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0 pointsstonemetal12y ago0 comments

That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.

I don't see how those two points are related. A measure can be good or bad independent of who you choose to measure by it.

Github(not necessarily just having an account but actually looking at what they have done) is a good measure of skill because it allows you to see the person's work output. You know exactly what they contributed to a project and what type of work they are interested in and are familiar with.

Now just because it is a good measurement of skill doesn't mean that it is a good hiring filter. The two are similar but not the same thing. A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender. It is kind of like saying measuring how much weight a person can lift is a bad measure for determining a person's strength because we only measured white guys. It is a good measure of strength, just misapplied if you are trying to find the world's strongest person.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

Anderkent12y ago· 1 in thread

> A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender.

It's a trade-off. You want to see as many people meeting your criteria as you can, but don't want false positives. A github profile might have many false negatives (because of the white man skew), but that's a price a company might be willing to pay, if they get enough applicants anyway.

stonemetalOP12y ago

True I more meant an ideal hiring filter not merely a good one. Biased hiring filters can get you in trouble in the US, especially if they are known to be biased. That is one of the reasons general IQ tests should be avoided here, they are considered biased.

hyperpape12y ago

I took it as implicit that a measure of skill is something that should work for most people. If you just mean it can be an indicator of skill (that is, something that tells you positively that some people have skill, but doesn't tell you anything about most people) we have no disagreement, we just were using words differently.

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