality/quantity of my output when working late nights after
8 hours in the office.

------
gaspoweredcat
i have ASD and ADD, it certainly isnt easy, while i have ability my social
skills are pretty terrible and the sad truth is that is what an interview is
about, regardless of what the job is the one thing basically everyone has to
have is the ability to work in sales because thats basically what you have to
do at an interview, sell yourself (in full knowledge that there are others
applying for the same position with more experience and no issues)

which is generally not easy when you know that youre already a poor prospect
due to various conditions, and then getting asked vague questions like "tell
me about a time when you were valuable to your team"

i find talking about myself awkward at the best of times, getting asked to
pull random events where i think i might have pleased someone etc and turn
them into some mini story on the fly is never going to end well for me

thats another issue, everything is about being a "team player" etc and putting
it bluntly im not and doubt i ever will be, i dont do things the way others do
which means im unlikely to be a "good fit" amongst a bunch of classically
trained people who stick to rigorous methods

in the places i have worked ive usually ended up as one of the "go-to" people,
i make a point of being good at what i do but getting someone to actually take
a chance on you is not easy

~~~
atoav
I hate this as well — especially if it seems to be only about selling. I
worked to lead various film crews and I can tell, that there is no correlation
between how well somebody is able to sell themselves under pressure and the
wuality of their work. If there was any relationship it is negative in
proportion: the worst people I ever worked with were incredibly good at
selling themselves to a degree you cold describe them as conmen (and it was
always men). Coincidentally it was never their fault when they clearly didn’t
manage to do their part.

That beeing said I still think it is good to give others a chance to get to
know you. It happened multiple times to me that I found out only during a
project just _how_ humble some people have been — not mentioning things that
would have instantly give them a pass.

Additional caveat: communications _is_ a crucial skill to have in nearly any
job and it is also a common point of failure in projects with more than one
person ans any HR person worth their salary should be able to sieve out people
who would hurt a project by beeing unable to communicate their ideas clearly.

I think if the process doesn’t you, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to tell them
before coming to the interview: “I have condition XYZ and so it can happen
that UVW. To allow you a truthful judgement of my work please consider looking
at $PLACES”

That way a well meaning HR person has at least the chance of looking at you
through with your unique context in the back of their mind.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Five years in, 75% of Ultranauts’ staff are on the autistic spectrum – and
> one reason for this is its innovative approach to hiring.

Given that autism has a significant male to female ratio (quick Googling
suggested 4:1 for Male:Female for autism), this seems to indicate that their
percentage of women developers is low.

~~~
pseudalopex
4:1 is the US average for software engineers.[1]

[1]
[https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm](https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm)

~~~
eru
That's less skewed than I had expected!

------
hogFeast
Am in this demo, and my interview experiences have been bewildering.

Whenever someone has actually tried to assess my skills and get me do
something, so almost never, it is always fine. In an interview, I have almost
no idea what is happening and it is never fine.

Yes, this isn't going to suit everyone but the point is that suits some people
who were totally shut out before.

~~~
shantly
It may be infeasible for a number of reasons, but this post makes me wonder
whether it'd be worth asking candidates _how they 'd like to be interviewed_,
then doing that.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I'm pretty sure most of the people who have problems with where do you see
yourself in 5 years, what's your biggest weakness, tell me about a time when
things didn't go as planned etc. will have just as big a problem with how
you'd like to be interviewed - I know for me the answer for how would you like
to be interviewed is honestly I would not like to be interviewed in any way
whatsoever.

~~~
eru
You can ask that question in writing and with no expectation for an immediate
response. Much less terrifying that way.

And you'd ask it like: "Here's a bunch of different options for assessing your
skills, which one do you think would showcase your strengths best and fits
into your schedule etc? Please take your time to think it over, a reply by
next week is fine."

~~~
bryanrasmussen
ok that makes more sense than how I was envisioning it in my head.

~~~
eru
It's still difficult to get this stuff right.

As a related example: a candidate for an onsite interview at Google gets a
chaperone for lunch. The lunch companion has no input into the hiring
decision. (And the Google hiring process is formalised enough that they really
have no input.)

Of course, candidates usually don't 100% believe that and treat lunch as a
secret test of character and stay on their toes, just to be safe. That can be
very stressful for some people.

(I behaved like that when I was a candidate.)

Similar for the topic at hand: you can't just declare to the candidate that
you are going to treat the different forms of assessment you offer as
equivalent. You actually have to think of mechanisms to convince them. Lest
someone pick a more stressful one than they want for fear of discrimination.

(And there are benefits to the candidates for the interview. For example it's
strictly time bounded, so you are not going to obsess and pull an all nighter,
because you are afraid that the competition is pulling all nighters.)

------
gt2
I've seen some articles[0] and firms[1] in the last years of not only valuing
diversity in profiles of people but actually valuing aspies higher than
neurotypical types.

I think aspergers can definitely be a super power, but I thought it strange to
actually say it is a net advantage since how can it be expected across the
board?

0\. [https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160106-model-
employee...](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160106-model-employee-are-
autistic-individuals-the-best-workers-around)

1\. [https://auticon.com](https://auticon.com)

~~~
eru
If your work environment is explicitly set up to cater to people with
Aspergers, it might make them more useful to you than neurotypicals.

