[facetious]Anyone who wouldn’t hire Jones is clearly an anti-Welsh bigot.[/facetious]
No, seriously, I could see someone finding it amusing to bring the Smith count to 46. I’m not sure that’s criminal.
What I’m more disturbed by is this:
A. How is which school one went to or which town one lived in, etc., a meaningful variable? That tells you nothing about the individual’s character.
B. If you’d pick someone just because he’s a Mason, I think that’s disgusting. (Though Masons I’ve known have been pretty decent guys.) Well, I hope you understand me not employing anyone from a secret society. Good grief!
A) If one went to Yale and the other went to Metro State, then I’d be inclined to hire the Metro grad. Not a fancy school so the person has done more with less.
If one is from the area and the other is from … oh, New York or something, I’d hire the one that is more likely to add to the group.
B) If all else is equal. I know some things about the Mason (or Eagle Scout, Knight of Columbus, Phi Tappa Keg, or whatever) based on his membership in the organization. One mentions that he’s KKK, flies RC planes, has his Ham radio license or publishes conspiracy theory newsletters, that also would tell me something about the person.
All of those are more relevant than his last name.
The manager would likely hire Jones purely out of fear of legal action by the NAAJ, who would surely levy accusations of systemic antijonesism, regardless of whether there was any real evidence of it. Under threat of boycott, the company would acquiesce in hiring enough Joneses to meet or exceed the proportion of Joneses in the general populace. The company would do its part to find the best Joneses available, but filling the Jones quota would (at least tacitly) be emphasized over finding the absolute best qualified and experienced candidate.
Whispers would begin to circulate among Smiths, who now find themselves working with an influx of Joneses, some of whom excel, others whose qualifications appear painfully suspect. Sensitive to their colleagues’ clannishness and discontent, the Joneses withdraw into their own clique. Hostility grows as morale plummets. The door to the Human Resources office groans on its hinges. A physical confrontation takes place (whose origin fails to be determined from contradictory witness accounts) that results in the dismissal of one Smith and one Jones.
Soon after, the company is named as a defendant in a class-action lawsuit. Faced with certain financial ruin, they close all offices, laying off the entire workforce, and move their entire operation to India.
Months later, the hiring manager finds himself with a quandary: two candidates of equally impressive qualifications. One is named Patel, and the other Singh, a surname shared (as coincidence would have it) by all the other current employees…
You have yet to explain the sense it makes. I’d love to hear how it makes sense, but all you do is announce that in your own personal hypothetical world, taking an action for no reason or a random reason is preferable to taking an action based on any rationality at all.
I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to call me a git in GD, but since I was pissy at you first I’ll let it pass without a report, and just ask you to please not call me names outside of the Pit.
You did add something to it, much more than many, and I’m glad for that. I’m frustrated because you still geared your response as if my OP was a rhetorical argument in favor of AA rather than a sincere question. Also, I never said “diversity for diversity’s sake”, that was face, so you’re misdirected on that point. You also pointed out what I had done already – that absent a qualifying factor one can discern in the hiring process one has to look outside it. My question became how do you do that without being completely arbitrary – the idea of the Halo tournament, for example, while silly, at least would be a measure of something. I’ve already addressed the point that this just expands the qualification process to include the new criteria; that’s just a semantic quibble to me, not something which prevents the question from being answered in general.
I have explained it, you just don’t like my answer. You have set up the question where it doesn’t matter if we pick Smith or Jones. Both would do equally well at their job and the last name diversity thing is just ridiculous enough that it can can be ignored. So either candidate would be the “right” choice.
So anything you do to separate the two is random. Unless the job is at a video game store, a Halo torunament would have no bearing on the job. So using it as a benchmark is effectively being random. Halo skills were not part of the interview so you have no idea what Smith or Jones’ skill in Halo is. Smith may have sat outside GameStop at the midnight launch to be get the Legendary Edition of Halo 3 while Jones might not even like video games. So the performance of either person in such a torunament is totally random.
I have not set the question up that way. You keep insisting that, I keep explaining why it’s not so, and you keep coming back to insist it some more. Yes, both would do equally well at their job – surely this is true of many, many people employed right now. Again, I didn’t suggest the “diversity of last names” thing, that was face, but I would like to see why it’s sillier than random chance. What I don’t get is that you seem to be insisting that it’s actually better to flip a coin than to employ any reasoning at all.
Look, I keep saying “what would you do if you had to go outside the usual qualifications to find the best employee” and you keep saying “anything outside the already laid out qualifications is just as random as a coin flip”. It’s obviously false. There are many character qualities which can be adjudicated outside one’s resume, and which ones a manager might choose to consider important isn’t random at all, but based on his or her understanding of the company, human nature, and so on.
This is a quote from your OP, where you set up the “equally impressive” idea:
From your own words, it sounds like Smith or Jones would both do equally well at their job and that neither has any distinguishing characteristics.
But here’s where your question falls apart. It’s based on the premise that the resume and answers to the silly standard interview questions like “What is your biggest weakness?” (stock answer: “Well I just work too hard Bob!”) are all that matter.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt an interview worked that way. Stuff like conversation skills, demeanor, word choices, sense of dress and other intangibles all matter in an interview. It’s not “going outside the box” to use them. As I explained above, deciding an applicant’s worth on a Halo tournament is no less random than a coin flip. Others have said the same thing I have, yet you refuse to even consider it.
