walterclifford

> It's a completely different vibe.

Sure, but everyone shouldn't be expected to have the charisma and salesmanship of Walt Disney.

Same, you have to not only tell gmail it looks safe but also mark it as not phishing (from the three dot dropdown), then it will be in your inbox AND have a link to click.

> don’t recruit anybody without having considered multiple genders and/or ethnicity before making the offer.

There are downsides to this approach as well.

My previous company had such a policy (no offer could be extended until at least one female or under-represented minority had been interviewed) - and we had someone who interned with us twice while in school and he was amazing, everybody on the team thought he was great and wanted to bring him on full-time once he graduated. So as he neared graduation our manager got us an open req and we extended him a (verbal) offer without interviewing him but HR blocked us from extending a formal offer because this exceptional engineer had the misfortune of being born male and Indian. HR told us we could extend an offer to him only after interviewing (on-site) a female or under-represented minority. And so we brought in and interviewed a female applicant wasting five hours of her time and ours as she had virtually zero chance of getting the job.

Generally it also meant female candidates were almost guaranteed to make it to the onsite, regardless of how they performed during the phonescreen because if you tried to pass on a female candidate you'd get pushback from the recruiter and/or manager, because with this policy we needed to interview at least one on-site before extending an offer to anyone.

I do genuinely applaud efforts at increasing diversity in tech, but I don't think policies like this are the right approach. We should probably be looking at other historically male dominated professions that now have gender-parity like medicine and law and emulate what they did to increase diversity (I have no idea what that is/was, but I'm guessing it's not what we're spinning our wheels on, since as far as I can tell we've barely moved the needle despite a very concerted effort).

> each of those questions is about a problem our team actually had to solve before

On my last job search I had one interviewer state (very proudly) the systems design question I was being asked was an actual problem his team had to solve. I don't doubt the veracity of his claim at all, but it probably wasn't solved by a single person under the time constraints and pressure of an interview.

Most likely someone on that team spent hours or days researching and designing potential solutions before drafting a design document that was shared and discussed with others, perhaps informally or perhaps in a meeting (or over the course of multiple meetings) where tradeoffs were considered among people with deep knowledge of the existing system and problem space. Expecting a candidate with only superficial (at best) knowledge of your current system to come up with the same or similar solution on their own in 30 or 40 minutes seems a bit unrealistic to me.

> Most jobseekers would be looking at jobs all over the country, correct?

Inside the HN tech bubble possibly. But outside of that the overwhelming majority of jobs are not in white-collar/remote-friendly work (and people change jobs far more often than they're willing to relocate so moving to a new state, or even city, for each new non-remote job isn't common either).

So no the majority of jobseekers are not looking for work "all over the country" - most are looking for jobs within a reasonable commuting distance of where they live.