And that's while neurotypicals might still be better all around employees in
your average company.

------
newnewpdro
At one of my early startups I shared a sizable private office with two other
engineers, one other full-timer who was the lead and a contractor we were
pretty sure had aspergers based on a variety of odd but relatively easy to
ignore behaviors.

Everything was fine and his work was acceptable until he apparently became
convinced we were talking about him behind his back and conspiring in some way
against him. He started leaving an external webcam w/microphone attached to
his desktop and monitoring the shared office when he wasn't around, his
contract required him to provide his own computer so he didn't seem to see a
barrier to attaching a camera and microphone despite his role having no need
for such things - this was years before video conferencing for meetings was
commonplace.

Because we were a proper scrappy startup we would work crazy hours often, but
his being an hourly contractor didn't enable him to pull all-nighters with us
salaried folks. So the circumstances somewhat encouraged this paranoia, but
his mind went crazy with it.

His contract wasn't renewed because of this crap, it was a really annoying
situation. I hated that we essentially fired someone because of dumb social
issues despite their technical contributions being good.

------
zestyping
Pet peeve: there is no such thing as a "neurodiverse person". Individual
people cannot be more diverse or less diverse than others. Diversity is a
property of a group.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Actually it is a thing - it the now accepted term for a wide range/spectrum of
conditions Dyslexia Dyspraxia, ADD Aspersers.

~~~
zajio1am
So perhaps a better terrm would be 'neuroatypical person'?

~~~
C1sc0cat
True but its harder to say :-)

------
pts_
They are only hiring testers which is a big resource waste but lots of autists
can create kickass software without needing to waste resources on analysis
paralysis.

~~~
timwaagh
Some of them. Most of them, like most ordinary people, do not have the
capability or the discipline for coding. Testing seems to be within the
capability of more of them.

~~~
pts_
But we are talking about spectrum folks who love computers here. Sounds like
management still does not trust them with core functions.

------
unnouinceput
Wasn't this tried like a year ago at one of FAANG companies and an AI was put
in charge for automation process and it hired only male, mostly white, and got
a huge backlash? I can't quite recall the details nor the specific company but
I do recall the backlash from feminists, so somebody help with a link please.

~~~
e-_pusher
You are probably thinking of this:

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-
recruiting-t...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-
tool-bias-amazon-report)

~~~
unnouinceput
Yup, that's it, thank you

------
otakucode
This is pretty brilliant. I hadn't accounted for this, despite doing a lot of
thinking in this area, but this sort of issue, where the business focuses upon
forming itself around the mentality of the employee rather than the other way
around, makes total sense. As we move away from repetitive physical labor to
mental work (I prefer that to the term 'knowledge work' because very often the
work has very little to do with actual knowledge which can be explicitly
codified but instead relies upon workers mental faculties), it's obvious that
we will need to change a lot of the structures and practices of business. Many
of the things that businesses have focused on are derived from things that
were very important in factory work. The ability to reduce your work to a
checklist of verifiable, quantifiable, and (very importantly) transferrable
tasks, the ability to 'sell' (not always actual sales, but extroversion, self-
promotion, etc), and things like that are all very possible and beneficial
when a business consists of a factory floor, a front office, a sales force,
and a back room with accountants and the like. When the factory floor
disappears and instead the business is tackling intellectual challenges that
require different strategies for every one, problems that are poorly defined,
etc... the difference is so substantial that any adequate changes will have to
be similarly substantial.

It's a big change. It impacts far more than the company office. It affects
what society views as valuable. It changes what society sees as success. It
basically shoots off in an orthogonal direction from everything society has
been structured around for the entire 20th century. I am reminded of things
like the recent book 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't
Stop Talking' and the documentary 'The Century of the Self.' It really is a
sea change and social changes of that magnitude are messy, slow, and usually
come with a good amount of strife. Substantial changes like these being tried
by this company are stressful and induce anxiety most especially in anyone who
has invested in or succeeded in the older model, so the psychological hurdles
are high. But, substantial changes are necessary and since this is a novel
situation, our best chance of finding the successful solutions are trying and
evaluating substantial changes.

