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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

#281

Post by sgift »

tominous wrote: post #267
sgift wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a medical student who never did an operation before? Arts are the exception, not the rule. In other areas it is fully understood that the whole purpose of the program is to teach you everything, so actually saying "you have to know this before" would be weird.

Medical students are expected to have a strong science background, and well before they commit to being a surgeon they'll have units where they need to wield a scalpel. If they find out it's not for them there are plenty of other paths which don't involve surgery. Engineering students are expected to have a strong maths background. If you can't do algebra and basic calculus then there's no chance of getting in. It's…

> It's completely reasonable to expect a CS student to have experience programming.

If you say so. I neither see the reason nor the advantage. Don't get me wrong: I had experience in programming before entering a CS program, but I had fellow students who never did any programming before and they did just fine, while others with programming experience failed. And I'm pretty confident that all of them who managed to stay through the introductory year were/are able to do FizzBuzz.

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

#282

Post by kstenerud »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #142
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…

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…

Too bad it didn't stop the bias in my Google interview :/

Passed through all the on-site interview problems and then they silently dropped me. No "we're sorry, you're not a good match." No emails, no phone calls. Nothing.

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

#283

Post by morgante »

thedz wrote: post #53

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…

> However, the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian.

My question is how the government is determining the "qualified applicant pool."

Not everyone with a CS degree is qualified to develop software. In my experience, only a minority of CS graduates are qualified to program.

I'm guessing there is some confounding variable here which predicts both ethnicity and poor qualifications. Perhaps being a master's student looking for a visa sponsor.

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

#284

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> Really it was Protestant, heterosexual white men, and maybe some other parameters applied too, but let's keep this simple.

Really? You don't think Jews had good jobs in 1950?

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

#285

Post by T2_t2 »

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'm not sure how they got in or are able to graduate

I can't speak for elsewhere, as I went to university in Australia, but down here we have a MASSIVE foreign student population as a percentage - International education is currently Australia's third largest export overall - mostly from India and most parts of Asia (kinda our closest neighbours).

My personal, very anecdotal experience is that Indian students were either amazing, or very much not very good. The route seemed to be do ANY degree in India, followed by a (one year?) Masters in IT in Australia. This then legitimised their IT bonafides.

The Indian culture also has a different attitude to cheating - it is seen as much worse to fail than to be caught cheating - and I saw this play out a fair few times, to the point that in one exam 5 Indians had to be physically separated for passing paper back and forth. We also had one girl who said to her lecturer "I don't see why it matters, I'm never going to work. I just need a degree so I can go home and marry a good man".

Now, to answer the quote, the reason this continues is due to the Australian need for the foreign $$$. As a result, very few foreign students are (or is it were?) disciplined for these infractions. Several times it has been a massive scandal down here (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mymaster-essay-cheating-scandal-mo... although it seems common: http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-m...), and many locals worry it devalues their own education.

On the flipside, the very best students in my year were foreign, and often Indian, so this was not a one-size-fits-all situation.

YMMV, but the Australian universities need for foreign student $$$ has lead to MUCH lower standards for foreign students passing than locals, at least in the past.

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

#286

Post by kirab »

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.

Should every node's value be printed out exactly once and if so, are there nodes which have two parents?

If so, I would keep the pointers in a set to mark nodes as processed but is there a more elegant solution?

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

#287

Post by scatters »

probably_wrong wrote: post #266
ap22213 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that first question proves what you think it proves. Learning implementation details about a specific programming language is not what CS is supposed to be about (see the quote about astronomers and telescopes). In fact, if you use several programming languages at the time, I'd go as far as to call it a waste of my time - if I'm worried about overflow for a specific problem, I can get the range of data…

sizeof(double) is not specific to any one programming language or architecture; it's determined by IEEE 754, an international, cross-language, cross-platform standard. Non-IEEE floating-point implementations are exceedingly rare nowadays (although they do exist).

You're right about it being engineering, not computer science, but IMO it's reasonable to expect someone applying to a programming job (assuming this is what it was) to have at least some software engineering experience.

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

#288

Post by vacri »

nolok wrote: post #278
noobermin wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

> 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? Ah! You're in for some surprise down the line. Fizzbuzz almost always clear out large amount of applicants.

We had another applicant just last week with a shiny spiral-bound resume that looked good, but couldn't do FizzBuzz.

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

#289

Post by vacri »

jnordwick wrote: post #212
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.

Sometimes I get these questions in interviews and I really don't know if I should be offended. My resume is pretty good, and I wonder who T.F. applies to these places that they have to have such simple weeder questions. Then I get all paranoid that there is some hidden complication and soon I'm producing FizzBuzz in TensorFlow: http://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

I think you shouldn't be offended at interview questions around skill unless you've been on the other side of the table. It's eye-opening, the range of people that apply for these positions.

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

#290

Post by morgante »

manish_gill wrote: post #261

I'm extremely disappointed by the vitriol and generalisations against Asians in this thread. Marginalising individual candidates because there are trends in the community is the textbook definition of racial profiling. I'm a dev from India. I work hard and always try my best to stay as honest as I possibly can, and I think I'm fairly competent. For the last job offer I received, I had to take around 7 interviews (pho…

Please don't take these comments personally.

I've seen lots of very incompetent Indian applicants. That doesn't mean I won't happily interview another Indian developer because I also know that there are lots of very competent Indian developers. Some of the best coworkers I've ever had were Indian.

Anyone who lazily dismisses you because "Asian people cheat" are themselves incompetent interviewers. In my experience, it's actually incredibly cheap/easy to suss out the competent people with a quick 15-minute phone screen.

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