Some of the comments here are laughable - "I also had to deal with clueless south asians once so I understand how it is".
Seriously?
U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
171–180 of 415 posts
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#172Palantir 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.
Nice catch
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Unless 73% of all people studying engineering are of Asian decent then the top of the funnel is broken. If the greater candidate pool is made up of 73% of people of Asian decent then the education system is broken.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#174Earlier 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…
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Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#175Earlier 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…
We (lefty types) generally want companies, Governments and people to put in effort to expand the "qualified candidate pool" to a point where it generally matches the population, and then put effort into ensuring they're non-discriminatory in hiring.
Governments then create indexes which companies and politicians game because it's cheaper to "positively discriminate" in hiring than to put effort into attracting qualified candidates or fix the broader social issues, and then the population as a whole judges everybody by the index the Government created.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#176Palantir 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…
Both sides of this issue are wrong. On the one hand, If I knew, based on online articles about the interview process, that there is a set of 100 questions out of which I might get asked 20, I'd prep on those 100 questions. It seems like the interviewees are underpreped for interviewing. That's sloppy. Maybe that's a reason not to hire them, but it probably isn't the best way to select hires.
On the other hand this process makes about as much sense as requiring that I know how to shift a non-synchronized manual transmission in order to pass a driving test. Nobody is implementing most of these algorithms from scratch, and if they did it would be a bad practice without having a good reason to do it.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#177Earlier 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.
Governments are not businesses, and should not be run as such. There are a lot of things that a government does that can't be measured as a direct monetary benefit.
I wasn't suggesting monetary ROI; rather, effectiveness at achieving whatever goal is in the department's charter to achieve, by whatever metric that goal is measured: QALYs for the surgeon general, victories for the army, average time-to-destination for the Department of Transportation, etc.
Currently, we seem to just think of the government as a machine that turns dollars into achieved consensus goals at some fixed (very low) efficiency. We never seem to say "what if we measured [metric] out per dollar in, and then tried to make that ratio increase?"
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
DFS == Depth First Search?
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> which they obviously don’t given who they actually hire It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit. > if they did hire 73% Asians they would rightly be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians. Why would they rightly "be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians."? Anyway, what you are suggesting does happen when listing jobs (eg how startup jobs are marketed towards younger…
>It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit.
It is obvious to Palantir. They are rightly recognising that talent is much more evenly spread despite attracting a disproportional number of Asian candidates at the top of the funnel. They are trying to fix a broken funnel by discriminating at the end of the process.
I don’t think anyone would think the appropriate solution is to just hire 73% people of Asian decent because that is what the funnel provided.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#180I don't think the regulators have a case. The applicants failed the phone screens. Apparently U.S. regulators don't think Asians can fail to be qualified or that they are qualified simply for being Asian. They don't define what 'asian' even means, and they are trying to make this a "white" vs "asian" thing. Sounds like a lot of bullshit, maybe they just want to stop doing business with Palantir and need an excuse.