Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 415 posts

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

#161

Post by arcanus »

noobermin wrote: post #132
Devthrowaway80 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a similar problem - interviewed dozens of people with exactly that pattern and they were universally clueless. No idea how seemingly-good Masters programs bring in so many people with zero basic CS knowledge.

As someone who might apply once I get my PhD, what does basic CS knowledge mean for you? Like what a tree is or fizzbuzz? Hopefully it isn't that terrible...how someone can make it through any amount of CS related schooling and not know the basics? Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to…

Weird. No one else would want a scheduler to be FIFO, either. Rather, the actual optimization that is performed by slurm, pbs, etc. under the hood is pretty interesting.

The point of schedulers is much more complicated than a straightforward queue, as they seek to project how best to utilize system resources into the future.

Strange he would be so pedantic. Everyone in HPC certainly does call it a queue, as you noted.

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

#162

Post by WhitneyLand »

chaosphere2112 wrote: post #128
Devthrowaway80 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a similar problem - interviewed dozens of people with exactly that pattern and they were universally clueless. No idea how seemingly-good Masters programs bring in so many people with zero basic CS knowledge.

My alma mater has a great undergrad program, but an absolutely awful masters. I've been told that they don't have the resources to teach it, and that the college keeps sending recruiters throughout Asia to pick up as many foreign students as possible for the extra tuition money, though that might have just been a bitter professor.

Sounds like CSU Chico.

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

#163

Post by huac »

danieltillett wrote: post #153
mildbow wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is they are not attracting enough non-Asians at the top of the funnel - something about their criteria is either driving away others, or is too attractive to Asians. Unless you believe that talent is disproportionally concentrated in Asian candidates (which they obviously don’t given who they actually hire), then it is telling you that the funnel is broken. The funny thing is if they did hire 73% Asians t…

Maybe there are more people of Asian descent (including Asian-Americans) studying engineering in America. Maybe Palantir needs to hire engineers for engineering roles. I'll let you fill in the blanks

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

#164

Post by ng12 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #142
throwaway8976 wrote: post #96

Earlier 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…

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 t…

How does personal bias factor in to FizzBuzz? It's literally what I'm hiring you for -- I should be able to describe some process to you, and you should be able to write it out in code. Communication is a huge part of software engineering, and I don't understand why anyone would be expected to hire employees they cannot communicate with.

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

#165

Post by just_saying_it »

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…

Look at the story submissions by the comment author above. May be, there might be a bias here.

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

#166

Post by WhitneyLand »

tomp wrote: post #99
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 agree woth this. I and my friends always wondered how so many Asians get accepted to top UK universities (with very high English-language requirements), when they can barely speak a word of intelligible English. Now I have a close friend from China, and the mistery is solved: others are doing their exams/essays/assignments for them. Keep in mind though, this is likely a huge generalisation (not all Chinese cheat an…

>>this is likely a huge generalisation...

Ya think? Sorry man I wouldn't be profiled as a cheater like that due to race or citizenship.

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

#167

Post by statictype »

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…

A few paragraphs in: "The accusation that Palantir discriminated against Asians is an oddity in Silicon Valley, where big companies including Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. have been criticized for hiring too many white and Asian engineers, and too few blacks and Hispanics."

Your organization is almost certainly not like Palantir so I'm not sure where your sympathy is coming from.

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

#168

Post by ng12 »

noobermin wrote: post #132
Devthrowaway80 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a similar problem - interviewed dozens of people with exactly that pattern and they were universally clueless. No idea how seemingly-good Masters programs bring in so many people with zero basic CS knowledge.

As someone who might apply once I get my PhD, what does basic CS knowledge mean for you? Like what a tree is or fizzbuzz? Hopefully it isn't that terrible...how someone can make it through any amount of CS related schooling and not know the basics? Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to…

Anecdotally, I've learned to expect nothing. I used to ask a graph-based question -- I had to adjust it so that the first step was doing a dead-simple DFS. This tended to weed out a good sixth of candidates and save us both a lot of time. And this was pretty constant against education level and background.

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

#169

Post by Kenji »

You have to stop discrimination from first principles downwards: Identify the discriminating policy or behaviour and stop it. You cannot assess discrimination from the other side, by looking at percentages and then conclude a systemic bias. That is not only unsound statistics, it is fascism.

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

#170

Post by praneshp »

kelukelugames wrote: post #156
praneshp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't know George Tech was a state school? Does that have some special meaning other than public?

No, I did not. I thought it was privately owned (like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, USC, etc).
Post reply on HN