Tag: inclusion

Recruiting on ability and potential

Let’s not just hire people who look and think and talk (and take exams) like us

This is one of those more open-ended posts, in that I don’t have any good answers, but I’ve got a bunch of questions. I’d love to have feedback, comments and thoughts if you have any.

This week, it turns out is “results week” in the UK. Here, there are two major sets of exams which most students take: GCSEs and A levels. The former generally are taken by 16 year olds, with around 8-12 in total, and the latter by 18 year olds, with 2-4 in total (3 being the strong median). A level results are one of the major criteria for entry into universities, and GCSE results typically determine what A levels students will take, and therefore have an impact on university course choice in the future. In normal years, A level results are release a week before the GCSE results, but (Covid having messed things up), A level results day is Tuesday, 2021-08-10, and GCSE results day is Thursday, 2021-08-12.

Both GCSEs and A levels are determined, in most cases, mainly by examination, with even subjects like PE (Physical Education), Dance and Food Technology having fairly large examination loads. This was not always the case, particularly for GCSEs, which, when they were launched in the mid 1980s, had much larger coursework components than now, aiming to provide opportunities to those who may have learned retained lots of information, but for whom examinations are not a good way of showing their expertise or acquired knowledge base.

At this point, I need to come out with an admission: exams suit me just fine. I’ve always been able to extricate information from my memory in these sorts of situations and put it down on paper, whether that’s in a school setting, university setting or professional setting (I took the CISSP examination ages ago). But this isn’t true for everybody. Exams are very artificial situations, and they just don’t work for many people. The same is true for other types of attempts to extract information out of people, such as classic coding tests. Now, I know that coding tests, when designed and applied well, can do a good job in finding out how people think, as well as what they know – in fact, that should be true for many well-designed examinations – but not only are they not always well administered, but the very context in which they are taken can severely disadvantage folks whose preferred mechanism of coding is more solitary and interactive than performative.

A family friend, currently applying for university places, expressed surprise the other day that some of the Computer Science courses for which he was applying didn’t require any previous experience of programming. I reflected that for some candidates, access to computing resources might be very limited, putting them at a disadvantage. I’ve made a similar argument when discussing how to improve diversity in security (see Is homogeneity bad for security?): we mustn’t make assumptions about people’s potential based on their previous ability to access resources which would allow that ability to be expressed and visible.

What does this have to do with recruitment, particularly? Everything. I’ve been involved in recruiting some folks recently, and the more I think about it, the more complex I realise the task is. Finding the right people – the people who will grow into roles, and become really strong players – is really tricky. I’m not just talking about finding candidates and encouraging them to apply (both difficult tasks in their own rights), but choosing from the candidates that do apply. I don’t want to just people who examine well (looking solely at their academic grades), people who perform well (who shine at coding exercises), people who interview well (those who are confident in face-to-face or video conference settings). I want to find people who have the ability to work in a team, grow the projects they’re working on, contribute creatively to what they’re doing. That may include people who fall apart in exams, who freeze during coding exercises, or whose social anxiety leads them to interview “badly”.

I’m not sure how to address these problems completely, but there are some things we can try. Here are my thoughts, and I’d love to hear more:

  1. Look beyond exams, and rate experience equally with academic attainment
  2. Accommodate different working styles
  3. Be aware that the candidate may not share your preferred interaction style
  4. Think “first language” and work with those whose native language is not yours
  5. Look beyond the neurotypical

None of these is rocket science, and I hope that the recent changes in working habits brought around by the Covid pandemic have already started people thinking about these issues, but let’s work harder to find the right people – not just the people who look and think and talk (and take exams) just like us.

3 vital traits for an open source leader

The world is not all about you.

I’ve written a few articles on how to be do something badly, or how not to do things, as I think they’re a great way of adding a little humour to the process of presenting something. Some examples include:

The last, in particular, was very popular, and ended up causing so much furore on a mailing list that the mailing list had to be deleted. Not my fault, arguably (I wasn’t the one who posted it to the list), but some measure of fame (infamy?) anyway. I considered writing this article in a similar vein, but decided that although humour can work as a great mechanism to get engaged, it can also sometimes confuse the message, or muddy the waters of what I’m trying to say. I don’t want that: this is too important.

I’m writing this in the midst of a continuing storm around the re-appointment to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) of Richard Stallman. We’re also only a couple of years on from Linus Torvalds deciding to make some changes to his leadership style, and apologising for his past behaviour. Beyond noting those events, I’m not going to relate them to any specific points in this article, though I will note that they have both informed parts of it.

