Ask HN: Have your physical characteristics impacted your career?
I can only bring a personal anecdote to this discussion.
Me and my friend have finished university at the same time, I consider myself conventionally attractive and with decent technical skills while my friend is quite unattractive (his own words) and at least in my opinion he is ten times the programmer I am.
Despite this however, he has found it very hard to rise up the career ladder, I am not sure if it is due to his physical deficits which also include stuttering when he is excited. I find this very odd because he always shows me his side projects and his algorithmic prowess on different competitive programming websites and I am quite impressed, in my opinion he is maybe a tech lead level of skill at any of the FAANG companies. Red name on codeforces and so on.
We interviewed at the same company a few years back and while I passed the interview with minimal questioning, he had to work twice as hard to get in, multiple rounds of questioning and so on. Now I will soon get a promotion to management and make three times his salary whilst doing maybe 10 times less interesting stuff than he is.
Is physical attractiveness such a big factor in tech work? I thought it would be purely meritocratic but it seems people have biases they cant even imagine having. I have seen this happen a few times in my career however the bias against ugliness is so ingrained there's no possible way of bypassing it. I think the current consensus is that exclusion based on physical characteristics is ethical because it is a very natural behaviour. I don't really believe this but it is what it is.