I have been using the iOS7 beta since it came out, and before doing this, it had asked me for permission. This is opt-in, so if you don't like it you don't have to use it.
Forcing diversity doesn't work. They should instead find out how to get more minorities etc to apply in the first place to be considered equally with other candidates, without their applications being weighted over the others. Hiring based on experience no matter what gender or race you are, and becoming more diverse due to that, is better than discriminating against others for the sake of diversity.
> Forcing diversity doesn't work. They should instead find out how to get more minorities etc to apply in the first place to be considered equally with other candidates, without their applications being weighted over the others.
Yes, that's what they are trying to do. Find out how. How do they signal to that group of people they want effectively, without weighting that group over others (such as by advertising only to that select group, or through other selective means).
The problem is that this is discriminatory. If you are not hiring based solely on qualifications, and instead on gender, it is discriminating. If you were to switch the genders and say that you are only hiring men, it would be clearly sexist. However, if you do not accept well qualified men who would fit the job, it is seen as "breaking gender barriers". You should be hiring based on the applicant's experience, education, and how they fit in with company culture.
If you are worried about a gender gap, you should be looking at why fewer females apply. Once you remedy this, you will be able to consider an equal amount of applicants, and you should then choose them based on their experience instead of their gender. The title of this article makes it out as if people are trying to stop you from hiring women, when in fact, you are instead trying to justify discrimination.
> You should be hiring based on the applicant's experience, education
I find it concerning that we so easily discount this discrimination. Someone who is equally capable of doing the job with less experience and education should have an equal chance at the job, no?
Now, perhaps someone with more experience is statistically better for the job, so you might want to look for that, but what if men are statically better for the job? I don't think it is right to say one is discrimination and the other is not. In both cases you are making prejudicial judgements about people through categorization.
At some point practicality takes over and you have to make judgements about people without knowing who they really are, but its not clear to me why the varying levels of treatment are happening.
> I don't think it is right to say one is discrimination and the other is not.
> In both cases you are making prejudicial judgements about people through categorization.
They are both discrimination, and they are both prejudicial judgement, but only one is illegal. Any property or characteristic of a candidate you use to make a hiring decision is the process of discriminating between the available candidates, and making prejudicial judgements.
Discrimination based on certain properties, like gender, is illegal. Discrimination based on any other properties, like college education, prior experience, communication skills, or how quickly (or more often slowly) they can do FizzBuzz is called 'the decision making process'.
An effective hiring process usually starts with trying to find good places to advertise, and then followed very shortly by figuring out how you will discriminate/prejudge the qualified candidates from the other [95% of] applicants.
As a general guide, typically it's the immutable properties which are the ones where discrimination is illegal.
That's a fair point. It's hard to pin down why fewer women apply. Is it cultural, social, our industry? Are these things that a single company can sort out or change? How would you encourage or solve the problem of too few women applying, without crossing the ethical, gray, broad boundary of discrimination?
Fewer women apply because there are fewer women in the field. It's that simple. If you consider that a problem, the author of the article is trying to solve it at the end of the road, when the solution lies at the beginning. The beginning is in school, and the problem is most certain sociological.
I'm not familiar with and female design groups, but if you are hiring a developer for example, you could advertise to one of the many female tech/programming groups that exist, while at the same time searching for an equal amount of male candidates. Or he could recruit by going along with his plan at the university, but instead setting a personal goal to reach out to an equal number of males and females, and not just saying "women only, sorry". Work on getting an equal number of applicants, then ignore their gender and only choose them based on their experience/education.
Who is not a direct analogy. In law, your motives matter when determining whether an act was criminal. The fancy term is mens rea, literally "guilty mind".
Unfortunately this high school civics version of the U.S. criminal justice system is not accurate. "Mens rea" comes from the traditional common law, which is now increasingly divorced from actual federal criminal statutory law. An increasingly number of federal crimes say unlawful intent may be presumed or is even irrelevant.
Note I'm not taking a position on whether any possible TOS violations rise to the level of a CFAA violation, or whether DOJ would care, just that waving around terms like "mens rea" does not an actual rebuttal make.
Or, if you prefer a high school civics sur-rebuttal, "ignorance of the law is no defense." :)
I'm not American, but I do resemble one on the internet.
It does vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but strict liability is still rare and still largely constrained to summary offences, not indictable offences.
Regardless of whether you are in a purely code jurisdiction or purely common law jurisdiction or some hybrid, there usually has to be additional effort by a legislator to indicate that strict liability applies.
The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities is foolish and offensive. This is similar to I believe a couple summers ago when Square had their summer intern program going, and all of the interns were male (because no females applied) and Jack Dorsey was attacked on Twitter for it. Square did not discriminate against people, but of course people leap to turning these people into the villain instead of thinking that it may be possible that no qualified minorities/women were able to speak at the conference for one reason or another. The organizer of this event is right to ignore this straw-man argument of trying to call him a racist/sexist because he knows that the allegation is ridiculous.
"automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities..."
Whoa, nellie!
That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak.
I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world.
Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride.
Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends.
