It is discrimination. The question is if that discrimination is a bad thing or not.
For instance: you are discriminating against people who don't know javascript if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it.
You are discriminating ... if you are hiring for a job
that requires javascript and don't hire people
who don't know it. Is that a bad thing? I dont' think so.
You might be overlooking good coworkers or employees, especially older ones who have experience in other languages. I knew zero Python or Javascript before I started this job, and now write in it 100% of the time. (My previous job was Lisp + GWT.)
Similarly, I recall an article from Matasano that said that some of their best candiates did not have prior experience with something that one might have expected to be a prerequisite: "Some of the best testers we've worked with didn't have a formal security background." [0].
If you only hire people who "know" $Language, what will you do if six months down the line you decide to rewrite in Clojure, or find that Haskell is the best way to move forward?
>The question is if that discrimination is a bad thing or not.
In colloquial American usage, "discrimination" in the context of hiring and employment refers exclusively to judging people by illegal or inappropriate factors.
>you are discriminating against people who don't know javascript if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it.
This may be an appropriate statement for other English-speaking countries, but in the US, this is a statement that borders on sophistry.
Discrimination is normal and beneficial. We discriminate on skills, we discriminate on location, we discriminate on ability and style of communication, etc.
Our whole team is very relaxed and smiles a lot. We aren't going to hire someone who is cynical, tense, and overly opinionated and has different values than us. That's culture fit. Yes, that is discrimination. But not based on gender, sexual orientation, race, or age.
I mean, it is, but there is all sorts of cultural discrimination which many people find reasonable—if not actively positive. Not hiring somebody because you don't like their bearing, because they said something rude, because they posted something non-politically correct on Facebook, because they belong to some ill-favored political organization, because they don't conform to existing norms for hygine: all this is as much cultural fit as anything else.
On one hand, startups strive very hard to become more diverse workplaces, believing that by having different kinds of people, more and better work will be done. On the other hand, "culture fit" bars exist so that any diversity achieved by such initiatives is entirely superficial.
But what does that actually mean? Too shy? Too loud? Too uncultured? The concept of "cultural fit" is so vague it can easily be used to mask actual discrimination, along with general arbitrary "I don't like the cut of your jib" decisions.
