
The hiring spreadsheet and the clash at The Markup - jashkenas
https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/the-markup-hiring-spreadsheet.php
======
x0x0
I read a description -- sorry, don't remember where -- that finally made me
feel like what happened made sense. Though who knows if any outsider will ever
understand what happened.

Reading between the lines, Gardner basically claimed Angwin -- who was the EIC
-- didn't do the job. Angwin wanted to do journalism, but that's not the EIC
job. Her job was to _hire_ people to do journalism, and to set up the
(prioritization, themes, etc) in which journalism was to be done. Angwin did
that poorly. [1] Her job also was to set up technical infra. It was claimed
she didn't. etc.

From another article, "Angwin acknowledged to CJR that 'meetings are not my
favorite thing.'" [2] . That makes me believe the firing of Angwin was
justified; the EIC job is literally meetings.

This is a pattern that is repeated in startups: a technical founder often
doesn't understand the job is not to be the best engineer on the team, but
rather to hire managers, set priorities, coordinate with the rest of the
business, etc.

[1] > _" Hiring was slow. Recruitment was slow. Even as of this month, we
didn’t have stories banked. We didn’t have editorial processes in place to
accept and develop pieces. We hadn’t developed areas of coverage. We still
lacked an editorial..."_ — Jeff Larson
[https://link.medium.com/oPwISQSD9V](https://link.medium.com/oPwISQSD9V)
[https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the-
markup-6adc6a77810...](https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the-
markup-6adc6a778100)

[2] [https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-
markup.php](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php)

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mruts
The spreadsheet seems pretty damning. I'm not a lawyer, but isn't it illegal
to judge an employee on whether they are male/female or "non-white"?

~~~
panarky
Not a lawyer either, but seems to me if you're hiring writers to pursue a
particular perspective, then their backgrounds matter.

~~~
tschwimmer
Hopefully you are hiring writers to report on the objective state of the
world, not pursue a particular perspective.

~~~
throwawayjava
And who gets to decide what "the objective state of the world" is?

There is real value in reading about the same topic from differing
perspectives. Not all writing is or aspires to be purely fact-based
journalism, and that's okay.

It's reasonable that The Markup wants to hire group of people with diverse
viewpoints on how "powerful institutions are using technology in ways that
impact people and society". I would be surprised and underwhelmed if they had
e.g. only software engineers or only consumer rights activists writing.

The issue is their assumption that only non-white, non-males have interesting
things to say about how "powerful institutions are using technology in ways
that impact people and society".

~~~
jdietrich
Why has it become acceptable to assume so much about someone's view of the
world based on their race, gender and sexual identity? Why has our definition
of "diversity" become so narrow and stereotypical?

If you want to hire people with diverse viewpoints, then look for people with
diverse viewpoints. It's incredibly easy to fill a room with people who look
like a Benetton poster but who all read the same books in the same colleges
and all rigidly adhere to the same dogma. It's incredibly easy to use tokenism
to justify your own prejudices. It's difficult to build a genuinely diverse
collaboration based on profound and meaningful differences of perspective.

~~~
barry-cotter
> Why has it become acceptable to assume so much about someone's view of the
> world based on their race, gender and sexual identity? Why has our
> definition of "diversity" become so narrow and stereotypical?

US Supreme Court jurisprudence more or less. No one actually cares about
diversity as a goal. The political coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act
looked around, saw they’d won and wanted more stuff for their constituents.
Affirmative action was one of the ways to get more stuff. It’s also illegal
under a plain reading of equal rights. For reasons I’m unqualified to opine on
a quota system is too blatant legally (also explicit points based systems with
group X getting Y extra points) so the Supreme Court went with diversity as an
acceptable workaround to get to the desired goal of getting more stuff for the
desired interest groups. This all happened in the context of university
admissions and the buzzword spread from the case law.

Same as free speech or state’s rights people who genuinely believe in them are
rare compared to those who use them as talking points when convenient and drop
them when not.

~~~
dwaltrip
Yeah, no one actually cares difficult, deeply rooted social and cultural
problems that affect millions of people. It's clearly just about getting more
stuff.

~~~
barry-cotter
Yes, that’s broadly right. The number of principled ideologues is always very
low compared to those who see that an ideology has something for them and then
follow it. I’m not suggesting these people are self-aware hypocrites that’s
just how human psychology works.

In under a generation people go from arguing that everyone deserves equal
rights and dignity to campaigning for explicit racial privileges for their
side, or from supporting the right of the federal government to seize slaves
who escape and travel to a free state to yakking about state’s rights to
justify Jim Crow, or the one we’re in the trailing end of right now, the
transition from free speech being a left wing value to a right wing one. When
the right had the establishment the left was all about people’s right to speak
and be heard. Now that they’re in charge it’s safe spaces and hate speech. Or
look at the collapse of the anti-war movement once Obama was elected. Bush
bombed Muslims for eight years, Obama bombed Muslims for eight years. Bush
destroyed Iraq and had no real effect in Afghanistan as it comes pre
destroyed. Obama destroyer Libya and cape quite close with Syria before his
good sense overcame the presence of Hilary Clinton in his cabinet.

Politics is overwhelmingly about sides, coalitions and spoils. Insofar as it’s
about ideology most people have 1-3 things they really care about and the rest
they’re pretty happy to modify to fit in with their coalition.

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jefftk
This spreadsheet looks basically fine to me? They're taking the information
they'd normally use to make decisions ("understands the tech industry" etc)
and using a tool to be more consistent across candidates.

With race/sex/class those are _after_ the computation of the candidate's total
score, which makes me think they're being used for affirmative action in a
pretty normal way.

