There's an awful lot of "yes but I..." going on in this thread, finishing with people not seeing their own bias, or not giving enough information to prove they don't have bias in their recommendations.
Let me start by inverting something that Uncle Bob has been saying for years: If you have less than 5 years experience, then 50% of the developers out there are 'older' from your perspective. Are half of your recommendations for people over 28?
Let's see how mine would stack up. If I had to recommend 10 people right now:
If I'm honest, about 6 of mine will be for people over the age of 28. That should be 5. So my recommendations are biased against young devs, which I hated when I was 26. If you asked me to be fair I could come up with 1 or 2 more young developers, but unbidden it would probably be 3-4.
2 or 3 would be female. If you only consider recent grads, that's low. But there's a hole in the older generation, so 25% is probably spot on, even though I think it kinda sucks.
2 should be black, hispanic or asian. I hit that number sort of. Because I could recommend 3 Indian developers and one East Asian from recent jobs. I have to my knowledge only ever worked with two black developers, one of whom was good, and also understandably frustrated that he is a statistic. I have seen him exactly once in 10 years.
I would wager that my numbers are better than most of the people who are getting rustled here (if you know your numbers are fine, you're likely not getting drawn into the conversation), but they're still biased. My recommendations don't make things better. They don't make them much worse, but they still tug the needle toward the unfair end of the gauge.
Let me start by inverting something that Uncle Bob has been saying for years: If you have less than 5 years experience, then 50% of the developers out there are 'older' from your perspective. Are half of your recommendations for people over 28?
Let's see how mine would stack up. If I had to recommend 10 people right now:
If I'm honest, about 6 of mine will be for people over the age of 28. That should be 5. So my recommendations are biased against young devs, which I hated when I was 26. If you asked me to be fair I could come up with 1 or 2 more young developers, but unbidden it would probably be 3-4.
2 or 3 would be female. If you only consider recent grads, that's low. But there's a hole in the older generation, so 25% is probably spot on, even though I think it kinda sucks.
2 should be black, hispanic or asian. I hit that number sort of. Because I could recommend 3 Indian developers and one East Asian from recent jobs. I have to my knowledge only ever worked with two black developers, one of whom was good, and also understandably frustrated that he is a statistic. I have seen him exactly once in 10 years.
I would wager that my numbers are better than most of the people who are getting rustled here (if you know your numbers are fine, you're likely not getting drawn into the conversation), but they're still biased. My recommendations don't make things better. They don't make them much worse, but they still tug the needle toward the unfair end of the gauge.