The verb "discriminate" has been (perhaps rightfully) saddled with negative connotations, but discrimination is exactly what any hiring manager is doing. You're discriminating between candidates on the basis of non-protected attributes. Obviously we don't want to discriminate on the basis of protected attributes, and it gets messy when there are areas of strong (often causal) overlap between protected classes of people and the non-protected characteristics that employers are looking for in candidates. But that doesn't obviate the need for discrimination along some axis or other. (Hard technical skills being the example that is probably most salient for the HN crowd.)
In an ideal world, anyone could do anything they wanted without impediment. But to quote Mr Lightyear, we're not on that planet. In this world, if I'm hiring you for a role where you're responsible for safeguarding the wellbeing of others (teacher, manager, doctor, whatever), then of course it's going to put downward pressure on my ability to hire you if you have a super fucked up background that makes you snap at people, attack them without provocation, jump at shadows, have traumatic flashbacks mid-sentence, whatever. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. There are other jobs that are better suited for people in those situations.
Regarding "culture fit":
While we should try very hard to avoid promoting monocultures when hiring (for a whole lot of different reasons, particularly because diversity is crucial for organizational resilience and adaptability), the truth is that it remains a very subjective determination. It depends on your criteria for what constitutes a monoculture. You could say that we live in a monoculture with regard to our expectations for treating everyone in the workplace with a baseline amount of respect. But not everyone agrees where that baseline should be drawn. If you come into an interview and it's immediately clear to me that you're the kind of employee who's going to be disrespectful of your coworkers, and I reject your application accordingly -- well, I'm promoting a sort of company monoculture in that sense.
Then you can walk back from that into varying shades of grey regarding different individual's varying ways of signaling respect, or deemphasis of candor in certain situations, unwillingness to openly address issues, etc, and it gets very messy very quickly. Where is the line between avoiding hiring rude people and discriminating against people from backgrounds or cultures that have patterns of communication that others may perceive as rude? And so on. It requires great care.
This is the sort of ambiguity I'm talking about. To think that this ambiguity doesn't exist, or believe that we can simply wish it out of existence -- that's why I reached for the word "naive" in my original post. I think a lot of engineers are fortunate to work in positions where they don't need to wrestle with this sort of ambiguity in their day-to-day.
And yet you don't need a bunch of personal background to "see how their worldview was shaped" in order to see their worldview and value to the company. The personal questions aspect of the interview is not very valuable, leads to the possiblity of more negative biases, and potentially opens the door to lawsuits if you ask specific things.
Perhaps your view of us "naive" technical folk is itself naive.
Well, I'm an engineer myself, albeit with a lot of sidecar management experience, so I like to (perhaps naively) think that I'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I believe everyone is naive in certain respects; there are so many hours in the day and no one can be an expert in everything.
But your larger point is fair: it's a very tricky and problematic area.
I do think that it can help to see how people's worldview was shaped rather than just trying to get a one-shot sense of someone's worldview based on your static impression of them at this moment in time, though.
It's analogous to asking someone to describe their prior technical work experience rather than just explaining what they know in this precise moment, and akin to someone showing their work when completing a math problem. It makes it easier to tell whether someone actually knows what they purport to know, or believes what they purport to believe, if they can show how that experience was derived.
I feel this is especially true in the case mentioned in the original article, where you as the employer are essentially taking a minor leap of faith in hiring someone. You can't rely as much on their prior work experience as a "web of trust" evidence point that they know how to conduct themselves. You need to reach for other data points.
In an ideal world, anyone could do anything they wanted without impediment. But to quote Mr Lightyear, we're not on that planet. In this world, if I'm hiring you for a role where you're responsible for safeguarding the wellbeing of others (teacher, manager, doctor, whatever), then of course it's going to put downward pressure on my ability to hire you if you have a super fucked up background that makes you snap at people, attack them without provocation, jump at shadows, have traumatic flashbacks mid-sentence, whatever. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. There are other jobs that are better suited for people in those situations.
Regarding "culture fit":
While we should try very hard to avoid promoting monocultures when hiring (for a whole lot of different reasons, particularly because diversity is crucial for organizational resilience and adaptability), the truth is that it remains a very subjective determination. It depends on your criteria for what constitutes a monoculture. You could say that we live in a monoculture with regard to our expectations for treating everyone in the workplace with a baseline amount of respect. But not everyone agrees where that baseline should be drawn. If you come into an interview and it's immediately clear to me that you're the kind of employee who's going to be disrespectful of your coworkers, and I reject your application accordingly -- well, I'm promoting a sort of company monoculture in that sense.
Then you can walk back from that into varying shades of grey regarding different individual's varying ways of signaling respect, or deemphasis of candor in certain situations, unwillingness to openly address issues, etc, and it gets very messy very quickly. Where is the line between avoiding hiring rude people and discriminating against people from backgrounds or cultures that have patterns of communication that others may perceive as rude? And so on. It requires great care.
This is the sort of ambiguity I'm talking about. To think that this ambiguity doesn't exist, or believe that we can simply wish it out of existence -- that's why I reached for the word "naive" in my original post. I think a lot of engineers are fortunate to work in positions where they don't need to wrestle with this sort of ambiguity in their day-to-day.