U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by uhhuhuh » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:36 AM UTC

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…

I also saw this a great deal among Indians and citizens of neighboring countries when I was in grad school. It was a huge problem, so much so that the Dean sent out a letter about it. Without specifying nationalities, but everyone knew who was implicated.

I was friends with some of them who engaged in this. After being straight up asked for help during one exam, I warned them not do it, and that this behavior would get them kicked out of school here, but it didn't matter. Most were very smart and talented, and really didn't need to cheat. But they did anyway. Cultural thing, I guess.

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

#192

Post by vietdung2910 » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

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…

Wait. Based on my knowledge, India is not in southeast Asia. Source: I'm from southeast Asia.

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

#193

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #164

ChuckMcM wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In addition to vidarh's excellent response, FizzBuzz is a great example that personal bias should not interfere. So if you did data analysis of your candidates and everyone you hired could do FizzBuzz and everyone you didn't hire could not do FizzBuzz then you could objectively state that failure to do FizzBuzz disqualified the candidates and it was blind to personal bias or discrimination factors. However if you hire whites who couldn't do FizzBuzz in the interview and you didn't hire asians who could, then you can't really say that "not being able to do fizzbuzz is a disqualifier" because it only disqualified some candidates.

Generally if you are hiring on work product skills (coding for software folks) and can show that your test is unbiased and you hire to the test, then you can avoid being found guilty of discrimination even if you hire a disproportionate number of a certain group. To be rock solid you also need to show that your applicant pool is highly diversified and has representation from all groups. Sometimes that means going out and seeking out candidates (like women or hispanics) who are self selecting to not apply. And why you really do better if you blind the resumes your HR staff sees before they sort them into phone screen and skip piles.

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

#194

Post by cup » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

statictype wrote: post #171

Some of the comments here are laughable - "I also had to deal with clueless south asians once so I understand how it is". Seriously?

The general HN users idea of race, discrimination or anything outside the realms of general whiteness is pretty dire.

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

#195

Post by beambot » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 2:55 AM UTC

Devthrowaway80 wrote: post #85

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 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.

Easy... money. Graduate classes are required to pull in top-tier researchers and grants, but they have relatively-fixed overhead costs for teaching (eg. professor salary). Want to maximize the return on that fixed overhead? Add more students. Many public and private universities are "Masters factories" for budget reasons. They typically filter (strongly!) between completion of MS and entry into PhD programs.

(Identifying such Universities will be left as an exercise to the reader.)

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

#196

Post by tostitos1979 » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

Devthrowaway81 wrote: post #144

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…

You mention a bunch of random companies .. what is the common thread?

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

#197

Post by Kadin » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:14 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #12

Here's the actual government complaint, the allegations are listed in sections 10 and 11, https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... My concerns, 1) why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians? 2) The complaint is concerned about the use of employee referrals. Studies have shown that building t…

> why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians?

This is almost certainly because they're using recruiters, and the recruiters are funneling them candidates who aren't representative of the broader CS-degreed candidate pool.

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

#198

Post by Kadin » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:22 AM UTC

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #45

rb2k_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably a big part of it. They might be very interested in appearing not to be a typical body shop.

The odd thing is that there are fairly straightforward ways to write position descriptions such that the "qualified applicant" pool is as small and well-defined as you want it to be. This is practically a subspecialty within HR. That they are getting sued would seem to imply that they didn't do any of the normal procedural stuff that most companies have their HR departments doing to head off such accusations, meritorious or not.

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

#199

Post by daveFNbuck » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:24 AM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #176

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…

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 pr…

You'd have a good point in your second paragraph if we were talking about implementing a Fibonacci Heap or an AVL tree. But the comment you're responding to is about people failing FizzBuzz.

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

#200

Post by abysmallyideal » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:27 AM UTC

Haha Silicon Valley is notoriously racist. It was started by the US military. Hell, even Stage Jobs went public talking about nuking Koreans like it was pearl harbour and everyone thought that was a swell thing to say.

There's gotta be some other motive here.