------
tus88
I wonder why they just didn't get rid of normal job interview questions and
let a natural conversation unfold. Surely they want to at least meet the
person and get a feel for their character.

~~~
cwyers
The problem is that you can't have a natural conversation with someone where
there's high stakes. Job interviews are incredibly asymmetrical conversations,
where one party has very low stakes (often they're choosing between several
candidates who all have met earlier qualification hurdles, and only one
candidate is needed to fill the position) and someone has very high stakes.
There is no way to make the high stakes candidate behave as though the
conversation has low stakes, and so that will always shift the conversation.

Also, people can often let biases influence them:

[http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/why-job-interviews-
don...](http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/why-job-interviews-dont-work-
according-to-a-psychologist)

~~~
eru
As a candidate, one of the social hacks you can do is make the interviewer
think the conversation is low stakes for you.

Either by bluffing well, or by genuinely making the conversation low stakes.

Some strategies of for the latter:

* start interviewing while you are still happy at your old job

* interview in batches, so you can afford to bomb some, and ideally get multiple offers you can play against each other

------
adj83
In its survey of 2,000 autistic adults, just 16% were in in full-time work,
despite 77% of people who were unemployed saying they wanted to work.

crazy stats. I wonder if its true when extended.

------
vanniv
I do wonder if, as we keep progressing down the hiring to fill a company with
a maximum number of equally-weighted populations by various identity
characteristics, if it will some day become trendy and hip to choose your
employees based on who would be most productive without regard for the effect
on the identity dimension distribution.

------
meristem
Would love to hear about their compensation and benefit packages and how they
compare to industry- and NY-averages.

(Is the competitive edge of neurodiversity being properly carried through to
living wages, benefits for people who aren’t full time, promotion processes
that support differences etc)

~~~
3minus1
Reminds me of this article [1] about Goodwill stores hiring people with
disabilities like blindness and paying them way less than minimum wage (22
cents, 38 cents and 41 cents an hour). I found the article very though-
provoking. Yes, they are hiring many people who probably would not find work
elsewhere. Yes, they are also paying them pennies.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/07/30/does-
good...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/07/30/does-goodwill-
industries-exploit-disabled-workers/#6de39dac6a56)

------
jonny383
Any software engineer that wants to build a _real career_ with _real
progression_ will already know that changing jobs should be done by
connections, not cold-applying for jobs.

Sure you need to get your foot in the door, but if you don't utilize the
connections you've made throughout your working history, you either A) weren't
useful enough to build higher standing connections, or B) were probably too
focused on being a good employee on a technical level.

Pro-tip: Companies love hiring people they already know through some mutual
relation. I would argue that a cold-interview process is directly the result
of a lack of trusted upper-management network contacts.

It's very common to skip these bullshit interviews through this path. When you
ask yourself "how did this manager get there?" this is probably your answer -
they knew how to play the game better than you did.

~~~
peferron
> Any software engineer that wants to build a _real career_ with _real
> progression_ will already know that changing jobs should be done by
> connections, not cold-applying for jobs.

If you can get referred, sure, do that. Why should that be a requirement to
build a "real career" with "real progression" though? (And what does that even
mean?)

Earlier this year I interviewed with several companies. I was referred to some
of them. For some others I didn't know anyone so I cold-messaged recruiters on
LinkedIn. It worked just fine and I received similar offers in both cases.

You're probably doing more harm than good by scaring people away from cold-
applying.

~~~
jonny383
>If you can get referred, sure, do that. Why should that be a requirement to
build a "real career" with "real progression" though? (And what does that even
mean?)

It means moving away from being a shit-kicker coder to a more senior position
at a fast pace. And eventually on to upper management.

If you ever want to reach upper-management, you basically have two choices: A)
You work from the ground up _at the same company, forever_, or B) You work at
various companies, developing a network and getting recommended into higher
positions from your networks.

~~~
peferron
But you can have a "real career" without ending in management. In the Bay Area
you can make absurd amounts of money as individual contributor. Not C-level of
absurd, but high enough to be fine with earning less but enjoying your work
more—money is only a means to an end, after all.

Also, the only way I'd be interested in going into upper management would be
as technical co-founder, which requires neither grinding levels nor job-
hopping.

Overall I think you're being a bit too reductive about what a "real career"
means.

------
sambeau
This is an interesting idea. An interview is a two-way process though, so I
wonder how you could ensure that an interviewee could test & probe the company
to be sure it's a place that they would like to work in?

------
Thorentis
We need more genetic diversity in STEM. When will we be introducing DNA
testing and doing mutation testing on all candidates to ensure perfectly equal
distribution of all genetic combinations among employees?

~~~
kick
Eliminating a source of bias that might prevent optimal workers from being
hired is efficient, the initiatives listed in your sarcastic strawman are not.

~~~
coleifer
>optimal workers

Do you actually talk / think in those terms?

At the end of the day, all I care about is: are you smart, can you think
critically, will you get along with others. Same goes for everyone who's hired
me. And a lot of it is just chance/luck.

~~~
greglindahl
That's not a very good way to build a team, though. Teams need complementary
people, and one part of that is having different ideas (e.g. physics vs
CompSci thinkers), and having some people willing to grind out the details
while others run on ahead with good ideas not fully fleshed out.