The first thing I should say about these tips is that they’re not specific to open source, but are maybe particularly important to it. Open source, though much more “professional” than it used to be, with more people paid to work on it, is still about voluntary involvement. If people don’t like how a project is being run, they can leave, fork it, or the organisation for which they work may decide to withdraw funding (and/or its employees’ time). This is different to most other modes of engagement in projects. Many open source projects also require maintenance, and lots of it: you don’t just finish it, and then hand it over. In order for it to continue to grow, or even to continue to be safe and relevant to use, it needs to keep running, preferably with a core group of long-term contributors and maintainers. This isn’t unique to open source, but it is key to the model.

What all of the above means is that for an open source project to thrive in the long-term, it needs a community. The broader open source world (community in the larger sense) is moving to models of engagement and representation which more closely model broader society, acknowledging the importance of women, neuro-diverse members, older, younger, disabled members and other under-represented groups (in particular some ethnic groups). It has become clear to most, I believe, that individual projects need to embrace this shift if they are to thrive. What, then, does it mean to be a leader in this environment?

1. Empathise

The world is not all about you. The project (however much it’s “your baby”) isn’t all about you. If you want your project to succeed, you need other people, and if you want them to contribute, and to continue to contribute to your project, you need to think about why they might want to do so, and what actions might cause them to stop. When you do something, say something or write something, think not just about how you feel about it, but about how other people may feel about it.

This is hard. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes can be really, really difficult, the more so when you don’t have much in common with them, or feel that your differences (ethnicity, gender, political outlook, sexuality, nationality, etc.) define your relationship more than your commonalities. Remember, however, that you do share something, in fact, the most important thing in this context, which is a desire to work on this project. Ask others for their viewpoints on tricky problems – no, strike that – just ask others for the viewpoints, as often as possible, particularly when you assume that there’s no need to do so. If you can see things at least slightly from other people’s point of view, you can empathise with them, and even the attempt to do so shows that you’re making an effort, and that helps other people make an effort to empathise, too, and you’re already partway to meeting in the middle.

2. Apologise

You will get things wrong. Others will get things wrong. Apologise. Even if you’re not quite sure what you’ve done wrong. Even if you think you’re in the right. If you’ve hurt someone, whether you meant to or not, apologise. This can be even harder than empathising, because once two (or more) parties have entrenched themselves in positions on a particular topic, if they’re upset or angry, then the impulse to empathise will be significantly reduced. If you can empathise, it will become easier to apologise, because you will be able to see others’ points of view. But even if you can’t see their point of view, at least realise that they have another point of view, even if you don’t agree with it, or think it’s rational. Apologising for upsetting someone is only a start, but it’s an important one.

3. Don’t rely on technical brilliance and vision

You may be the acknowledged expert in the field. You may have written the core of the project. It may be that no-one will ever understand what you have done, and its brilliance, quite like you. Your vision may be a guiding star, bringing onlookers from near and far to gaze on your project.

Tough.

That’s not enough. People may come to your project to bask in the glory of your technical brilliance, or to wrap themselves in the vision you have outlined. Some may even stay. But if you can’t empathise, if you can’t apologise when you upset them, those people will represent only a fraction of the possible community that you could have had. The people who stay may be brilliant and visionary, too, but your project is the weaker for not encouraging (not to mention possibly actually discouraging) broader, more inclusive involvement of those who are not like you, in that they don’t value brilliance and genius sufficiently to overlook the deficits in your leadership. It’s not just that you won’t get people who aren’t like you: you will even lose people who are like you, but are unwilling to accept a leadership style which excludes and alienates.

Conclusion

It’s important, I think, to note that the two first points above require active work. Fostering a friendly environment, encouraging involvement, removing barriers: these are all important. They’re also (at least in theory) fairly simple, and don’t require hard choices and emotional investment. Arguably, the third point also requires work, in that, for many, there is an assumption that if your project is technically exciting enough (and, by extension, so is your leadership), then that’s enough: casting away this fallacy can be difficult to do.

Also, I’m aware that there’s something of an irony that I, a white, fairly neuro-typical, educated, middle-aged, Anglo adult male in a long-term heterosexual relationship, is writing about this, because many – too many! – of the leaders in this (as with many other spaces) are very much like me in many of their attributes. And I need to do a better job of following my own advice above. But I can try to model it, and I can shout about how important it is, and I can be an ally to those who want to change, and to those worst affected when that change does not come. I cannot pretend that inertia, a lack of change and a resistance to it, affects me as much as it does others, due to my position of privilege within society (and the communities about which I’ve been writing), but I can (and must) stand up when I can.

There are also times to be quiet and leave space for other voices (despite the fact that even the ability to grant that space is another example of privilege). I invite others to point me at other voices, and if I get enough feedback to do so, I’ll compile an article in the next few weeks designed to point at them from this blog.

In the meantime, one final piece of advice for leaders: be kind.