Yes, it's a crapshoot. There can be bad hiring decisions. There can be bad business decisions. And people can be jerks or rude. People are passed over promotions. That happens all the time to everyone. But it's problematic when someone sees each event as happening to them as some conspiracy against their race/gender/age/whatever, as opposed to someone just disagreeing with them or dismissing their argument because they think it's a weak argument. And this is made worse because some people view everything through the lense of identity. It is literally the only developed conceptual framework they have. And when you try to explain, no, it was because I thought Y was better, then there must be unconscious bias, that you weren't even aware of.

So fundamentally this debate is about the existence of an objective reality that does not have, at its base, gender or race or other attributes. Most of us who are engineers see a different base and it's pretty condescending to have someone explain to you that you prefer the person who aced the interview to the person who struggled because of some unconscious bias, or that you asked the wrong questions, etc.

When I interview, I have a bank of questions and answers already written out. Each question has a well-defined definition of passing. I decide which question to ask based on the topics that the person lists on their resume. That is, question selection happens from reading the resume, and it happens before the interview. If they say they know javascript, I give them something from the JS pile. If they say they know crypto, I give them something from that pile. I don't want to ambush them with stuff they don't know. The assumption is that if they know the stuff they say they know well, then they can learn what they don't know as needed.

And believe me, there are huge differences in how people do on these questions. For example, in the javascript test, I have some code with vulnerabilities that I ask them to find. I give them the code, explain what it does, explain what I want them to do, and either stay in the room or walk away, depending on what they want. After 20 min, I come back and ask them what they found. A large number of people find nothing. Some find one, but not the biggest one. Some find everything. Some are not able to understand how the code even works. This is for a security role.

If they say they know crypto, then I have a bank of crypto questions. For example, I write down a common authentication and key establishment protocol. Then I ask them what could an attacker do if the last confirmation message was not sent. There are huge differences in outcomes. Some people are confused and have no idea. Others start confidently making stuff up. Others actually identify attacks that would be possible, demonstrating an understanding of cryptographic protocols. None of these differences are based on race, gender, age, etc.

There isn't too much of a middle ground -- most people either succeed or fail. Now, they may have failed because they were having a bad day, or maybe they don't do well at technical interviews, or they might have lied on their resume, but there is an objective reality. This is what people mean when they say the interviews are utilitarian. But I honestly don't think that a large portion of the population is capable of understanding that. They really see everything in terms of identity, so the questions must have been sexist, or I was being unfair to the interviewee.

Now the battle becomes, must everyone else also reject objective reality? Must everyone else throw away the notion of ranking candidates based on their ability to reason abstractly and demonstrate problem solving skills in a live interview, or must we just adopt a notion of "qualification" ? E.g. do we give everyone a job based on their GPA/list of degrees, or is there room for performance based evaluation of individuals? This debate is very important to tech, because there are a lot of incompetent engineers with degrees that really impact a team. There is a big difference in productivity between good engineers and bad engineers. Joel Spolsky is spot on here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

In engineering, actual talent matters, and it matters a lot. This isn't like hiring a bus driver. You don't get promoted for having been there for X years, and you don't get hired based on your credentials. Your idea doesn't get adopted because "it's your turn" to have your way. Individual talent matters, and the fact that we may not always detect it accurately is not evidence of the hiring process not being utilitarian or any kind of identity-based discrimination.