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.
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U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
251–260 of 415 posts
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#252When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro? And who exactly qualifies as an 'Asian' applicant? Does a person born, say, in Israel qualifies as one?
Yeah, sounds like a good deal. I will apply to one of these blatant all asian shops that happen to have a government contract and file an EEOC claim. I will get back pay when I am predictably not hired as they have essentially zero non-asian hires. That's assuming US regulators are not totally full of shit. Infosys has IRS, NIH, and UN contracts. WIPro is "is bidding for various government related projects in the US, Europe and Australia." I don't see how they will be able to sue Palantir and not have to sue the fuck out of these racist outsourcers.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#253I'm wondering, how do they define equally qualified? Suppose for instance that a company has an anonymous interviewing procedure (e.g. maths puzzles, supposing it is relevant for the job) that somehow discriminates against a minority, would that be an issue?
One shady tech company gave me an IQ test
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#254I'm wondering, how do they define equally qualified? Suppose for instance that a company has an anonymous interviewing procedure (e.g. maths puzzles, supposing it is relevant for the job) that somehow discriminates against a minority, would that be an issue?
One shady tech company gave me an IQ test
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#255Earlier 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 ?
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all? Recent undergraduate grad here. A lot of the algorithms I've seen on technical interviews were only covered once or twice in the curriculum. Basically, one such algorithm would come up in either the data structures or algorithms class, we would then work on it for the given assign…
> ..assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge
This is bizarre to me. It's like someone signing up for a music degree having never played an instrument. Maybe you'll cram enough to pass a test on the theory, but it's useless knowledge. It's unanchored and will float away.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does anyone know how affected applicants are supposed to participate in this lawsuit? They aren't. > That is, the remedies include remuneration for these applicants, but it doesn't look like there's a clear way for people to indicate that they think they were affected by this bias. Hiring, not remuneration, of some from the "affected class list", is one of the remedies sought. Since the government has through the c…
From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me. I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants, since this cannot reliably be done by surname or by any other indirect method. And since applicants cannot be required to provide this information in an application, there is no direct method either (othe…
Most companies ask race during the initial application process.
Being a government contractor, this 100% happened at some point or would.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all? Recent undergraduate grad here. A lot of the algorithms I've seen on technical interviews were only covered once or twice in the curriculum. Basically, one such algorithm would come up in either the data structures or algorithms class, we would then work on it for the given assign…
If you know even some basic programming and logic, you should be able to come up with a reasonable fizz buzz solution. You don't need to have studies the fizz buzz algorithm in college, or have practiced a solution.
I spent weeks on that algorithm. It is only through daily katas that I still remember its rigors.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#258Earlier 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…
In the last two weeks I interviewed three candidates with masters of science C.S. None of the three knew the memory size in bytes of a double precision floating point variable. None of the three could explain scenarios in which they would use an array over a linked list.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 qualif…
Would love to upvote if you started with "They" because it's exactly what happens.
Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
#260Earlier 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)?
I've written DFS about 1-2 times a year, on average, for the last 15 years. Why do I need to? Usually, because I need to modify or create a data structure that is kind of graph-like but not quite. If someone didn't know how to write one or at least derive it, they would confuse a lot of people, so yeah it's kind of important.