Since much of their work consists of analyzing classified data, they may also be screening out those they decide aren't likely to obtain those clearances. Many defense contractors hire you provisionally (and might put you on a non-classified project) but don't expect to keep that job if you wash out of the background check process. There are plenty of interview questions you could ask to avoid candidates that you know won't make it.
U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
101–110 of 415 posts
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#102Doesn’t this result just tell us that Palantir’s recruitment funnel is broken. If your funnel is attracting 73% Asians then fix the funnel at the top, not the bottom.
Fix the American educational system?
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#103Palantir 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…
I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens (or asked in person at job fai…
Does Palantir make US citizenship a requirement for most of its job positions? My understanding is that this is common place for most US military contractors but I was wondering if this applies to government contractors at large.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn't read the article. They're being sued due to their final hiring being grossly out of step vs the qualified candidate pool. You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population. That assumption is, and continues to be, the problem.
I did read the article. Here is one specific context where they are facing potential penalties because employee racial distribution != candidate pool racial distribution. On the other hand, in a different context, tech companies as a whole are taking a lot of flak because employee racial distribution != population racial distribution. > You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool c…
> You're saying if that candidate pool only had 15% women, we'd want Palantir to hire just 15% women?
Well, yes, that's only fair. Efforts to expand the ratio of women in the qualified candidate pool notwithstanding.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#105The cited example was interns. Who doesn't favor employee referrals for interns? You can be encrusted in diamonds and you're going to get put in the back of the line behind the known quantities and get-in-so-and-so's-good-graces hires for an intern position. There's also the fact that people start to favor/discriminate schools based on history. Had a great intern from Stanford? Hire another Stanford kid. Had a terrib…
It's common practice, but that doesn't make it ok. In fact, afaik, those network-based hiring practices are a major obstacle to social mobility and to ending racial and gender inequality.
Think of it this way: In the U.S. in 1950, white men[0] controlled access to resources like education and jobs, and shared them only with other white men, intentionally discriminating against non-white and non-male applicants. In the past 66 years, network-based hiring practices have extended that systematic discrimination well past its expiration date. White men still dominate those resources, in large part because they network with and therefore hire each other. Who has good schools in their neighborhood? Who got into the good college? Who are their college buddies? Who do their professors and other mentors know? etc.
Isn't time we broke that cycle? Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc.: If we step back from our expectations, conditioned over our lifetimes, those photos are absurd - and represent an enormous waste of talent, self-determination, and achievement.
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[0] Really it was Protestant, heterosexual white men, and maybe some other parameters applied too, but let's keep this simple.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#106I think many of the comments are missing a few important points: 1. Yes, 20% Asian hiring rate is pretty decent when you compare to the general Asian population at large. However , the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians. 2. Palantir is involved in government contracting, so…
> However, the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians.
It's abnormal, sure, but that doesn't imply that the abnormality is Palantir's "fault." It might be that, say, one department of one major University, which happens to have an outsized Asian student population, heavily encourages its grads to apply to Palantir.
As a result, Palantir would see one "general" applicant stream, from all walks of life, but with a self-selection effect filtering for people who are (in their own opinion) good matches for working at Palantir; and then one applicant stream of people who happened to go be in the Maths program at University X and didn't want to say no to some advisor's strong recommendations.
The self-selected stream would be better hires than the "coerced into applying" stream for obvious reasons; and the "coerced into applying" stream would also likely be much larger than the self-selected stream. If the people in the "coerced into applying" stream, then, fit a certain profile, it would appear in the resulting data that people who fit that profile are worse candidates than you'd expect.
Doing a causal factor analysis to the applicant graph, though, would immediately show that the contributing factor of being Asian (or whatever else) is "screened off" by the contributing factor of being an alumni of University X.
Given that Palantir is full of the very people who can do this sort of analysis, though, I fully expect that if this is the case, they'll end up attempting this argument on a judge. Probably with amusing results.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would guess for the second part that the government prohibits it because it could result in unequal opportunities for job seekers based on race. While referrals are more acceptable in non-government-sponsored companies, government-sponsored companies are held to higher standards because that is where taxpayer dollars are directly headed. If the applicant pool was overwhelming black and Palantir hired more white peo…
The general form of this question is: do we care more about government departments in their role as equal-opportunity jobs projects, or do we care more about the government being "effective", doing the most it can with each tax dollar? In this case, I can see how "increased cohesion"—although decreasing the "jobs project" value—would be extremely helpful for increasing tax-dollar ROI.
Tax dollar ROI for whom?
Part of the benefit of ensuring a diversity in government roles is aiding governments to better provide services for all aspects of society, not just the minority who hold those roles.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#108Palantir 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…
> and now doing a master's at a large state university ahh, Georgia Tech
I went to Georgia Tech, and a small subset of Indians there matched the "bachelors in India + work in consultancy" description. I didn't feel anyone there was clueless though. Definitely no fake resume shit.
It is possible that I'm clueless, and cannot identify clueless people.
Thanks to you, TIL that Tech is a state university. Never knew.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens (or asked in person at job fai…
Does Palantir make US citizenship a requirement for most of its job positions? My understanding is that this is common place for most US military contractors but I was wondering if this applies to government contractors at large.
Not for the positions I was interviewing for.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#110Doesn’t this result just tell us that Palantir’s recruitment funnel is broken. If your funnel is attracting 73% Asians then fix the funnel at the top, not the bottom.
It tells us something might be broken. Could be their applicant pool, and/or could be the way implicit biases creep in.
The way you word it, however, says the problem is that they are "attracting 73% of Asians".
If you want to work in the 21st century, get used to working with people who don't have your same exact background.