OI have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.
So I raise my hand and ask, "Could this process be improved?" No accusation of deliberate malice or even incompetence, just asking how we can do this better.
"The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an INTENTIONAL act by the event organizers..."
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You're missing the point. The concern expressed about the predominantly white-dude lineups at popular conference IS NOT that individual conference organizers are purposefully excluding non-white-dude speakers. The people talking about these issues generally go out of their way to explain the difference between INDIVIDUAL bias and SYSTEMIC bias. The latter is not a matter of a conference organizer saying, "Hey! Let's make sure we don't have black speakers!" Instead, systemic bias is the way the status quo of a particular group or culture leads members to make assumptions or automatic decisions that UNINTENTIONALLY exclude certain people.
Think of a web developer building a new site. All of their friends use iOS, they use iOS, and although they don't have anything against Android, their unexamined default assumptions will steer them towards building the mobile version of the site with iOS in mind. Some Android users might still use it, and even get a lot out of it, but many will also be lost to bad UX collisions, mistaken assumptions about browser feature support, and so on. The result can easily turn into a spiral: Android users don't use our site, so working to support them would just be platform zealotry!
A stretched analogy? Perhaps. But it's an example of how unintentional assumptions can leave important groups of people -- with lots of really valuable stuff to contribute -- out in the cold unless work is done up front. It's not about tokenism, or quotas, or assuming bad faith and evil intentions. It's about keeping our eyes open, and listening when people say we're missing something important.
it's about promoting the program for females, to help balance the gender divide in programming. In my batch, there was no scholarship yet, and we had no females. Same for batch[0]. batch[1] didn't have the scholarships and they had just one female. Since starting the scholarships, the program has been just under half female, which has been extremely beneficial to hackerschool culture.
The scholarships do help fix the gender divide, and honestly, I think that's very important, for both females AND males. I don't think it's acknowledged widely enough the relationship between gender diversity and happiness in a working environment. I would be very, very surprised if scholarly research didn't reveal that all-male or mostly-male workplaces lead to unhappy males. As a CE undergrad, I had almost no female classmates. A few years out of graduation, I've come to the conclusion that having no females in my program contributed to the severe depression that I experienced as an undergrad. Part of fixing that is making it clear that we want females to be a part of our community, and part of it is actually making sure that can happen. The scholarships are a good thing, even for the guys that don't qualify. As an alum, I support the scholarships for female applicants, and can testify to the positive impact they've had on our little community.
It's not just about happiness, but also productivity, diversity of thought, ideas and working styles, having a well-rounded team, and all that jazz. Though I'm sure happiness comes into it, too.
I'm female, and half the reason I'm tempted to apply is the scholarship. I find that a little disquieting, and I can't quite put my finger on why. Unfortunately, the scholarship is not enough for me to give up my (non-programming, but in technology) day job and move across the country, so it's something of a moot point. I'd love to do Hacker School, it's definitely a direction I'd really benefit from growing in, but the sort of person to whom the scholarship makes a substantial difference in applying... let's just say not every woman falls into that category.
"Employers who do this are being just as antisocial and psychopathic as this school district"
Because using rfid badges to unlock doors at an office building/control and log access to server rooms, etc is a psychopathic and antisocial thing to do
Most uses of RFID badges for access control have nothing to do with building control or server rooms (and why would you want something as poorly secured as RFID when a smartcard would be equally convenient and far more secure?). Most uses of RFID are based on the same reasoning that leads to the installation of keystroke logging software, MITM devices, etc. -- the idea that employees should be watched at all times, and that the more detail you have about your employees work habits, the better (and you should never have know how to judge the products of their work; after all, that is not the job of a top-level manager).
As an information security professional, I am so glad we use RFID badges. I want to know who is getting into my secure datacenter and when, and be able to revoke that right with the click of a button if things start going pear-shaped with their activities.
RFID is a broad spectrum, not necessarily one technology. Some are more secure than others. Even with the most basic, though, it's pretty easy to clone a key or a keycode as well. Keys can't be revoked if you don't know where they are, and keycode changes require everyone to learn the new keycode. It's a game of give and take.
I agree that the laws shouldn't be as crazy as they are now, but why make it harder to catch file-sharers? It's illegal to share stuff like this, and I don't see any justifiable reason why this shouldn't be illegal. However, it should be a small fine in my opinion, and it's a waste of time to break down the doors of these people downloading music unless they are making a ton of money by selling this pirated content.
I don't see any justifiable reason why this shouldn't be illegal
Because sharing is good and it's not our problem if the currently dominant business model has troubles with it?
Even if you think that sharing music freely should not be allowed, the fact remains that we are dealing with an industry that refuses to adapt to new technologies and new customer expectations, and engages in despicable conduct to preserve their outdated business model, as this story illustrates. In this view, accelerating the change, or doom, of this industry is rendering a service to society. Letting them go after file sharers is simply helping them resist change, and only by fighting the symptoms (we're losing some sales) rather than the causes (it's easier to "pirate" than to download legally, legal downloads are too expensive and impose unwanted restrictions).
