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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

#201

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

The problem is, these idiots eventually get jobs, continue to know nothing, and build a resume of projects. Then they become Project Managers.

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

#203

Post by sheeshkebab »

ng12 wrote: post #181
somedangedname wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DFS == Depth First Search?

Yeah, given an acyclic graph print out each node's value. Passing candidates generally got it in five minutes.

was writing DFS from scratch ever needed to perform dev job or was it a thing that stumped 95% of applicants (and let you read some hacker news/email on your phone/laptop in the mean time)?

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

#204

Post by AnthonyMouse »

hackuser wrote: post #105
Steeeve wrote: post #77

The 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 th…

> Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc.

But they're not just white men. Not even just protestant heterosexual white men. They're white men with rich parents and Ivy League degrees and so on. And when you realize that, you realize that the percentage of CEOs who have rich parents and Ivy League degrees is higher than the percentage of CEOs who are white men. A century ago the graduates of Harvard may have been 100% white men, but the graduates of Harvard are less than 1% of 1% of white men.

The thing you're training your sights on is the scenario where 67% of the candidates are white but >85% of the employees are white. Here's how we got there: The company hired 100 people. First they hired 65 white people who the owners know ("the privileged"). Then they hired 35 more people who all got there on the merits, 67% of whom are white. Company is now 88.45% white.

But let's separate the Now suppose you require the company to balance on race. All the people the owners know are still in. They only made up 65% of the employees, up to 67% can be white, they all get to stay. But now only 2% of the slots are available to 67% of the population, because they were classified as the privileged elite when they weren't.

It isn't a race problem, it's a class and social mobility problem.

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

#205

Post by Kadin »

munchbunny wrote: post #139
hiram112 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are naive. Who would be more likely to be compromised by last year's OPM database hack by the Chinese (supposedly) which contained info on most of the cleared government and contract workers in the US? * A guy of European ancestry from Anywhere, USA who has no family, friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there. * A naturalized US citizen from China whose friends, family, and associates still liv…

Let's say I take your reasoning and run with it. There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there. If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems: 1. You should be…

Companies can decline to hire someone for a position that requires a security clearance if they have reason to believe that it will be difficult or impossible for that person to obtain a clearance. There is a specific exception to nondiscrimination laws for this: Section 703(g).

Section 703(g) exceptions are somewhat tricky from a HR perspective because they can edge into territory that would normally be an EEO violation (I mean, obviously, since it's an exception to the rule) and there's very little precedent on them. AFAIK, there's only one court case around about it, where a guy was not hired for a cleared position on account of having family in Cuba. [1] The decision not to hire him, based on the reasonable belief that he would not be clearable, was considered acceptable. "Example 3" on that page also gets into another common scenario, which is declining to hire someone based on the belief that their clearance process would be long, and the company has an immediate need. (IMO, this is the most common scenario. Someone with a lot of family in China or Russia might well be clearable, but their clearance might be likely to take too long for them to be a viable candidate, particularly at a company that doesn't have non-cleared work for them to do in the meantime.)

[1]: https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/national_security_exemption...

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

#206

Post by ng12 »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #203
ng12 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, given an acyclic graph print out each node's value. Passing candidates generally got it in five minutes.

was writing DFS from scratch ever needed to perform dev job or was it a thing that stumped 95% of applicants (and let you read some hacker news/email on your phone/laptop in the mean time)?

It only stumped the candidates that clearly wouldn't make it through the rest of the problem. One sixth was a probably a high estimate.

DFS for an acyclic graph is about five lines of code and shows me that you A. know a programming language B. can figure out a data structure. I would argue both are needed to perform a dev job.

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

#207

Post by tastythrowaway2 »

simplemath wrote: post #146
Shivetya wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

my guess is it's...

simple math

YYYEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

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

#208

Post by Kadin »

mikeryan wrote: post #28
TallGuyShort wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if ratio hired matched ratio applied, then 73% of those hired would have been Asian and they could be accused of discrimination the other way.

And if ratio hired matched ratio applied, then 73% of those hired would have been Asian and they could be accused of discrimination the other way. If the ratio of those hired matches the ratio of applicants how does anyone make a complaint of discrimination?

> If the ratio of those hired matches the ratio of applicants how does anyone make a complaint of discrimination?

They'd complain that the company wasn't doing enough to attract resumes from underrepresented groups. That's the usual thing, anyway.

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

#209

Post by paulddraper »

kelukelugames wrote: post #190
praneshp wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

LMAO. I'm sorry but that's hilarious. How many years were you there?

I didn't go there, but I thought the same. "Techs" seem to always be private...MIT, Cal Tech, Florida Tech, etc.

(Oh, by the way, Florida Tech definitely fits the aforementioned stereotype.)

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

#210

Post by sheeshkebab »

vidarh wrote: post #188
api wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all ?

The question is if the questions asked are really "FizzBuzz level" questions, or algorithm questions that are easy to consider of similar complexity when you know the expected algorithms. When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester. That's the last time we were tested on…

^^ - this.

same here - almost 20 years of dev, last time I needed to implement basic cs algorithms were in college and grad school classes (and some idiotic corporate interviews where preferred way of coding is apparently using a white board).

basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed - however asking developers actually implement them in front of you is pointless, at least as far as job performance goes.

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