chess players

It would not be of much significance to me. I would be much more interested in the specifics of what he has done in his job and what he might have potential for in the future.

There are many ways to measure intelligence, which is what a high chess rating would show. However, this does not necessarily correlate with job skills. Few jobs are all technical. There are many personal traits that need to be considered as well.

Annoying, the credential is dubiously related but it's one more thing you have to verify anyway to make sure you're not hiring a pathological liar.

See e.g. Google and James Damore who claimed the same but just made it up, if only they'd done due diligence on that guy it would've saved them quite a bit of headache.

How high a rating? If they are at GM+ then they may not need your job or could be away for a fair proportion of the time playing at tournaments.

If you can test their ability it isn't a bad indicator of high pattern matching intelligence, very good memory and having started at an early age. It is a fair indicator of strong visuo-spatial abilities too.

Test them against a few progressively more difficult test positions chosen from CT_Art if you want to separate the wheat from the chaff (other sources of hard chess puzzles with correct answers are available).

We're trying to convince RichD to not claim to be a "high rated chess player" on his resume okay

yeh, people who don't know how to shut up and follow the religion and think they should actually research and answer honestly on such matters of religion is nothing but trouble

He was a problem employee who lied on his resume before all of that, not really worth making a martyr of (though no doubt he thinks himself as such.)

when someone asks questions that doesn't fit the ideology and exposes hypocrisy A quick smear campaign is in order to discourage anyone else from doing such silly things

If nothing else it shows they possess one set of intellectual skills that may or may not help with electronics, and that they put in the work and time to earn that rating. Hopefully that perseverance would transfer to the job.

Far as I can recall nobody at Google liked him enough to hand in their resignation over it, like "This injustice will not stand, either he stays or I go too."

Pretty sure somebody relevant has to actually like and respect you as a person before anyone can run a "smear campaign", yeah? well, maybe Google is just that woke.

I mean, I'd have handed in my resignation over it. But if Google hired me I'd immediately resign anyway so I guess that doesn't count for much.

afair several threatened to and said such silly things like they hadn't been able to work for days because of anger

It tells something when an autist engineer writes a memo and instead of explaining why and how he's wrong they oust him

I'd be more suspicious of someone who had no hobbies at all. If he has an ELO rating in competition I don't see any harm in saying so.

OK. It wasn't clear to me which way around it was.

I assumed he was interviewing an applicant who had made that claim.

I'd say it was a double edged sword - some interviewers in the electronics business might also be highly rated chess players... so he'd better not be bluffing.

A scenario where an autistic engineer tells his superiors "I've noticed there's a lot of employees who probably shouldn't be here in this company. Prove me wrong" and they reply "You're not wrong! You're fired. Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention."

maybe isn't the type of humor an autistic engineer would "get" too good, but a lot of other people would probably find it pretty funny.

Saying you're 6' tall on your online dating profile when you're really only 5'11" and a quarter, or saying you helped sell 20k units last year on a resume when the grand total was actually only 19,487, are the kind of fibs that make the world go 'round.

Lying about credentials, however, is very serious business and I'd never hire anyone who "bluffed" about a credential as straightforward to verify as chess rankings, even though it's "only" chess rankings and not something directly related to the job description doesn't make it any better.

Maybe worse, at least lying about an employment-related credential is in some sense understandable as goal oriented, but what kind of asshole would lie about their chess ranking when it's not even required?

So you have to check to ensure you're not dealing with that kind of asshole, even if you figure it's a small chance you are.

I'd ask him if he thinks the chess skill relates to the job. That would be interesting.

Some chess champs are very weird.

"That must take up a lot of your time?"

What makes you think this would "transfer" in any useful way? Clearly, chess is a hobby for such people, and so, is done out of pleasure seeking. Much more appropriate would be seeing electronics as a hobby on a resume. If you love your work, you are much more likely to be good at it. Enjoying something that is only loosely related is much less likely to indicate an applicant that will do well.

In the article I read, they did explain why they fired him. It directly related to his actions. What more do you expect? Do you think they should engage in a debate?

You can fire someone for not working effectively, or negatively impacting the work environment (which is what was said to be the reason for his dismissal). You are not allowed to fire someone for their personal views. A discussion of the details of what he said would have put the focus on his views, rather than the impact those views had on the workplace.

If he'd stayed on-topic in the realm of vaguely relevant things it might have been OK.

But he didn't, his writings devolved into a cranky rant where it was pretty clear he just didn't like women who work in tech very much; massively overly-generalized claims like “Women don’t get promoted because women don’t seek status like men do” (lol!) and “Women tend to be more neurotic than men", and his own personal theories of the origin of ideological differences between conservatives and the libs (no points for guessing which ideology he figures is superior.)

that is to say he was a crank who likely loves attention more than anything: