Do they mean Asians from Asia or Americans of Asian descent?
The article is unclear, but if the former, given Palantir'a security work with various US government agencies, it might be a factor as others have pointed out.
U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
41–50 of 415 posts
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#42When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro? And who exactly qualifies as an 'Asian' applicant? Does a person born, say, in Israel qualifies as one?
> When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro?
Are Infosys or WiPro government contractors covered by EO 11246? The audit process doesn't apply to most employers, only government contractors.
NOTE: An earlier version of this comment incorrectly referenced EO 12466, because of a transposition in reading from the scanned-but-not-OCRd copy of the lawsuit text.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#43The part that doesn't make sense to me is... what does Palantir have to gain by discriminating? The other way this happens is by cultural biases causing discrimination, but not intentionally with some specific goal in mind. I'm operating only on anecdotes, but in the tech industry, discriminating against Asians at the intern/ground level seems to be a non-issue. Maybe different story when you get to management, and m…
I have no idea, but just a random guess: If you try to sell a lot of secret spying services to the government (which I think Palantir does?), they probably think it helps if your employees don't look/sound Chinese, seeing as the government might be afraid of China's espionage efforts. I also don't know how much trouble they have getting clearance for someone that grew up in China compared to other countries. (again:…
I would speculate that the majority of 'asians' who applied to Palantir were not from China, but rather from the region sometimes called South Asia.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#44Who cares? If the Asians are equally qualified as whites then they are only hurting themselves by excluding them. And they aren't really excluding them. They still hire vastly more Asians than expected by the proportion of general population.
Replace "Asians" with "Blacks" or "Women" in that sentence and see how much support you'll get with that statement.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#45The part that doesn't make sense to me is... what does Palantir have to gain by discriminating? The other way this happens is by cultural biases causing discrimination, but not intentionally with some specific goal in mind. I'm operating only on anecdotes, but in the tech industry, discriminating against Asians at the intern/ground level seems to be a non-issue. Maybe different story when you get to management, and m…
I have no idea, but just a random guess: If you try to sell a lot of secret spying services to the government (which I think Palantir does?), they probably think it helps if your employees don't look/sound Chinese, seeing as the government might be afraid of China's espionage efforts. I also don't know how much trouble they have getting clearance for someone that grew up in China compared to other countries. (again:…
That's what I thought too. I would imagine if something like this were the case, it would be more likely done out of clearance concerns or even a genuine fear of infiltration, than for customer facing optics.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#46Does anyone know how affected applicants are supposed to participate in this lawsuit? That is, the remedies include remuneration for these applicants, but it doesn't look like there's a clear way for people to indicate that they think they were affected by this bias. (Note that this is a government lawsuit, so it's not like a class-action where additional parties "join" the suit or are included in a class. It's just…
> Does anyone know how affected applicants are supposed to participate in this lawsuit? They aren't. > That is, the remedies include remuneration for these applicants, but it doesn't look like there's a clear way for people to indicate that they think they were affected by this bias. Hiring, not remuneration, of some from the "affected class list", is one of the remedies sought. Since the government has through the c…
From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me.
I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants, since this cannot reliably be done by surname or by any other indirect method. And since applicants cannot be required to provide this information in an application, there is no direct method either (other than seeking applicants to identify themselves after the fact).
I am curious about this partly because I am an Asian American who interviewed at Palantir and was turned down for not having enough X skills, when I was never asked any questions pertaining to X.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#47Do they mean Asians from Asia or Americans of Asian descent? The article is unclear, but if the former, given Palantir'a security work with various US government agencies, it might be a factor as others have pointed out.
I'm pretty sure the government auditors whose only job is to do compliance audits of government contractors are more than aware of the relevance of citizenship status to qualification for certain jobs related to certain government contracts.
And, even if they weren't, I'm pretty sure that Palantir could easily have pointed that out in the two rounds of attempted to pre-lawsuit conciliation initiated by the Department of Labor to resolve the identified issues.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#48When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro? And who exactly qualifies as an 'Asian' applicant? Does a person born, say, in Israel qualifies as one?
> When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro? Are Infosys or WiPro government contractors covered by EO 11246? The audit process doesn't apply to most employers, only government contractors. NOTE: An earlier version of this comment incorrectly referenced EO 12466, because of a transposition in reading from the scanned-but-not-OCRd copy of the lawsuit…
So only the projects being done under the govt. contract are being evaluated, or the whole company if at least one such project exists?
Also EO 12466 is an executive order on Reimbursement of Federal employee relocation expenses. I fail to see how is it related to the topic.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#49Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian.
Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in India doing something that could be argued is software development and now doing a master's at a large state university. To be honest I'm not sure how they got in or are able to graduate.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#50Compliance would be a lot fairer and lower-overhead if the government would simply inform businesses of the racial composition they wanted to see, rather than randomly cracking down on firms because particular groups were "only" 4x overrepresented rather than 10x.