~~~
prepend
This spreadsheet is what I dread serving on interview panels. It has column
headers that are hard to understand but gives a score to that header.
Hopefully there’s a companion doc describing the criteria and the meaning
between a 1-5.

Without such definitions, this is just a way to ouija board bias into results
because you can sum factors and sort candidates.

I’ve found that people like to put more importance on numbers like this than
they should and will naturally try to create cutoffs.

The class column is concerning as a hiring criteria, but also that it’s just
based on superficial review of info and imputing. Someone going to Wesleyan
and studying abroad might be extremely poor on scholarship. Probably not, but
might be. Trying to guess class by reading someone’s LinkedIn and then using
that guess for something like hiring is confusing to me. That doesn’t seem
like good decision making since the “data” aren’t factual.

There’s a term called scientism [0] which is when something is cosmetically
like science but kind of bullshit. This smells like whatever the equivalent is
for data where the data are all made up bullshit, but then a reasonable
looking method is applied to it. Maybe it’s “data scientism.”

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism)

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thaumasiotes
There's something about this spreadsheet that I don't get.

The article gives examples of categories graded on a 1-to-5 scale:

> The criteria [for the "social class" column] are: “1) very poor family
> background, 2) working class, 3) middle class, 4) slightly upper middle, and
> 5) super rich, super privileged.”

> A key for the column marked “Famous” describes the criteria as: “1) has only
> published in small media, or hasn’t published very much 2) has published
> regularly in ordinary-sized media 3) has published a LOT in ordinary-sized
> or larger media, or has a social media presence exceeding 10K, 4) has
> published a lot in very popular media AND has a social media presence bigger
> than 10K 5) practically a household name.”

These do not look like evenly spaced points to me. In particular, the gap
between a 4 and a 5 appears to be much larger, in both cases, than the gaps
between other adjacent numbers such as 2 and 3.

And that is fine; there's nothing saying your scale needs to use uniform
spacing.

But if you look at the spreadsheet, it starts with a bunch of columns
assessing various metrics. Then there's a column labeled "Total", the value of
which is just the sum of each entry in the preceding columns.

This makes no sense. If your numbers come from a non-uniform scale, adding two
numbers together is an error. With the sharp dropoff from 4 to 5, it should be
_much_ easier to have a 3 in two categories than to have a 5 in one and a 1
(the minimum! You're guaranteed to be at least this good!) in another.

The "famous" and "social class" columns aren't among the ones that get summed.
(Presumably because higher social class is bad rather than good.) But I tend
to suspect that the scales for the summed columns were assigned similarly.

And the summed columns do show direct evidence of a very similar problem --
they are color-coded. Each cell is assigned a color ranging from deep red
(bad) to white (neutral) to deep green (great). In most of these summed
columns, a 3 is neutral, a 4 is light green, and so on, exactly what you'd
expect. But in "Competent technology end user", a 5 is deep green, and a 4 is
already light red. In "explanatory, helpful to readers", a 3 is deep red. This
suggests again that the columns aren't being measured in similar scales, and
that adding them makes no sense.

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novok
Well this spreadsheet reaffirms a bunch of recent stereotypes about
journalists now.

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ww520
Myers-Briggs personality test?! Isn't that like horoscope? The last time I
took one in a company was administrated by a consultant paddling some psycho
analysis things to HR. We all had a good laugh, like reading our palms to
pigeonhole us into artificial compartments.

~~~
gboudrias
Hi, psychology student here. It's not very good in a psychometric sense, but
its validity problems aren't really a concern when it comes to idiographic
data ie: "helpful tools for getting to know the people with whom she was
creating a new company".

It's not the devil we memed it into, there are better tools for categorizing
and rejecting candidates based on objective-ish traits but this wasn't the
purpose according to thr article.

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mft_
Out of (genuine) interest, which alternative tools do you recommend?

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gboudrias
The MMPI-2 is the big reference right now. Legally you'll probably need a
licensed psychologist to administer it (depending on your state/country), but
that would be true of most useful tests.

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ANPEQ-1
"Non-white"

"Non-male"

How does this spreadsheet not represent practices prohibited by the EEOC?

[https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm)

~~~
panarky
EEOC rules don't apply to private businesses with less than 15 employees.

[https://employment.law.tulane.edu/blog/what-is-an-equal-
oppo...](https://employment.law.tulane.edu/blog/what-is-an-equal-opportunity-
employer)

~~~
ANPEQ-1
Ahhh okay, interesting. I guess that is interesting news for all the racist
and sexist small business owners out there _barf_

