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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

#291

Post by fennecfoxen »

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…

> It's common practice, but that doesn't make it ok.

It's inevitable, and it happens from both ends of the hiring funnel. When I decided it was time to look for a new job, the first thing I did was to look at where people I'd worked with before had ended up. I knew those were places where I would be qualified to work, would be likely to advance my career, and where I would be happy on a daily basis. This is incredibly valuable information for me as I live my life.

(This is in addition the business's gain of being able to save dozens of engineer-hours discarding junk candidates from the hiring process, thousands of dollars in job advertising, and tens of thousands on recruiter fees.)

Asking everyone to destroy this information and waste resources on alternative sources in the service of a more valuable but vague, distant and nebulous goal is... impractical. Pursuing it any regulatory manner would either be a joke or carry a crushing burden on the ability of business to actually conduct business and might very well violate Constitutional protections on the freedom of speech. It would fuel backlash and resentment. It cannot possibly be the best way to do things.

If you want to fix this then we need to find a world where individual self-interest and the pursuit of this goal are at least roughly in alignment with each other. That means making hiring for minorities and the poorly-connected better, rather than making it worse for everyone else - and, from a human perspective, is about making connections between human beings rather than trying to sever them.

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

#292

Post by kirab »

scatters wrote: post #287
probably_wrong wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

Well..

  C and C++ offer a wide variety of arithmetic types.
  Double precision is not required by the standards
  (except by the optional annex F of C99, covering
  IEEE 754 arithmetic), but on most systems, the
  double type corresponds to double precision.
  However, on 32-bit x86 with extended precision
  by default, some compilers may not conform to
  the C standard and/or the arithmetic may suffer
  from double-rounding issues.

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

#293

Post by scatters »

kirab wrote: post #292
scatters wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

Well.. C and C++ offer a wide variety of arithmetic types. Double precision is not required by the standards (except by the optional annex F of C99, covering IEEE 754 arithmetic), but on most systems, the double type corresponds to double precision. However, on 32-bit x86 with extended precision by default, some compilers may not conform to the C standard and/or the arithmetic may suffer from double-rounding issues.

ap22213 (OP for this thread) was more precise than I was; they actually wrote "a double precision floating point variable" rather than writing "double", which could either be a shorthand for "double precision floating point" or be referring to a platform/language type (where that exists by that name).

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

#294

Post by TulliusCicero »

morgante wrote: post #274
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 ?

A lot of people are pushing back on you, but I've seen the exact same thing. I think everyone who hasn't interviewed developers would be surprised by the general incompetence, but everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 1…

> everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible.

No, 80% of people in the 'currently looking for a job developer pool' are terrible. But you have to consider that the worse a candidate is, the longer they stay in that pool. So judging developers as a whole based just on interviews makes them look much worse than they are.

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

#295

Post by vacri »

vietdung2910 wrote: post #192
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.

In the UK, 'asian' tends to refer to people from India or Pakistan. In other primarily-English-speaking countries, it tends to mean people from eastern Asia.

(yes, technically anyone from Asia is Asian, but when someone says 'asian', it doesn't evoke the mental image of a caucasian Russian who lives in Novosibirsk.)

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

#296

Post by morgante »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #294
morgante wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are pushing back on you, but I've seen the exact same thing. I think everyone who hasn't interviewed developers would be surprised by the general incompetence, but everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 1…

> everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. No, 80% of people in the 'currently looking for a job developer pool' are terrible. But you have to consider that the worse a candidate is, the longer they stay in that pool. So judging developers as a whole based just on interviews makes them look much worse than they are.

Good point, that's always an important thing to remember. The average job applicant is much lower quality than the average developer.

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

#297

Post by AtheistOfFail »

nazgob wrote: post #268
sheeshkebab wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^ - 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 lea…

Why do you bundle fizbuzz with some legit algorithms that require some knowledge? Fizzbuzz is a gimmick, deliberately picked as something very simple to filter out clowns. I can't imagine a more simple programming task. Any suggestions? ;)

Simple variable swap?

"Take these two variables, derpyOne and derpyTwo, and swap their values"

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

#298

Post by chopin »

nazgob wrote: post #268
sheeshkebab wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^ - 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 lea…

Why do you bundle fizbuzz with some legit algorithms that require some knowledge? Fizzbuzz is a gimmick, deliberately picked as something very simple to filter out clowns. I can't imagine a more simple programming task. Any suggestions? ;)

Write "Hello World" in your favorite language...

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

#299

Post by lawnchair_larry »

skybrian wrote: post #232
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…

Well, for example, I have an interview question where it's not just about knowing what a stack or a tree is, but rather realizing that a stack or a tree might be useful to solve a particular problem. (You could use either one.) And then writing out code to do it. So, no esoteric data structures, but you really do have to know how to use the standard ones. It tends to trip up people who might have some book knowledge…

It could also be that you only ever have to do this between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world, and many people who could do it just fine if they are given space to think about it or refresh their memory, which usually results in freezing up during a stressful interview. They probably haven't exercised that knowledge because they have been too busy building real things.

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

#300

Post by lawnchair_larry »

ap22213 wrote: post #260
sheeshkebab wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, they'd probably look it up, skim a blog for a few minutes, then figure it out and promptly forget. This is no different than forgetting the order of the arguments to socket() and accusing that person of being incapable of writing networking code.
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