211–220 of 415 posts
Some of the comments here are laughable - "I also had to deal with clueless south asians once so I understand how it is". Seriously?
I don't know what you think is weird....some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did (depending on the truthfulness of allegations, of course).
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DFS == Depth First Search?
Yeah, given an acyclic graph print out each node's value. Passing candidates generally got it in five minutes.
Really surprised that they would see an 85% rate for Asian applicants. Is that normal in SV?
It wouldn't surprise me if the end lesson that comes out of all this is "be very, very careful who you work with to do your recruiting and the effect it has on your applicant pool". If someone (be it a recruiter or just employees hoping for referral bonuses) pumps your hiring pipeline full of low-grade resumes but who nonetheless represent a particular ethnic group, and you end up turning them all down or turning them down at a higher-than-normal rate, you could really be increasing your EEO exposure without realizing it.
I think many of the comments are missing a few important points: 1. Yes, 20% Asian hiring rate is pretty decent when you compare to the general Asian population at large. However , the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians. 2. Palantir is involved in government contracting, so…
Government agencies would not take a suit unless it's a slam dunk.
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.
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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?
The same complaint is the basis of sexism in the tech industry. I haven't seen many resumes from women cross my desk. So it's not that I'M being sexist, but clearly there's a problem somewhere. And it could be the way I'm soliciting those resumes in the first place.
No it's not. It's in fact the opposite. Sexism is systemic to the point where you're lucky to have 5% of your applicants be female.
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It's an elementary statistics calculation (which I'm not saying was done right; but that's the direction it was most likely coming from). Left unstated was what P(portion of Asian applications being >= 74%) should be given that, if I'm not mistaken, the percentage of Asian undergraduates (even at upper-tier schools) seems to top out at around 45% (a very rough figure based on quick eyeballing; but I doubt it pushes 6…
I understand that, thanks. The problem of course is that it bears no relation to actual reality. It may be the case that, for a pipefitter, every human body with Pipefitter Certification 409B can do the job identically to his fellow 409Ber. But there are very few jobs like that–trending to zero. Result of this case: lawyers make a few million bucks. Government gets a few million bucks. Palantir has a few million buck…
Some of the comments here are laughable - "I also had to deal with clueless south asians once so I understand how it is". Seriously?
Uh...me too. I don't know what you think is weird....some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did (depending on the truthfulness of allegations, of course).
... which is completely irrelevant to whether Palantir is on the right side of this issue.
If a police department was reported as displaying bias against blacks or muslims, would it be reasonable to respond with "I've had issues with blacks and muslims in law enforcement too"?
Now consider the fact that Palantir does a lot of work for intelligence agencies...
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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 ar…
I think that's a very good point.
However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of society, it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized racism it would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!
I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've never seen data supporting it.
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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?