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U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#141

Post by madengr »

hiram112 wrote: post #124
Spooky23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's alot of cheating and other shady nonsense. Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.

I worked in India and also went through several CS training programs there. Indians cheat. A lot. It is just a different culture. Students in three different groups would turn in the exact same solution to a coding assignment, and they'd all get the same grade. I was baffled at first, then furious, and finally just learned to laugh about it, while understanding that they were only screwing themselves by not learning…

Witnessed it firsthand in grad school on a few occasions. Instructor momentarily leaves during an exam and the Indians start asking one another the answers, thinking nothing of it. WTF! This was not all of them, there were many straight-up smart ones, but cheating wasn't uncommon.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#142

Post by ChuckMcM »

throwaway8976 wrote: post #96
ones_and_zeros wrote: post #49

Palantir 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…

If that is the case, and the records show that, then the company is probably ok. But you have to show that all of the people you hired could pass FizzBuzz right? Google gave one of the best hiring training lectures I've ever attended on eliminating personal bias from interviewing questions. A lot of it was thinking about the question and the response and putting it in the context of someone you knew, what would you think then? Would you still consider it so highly? Or as such a deficit? They said, although I didn't experience it directly, that they did data analytics on interviewer write ups to identify bias. That could have been to sort of encourage due diligence but given how data driven that company was when I was there I would not put it past them to do exactly that.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#143

Post by munchbunny »

hackuser wrote: post #93
munchbunny wrote: post #27

The 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…

> The part that doesn't make sense to me is... what does Palantir have to gain by discriminating? A very good question: What does any company, or any person, have to gain by discriminating? Yet, many do.

Well, yes, which was why I thought of unintentional "culture fit" bias as the reason, because that's certainly the case in many other situations.

But for a company Palantir's size, I would expect the law of large numbers to push hiring preferences towards being more or less representative of the industry, after controlling for things like security clearances and other domain specific issues.

The missing piece of information to me is whether there really is something wrong with their company culture that would cause hiring preferences to deviate away from "generally average in the aggregate."

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#144

Post by Devthrowaway81 »

I interviewed for Palantir in 2010 for a QA position. They flew me in from East Coast, and took good care of me. I didn't accepted the offer as I went on to accept a SW position in a different company. I didn't felt like I was biased against.

I'm not sure about Palantir's bias against Asians, but the tone of comments here are surely negative and partially racist. Let me think, if I really meant "racist". May be it is the fear of competition, usually shown by below par individuals, or may be just signs of arrogance.

Either ways, I am N.E.V.E.R. going to apply to companies like Palantir, Theranos, Snap, Reddit, Path, etc. Damage is done. Congrats.

p.s. Throwaway account.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#145

Post by simplemath »

sib wrote: post #113
ezzaf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tax dollar ROI for taxpayers (since they are the "investors").

The government isn't a corporation.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#146

Post by simplemath »

Shivetya wrote: post #118
derefr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is less important to politicians than an equivalent of voter ROI. It cost them nothing to turn out an inferior program, project, expenditure, or whatever, provided the political points are accounted for. seen companies at local airport bidding contracts who have minorities who are merely paid to be on the board so they qualify for the contract. want to know one reason the government is so large, intrus…

How do you know why those minority employees were hired?

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#147

Post by [deleted] »

Shivetya wrote: post #118
derefr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is less important to politicians than an equivalent of voter ROI. It cost them nothing to turn out an inferior program, project, expenditure, or whatever, provided the political points are accounted for. seen companies at local airport bidding contracts who have minorities who are merely paid to be on the board so they qualify for the contract. want to know one reason the government is so large, intrus…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#148

Post by bane »

munchbunny wrote: post #27

The 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 don't think it's explicit discrimination. From what I've heard they're very "culture fit" biased in their hiring.

"Culture fit" is a notorious discrimination problem in startup-land, but it often just comes from wanting to hire people who share similar interests and socio-economic factors rather than race -- but it can have the same effect. For example, if somebody started a company that hired people overwhelmingly on their music preference, and that preference was Blue Grass, the employee pool would probably not well represent the racial makeup at large.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#149

Post by stale2002 »

derefr wrote: post #98
onmatest wrote: post #78

Earlier 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.

Erased Essa wrasse w dad ex Zaire Cs

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#150

Post by hinkley »

sib wrote: post #113
ezzaf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tax dollar ROI for taxpayers (since they are the "investors").

Stop that. Stop that shit right now.

You are not an investor. You are not a consumer of services. This is not a business, and we don't need a CEO.

You're a CITIZEN of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, and don't you dare forget it.

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