I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but Opportunity Hoarding Hurts Your Tech Organization

I was listening to NPR this morning and there was a guest on who brought up the term ‘opportunity hoarding’ which is what it sounds like: making opportunity available only to the ‘top’ performers (often people who have had privileged access to education, resources, etc). This got me thinking about my experience in the tech industry.

In recent years there’s been a lot of news and academic studies written about the correlation between an organization’s diversity and performance (the more diverse a company is, the more likely they are to perform better). Google it, you’ll find pages of info.

I used to be a recruiter (have since changed my career to engineering at 38 years old). In my former life, I used to vet people in the technology field; helping engineering teams, big and small, at high growth and start-up companies find talent. I often didn’t feel well versed enough in tech speak to be able to effectively vet people fairly. I’d speak and meet with both experienced and inexperienced developers and was able to tell if they were a cultural fit, but my expertise stopped there. Even if I learned what MVC was and why it was used, or other tidbits, my knowledge didn’t go very deep. This is ultimately what led me to becoming a developer, but that’s a story for another day.

With my limited ability to screen past culture, I would pass the interested candidate off to the engineering team and there were always themes with hiring: the candidate would be assessed based on their ‘skills’ and ‘culture fit’. The teams would say that they love objectivity, and that’s why they would choose to have a process that mostly looked like this: (1) have the candidate do a take home tech assessment (2) if 1 goes well, have the candidate interview with members of the tech team and (3) if that went well make an offer.

I can count on one hand over the 10+ years of experience as a tech recruiter how many women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people were hired in engineering roles at the companies I worked for, combined.

Reason being, this process is fundamentally flawed and is mercy to decisions of the people in power (usually privileged men at the hiring decision level). Whether or not these people in power realize it, they are continuing a system that favors the privileged.

1. Take home assessments are not objective, there are already assumptions being made. What if a person who’s applying is a single parent without support, already has a full time job and doesn’t have time to do unpaid work to then be considered for the already dreaded uphill battle of a white boarding interview?
2. White Boarding Interviews (still largely the style of interviews that are used) take engineers completely out of their element and ask them to perform tasks under pressure. It’s like asking a fish to swim out of water. This also assumes the person who is interviewing has had time (read privilege) to prep for algorithm exercises and be able to talk through it at the same time — it’s a lot of prep work.

I have struggled throughout my career with the way privileged decision makers hire: often rejecting diverse candidates based on the candidate ‘not being good enough’ — which really meant the candidate doesn’t handle standardized testing well or doesn’t have the all access pass that privileged folks do.

Yes, hiring technical people isn’t easy, but if you want to be successful, you need a diverse workforce: arguably diversity not just in the color of skin but perhaps age, demographic, income level, and education level (the old CS degree vs bootcamp grad argument).

Hiring diverse workforces means changing the way we hire. I challenge companies to come up with creative ways to make sure your hiring process is inclusive, and to ask yourself some tough questions. Your success ultimately depends on it.