Not only wrong, not only not implied in what you quoted, but specifically and repeatedly repudiated by me subsequent to the OP.
I think addressing practically every post you’ve made is not “refusing to consider it” at all. Anyway, of course those intangibles matter. You agree that the “set of things which are usually considered” does not encompass the entire universe, right? I agree that the set thusly defined is also wider than the resume qualifications, and have all along.
As for “others”, “others” have said lots of things, the majority of which don’t, in fact, support your position that it’s better to employ random chance than no reasoning whatsoever. If I were a manager, I would hope that when I had to make unusual decisions I wouldn’t immediately throw the whole thing to blind chance or insist that any choice I make is exactly equal to doing so.
If they have defining characteristics that would be useful on the job, then any one of those would be used well before the idea of a Halo tournament (or commute time or last name) was even considered.
If they’re NOT equal, then there is no discussion, one has to be “better” than the other in some way that is meaningful to the job. And if they ARE equal, then choosing one over the other is a completely arbitrary decision.
The discussion I’ve been trying to have is how one would determine which was better. I think you’re just not getting that my question is different from the one where the candidates are literally identical.
I get what you’re asking, I just don’t think we approach the idea of a resume/job interview in the same way.
I think what you’re asking is a question with no answer. You think otherwise. We can’t reach any common groud to debate the question because we both see the question as being interesting (you) or pointless (me).
It was fun man, but I think this’ll be the last round of back and forth for me. Unless someone else can enlighten me on what Ensign is trying to say.
It couldn’t be simpler, Justin_Bailey: how would you, as a real person in the real world, determine which of two fantasy-world job candidates was the better choice, when the scenario has been painstakingly defined so that neither of them is better than the other?
Show me, with quotes, how this is true, or stop. Won’t be a problem, right? You’re completely able to back up this position? You can easily demonstrate how your characterization of my argument is true, or else you wouldn’t be so amusingly flippant about it? Or will you just drive by and feel good about how clever you’ve been without contributing anything of substance or having to work in any way to demonstrate your point?
See that? The scenario is that, all qualification to perform the job being equal, do you or do you not hire to increase diversity in your company.
As was extremely adequately stated above, if one employee adds more diversity that is of benefit, the two candidates are not equally qualified. If the diversity they add is not of benefit, then that diversity is irrelevent. Only factors of relevence to the job determine qualification. If those are all truly equal, then any non-random method of hiring leaves the potential employer liable for legal prosecution on grounds of discrimination, since it applied discriminating procedures in its hiring practices. Hence, either they’re not actually equal, or the scenario is only solvable by use of random determinants, specifically items such as coin-flipping.
I can’t say how AA has much of anything to do with the OP question.
You’ve given an example where both applicants could just as easily be chosen by the flip of a coin for all the effect it has–and this is supposed to represent what exactly about Affirmative Action?
To answer though, I’d probably go with the one who applied first. Again, I don’t really see how that answer has any relevance with the potential plusses or minuses of AA.
I think that AA was historically a negative, helping to re-inforce the idea of “you can’t succeed under your own power” into a group of people who had had that idea forced into their culture for a couple hundred years. And when you’re battling the culture of poverty, you don’t need to get unqualified people into the same schools as the Smiths, you need to get them into schools that will get them competitive with the Smiths. AA was a cheap alternative to building good schools in bad neighbourhoods.
What? Where did I say that? WHere did I say anything like that you were delusional? Why are you taking the fact that some people here agree with you as evidence and discarding the fact that some people don’t? That’s a very strange way to approach supporting your position, which seems to me like it should stand or fall on its own merits. I’m not using the fact that others have read it my way as evidence, so you shouldn’t do the same thing in reverse.
Only if you completely ignore pretty much everything else posted to this thread, how I’ve agreed with various other objections and versions of the scenario and even happily ACCEPTED several responses as valid and good that did not rely on the diversity issue. Which I wasn’t even the one to bring up, by the way, and was never championing. It is very clear that some people have seem something vaguely similar to this scenario before and are just jumping in without paying much attention to complain about that other argument they once had with someone else making similar but different points.
Actually, I might anyway. But yes, I could easily demonstrate as much, but given BrainFireBob’s post, it would be redundant.
You have created a hypothetical in which two non-identical job candidates are identically qualified for a job. From the company’s perspective, there is no advantage whatsoever to hiring one over the other. (This is necessarily true, because if one did have an advantage, any advantage relevant to the job, they would no longer be equally matched.)
You continue to deride the coin-flip solution because it “throws the matter to blind chance,” and insinuate that there is some better, more rational method of choosing, but thusfar you have not hinted at what that might be.
Again, you have set up the scenario so that from the company’s perspective, there is no advantage to hiring one person over the other. From the perspective of the candidates, the coin flip (or any other chance method) at least offers a degree of fairness. If you’d like to explain why you think “diversity of last names” is any more just a rationale than choosing randomly in this instance, I would be pleased to read it.