I'm not sure how it is any different than studying for whiteboard interviews. Especially in a time period when educational opportunities were not equal.
If it was "This is the type of interview and type of questions you're likely to come across" - then I've no real issue. As you mention, educational opportunities were not equal, so maybe counteracts the implicit bias of not being provided with general information from tutor/peers/previous-experience - "this being your first IT interview, you should know.." or "how a bunch of white guys tend to do things"
Story is being re-told through the father, son, book and now newspaper article - so who knows.
There's sometimes room for civil disobedience, where you openly stand up to authority and say you can't follow the rules because they're unconscionable.
Secretly breaking the rules because the system isn't fair is like lying because the truth will get you in trouble. It doesn't right any wrong or effect any change; you're just taking advantage of everyone who assumes you're an honest person.
It's a lot different. It's easy to memorize a few answers. It's hard to memorize the entire corpus of material, in ignorance of what might be on the test. Yes, educational opportunities were unequal at the time. No, that does not make this a good way to equalize them.
I don't remember hearing that IBM suffered a huge losses (or any) as a result of this, so could it then be that it wasn't such a big deal?
There's so many variables at play when hiring it's just silly to presume that 100% perfect fairness in tests is of any huge significance to "fairness" of outcome or to maximizing the benefits for a company, especially when compared to the things like racial or other purely personal biases. The idea of "keeping the bar high" is too idealized, as tests and interviews even today just measure how prepared is that person for taking the tests, and not the real world knowledge and abilities. Ultimately what company really cares about is estimating the future performance of that employee, not just the knowledge. People who had to fight hard for a chance to work will often be much better hire and work harder and do more for the company, than someone a little more knowledgeable, but who lacks that kind of drive.
We already know IBM failed to hire qualified black engineers because they were black. This may well have been cases of qualified people working around a corrupt system.
The first black IBM engineer isn't going to want new black hires to be incompetent -- quite the opposite. He likely did his own screening.
I can't tell if you're being sincere or not, but I'll assume the best and respond sincerely.
Let's say you have two candidates, one white and one black. In IBM's case, it was more likely they had hundreds of white candidates and a handful of black candidates.
Now assume your hiring managers or practices are racist, which we know IBM's were (as were most companies' at that point, when it would still be 20 years before racial discrimination became illegal).
Finally, assume that the average scores of the black and white engineers are similar. It shouldn't really matter, because (as we've seen from LSAT scores, Google's HR, and other sources) no test has been developed that's a good measure of future productivity.
In this situation, you're never going to hire the black engineer. Even if you yourself aren't racist, you know you likely have colleagues who are. You see hiring the black engineer as risky.
If the black engineer instead has excellent test scores, you as a non-racist hiring manager get to cover your ass.
Does that make sense? Coaching on tests was a way of counteracting the racism. It had no bearing on whether the candidates were less qualified in this case.
> I don't remember hearing that IBM suffered a huge losses (or any) as a result of this, so could it then be that it wasn't such a big deal?
That is a pretty silly argument that you wouldn't make in any other context. For instance, I also don't recall hearing that IBM suffered huge losses as a result of rampant discrimination. But that doesn't mean that they should do it.
> There's so many variables at play when hiring it's just silly to presume that 100% perfect fairness in tests is of any huge significance to "fairness" of outcome or to maximizing the benefits for a company, especially when compared to the things like racial or other purely personal biases.
I don't recall making that assumption. However, it's clear that any benefit the test may have had in selecting candidates is completely subverted by giving them the answers. And it's certainly not up to this guy to make that decision.
> The idea of "keeping the bar high" is too idealized, as tests and interviews even today just measure how prepared is that person for taking the tests, and not the real world knowledge and abilities. Ultimately what company really cares about is estimating the future performance of that employee, not just the knowledge. People who had to fight hard for a chance to work will often be much better hire and work harder and do more for the company, than someone a little more knowledgeable, but who lacks that kind of drive.
That may well be true. And when you create your own IBM, you can apply whatever candidate selection method you like. Maybe your method will be so good that your company will outperform all the others. However, IBM has their method and it is not the right of some random engineer to subvert that process for their own personal reasons.
Secondly, while it's true that "IQ like" puzzle tests may not be a good method of filtering candidates, it is not the case that knowledge tests have no value. For an engineering job, there is absolutely a minimum knowledge bar you need to pass to be effective. If you can't code FizzBuzz, you probably don't belong in an engineering role, basically anywhere. We don't know which type of test these were. Or at least, I don't.
Telling people what kind of questions are asked, or what topics are important is very different from telling people the specific questions and answers!
