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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

#321

Post by morgante »

dqv wrote: post #320
morgante wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

An “Internet Applicant” is an individual who satisfies all four of the following criteria: * The individual submitted an expression of interest in employment through the Internet or related electronic data technologies; * The contractor considered the individual for employment in a particular position; * The individual’s expression of interest indicated that the individual possesses the basic qualifications for the p…

Thanks for linking. Do you know what the specific qualifications were in this case though?

The problem is that you could find literally thousands of developers with a CS degree and 3+ years of experience who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.

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

#322

Post by roganartu »

microcolonel wrote: post #304
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like a lousy excuse to me. As a web developer, my entire job revolves around computing trees; and that is (as of now) the most common development environment in the world. My side projects (graphics demos/toys, a multiprocess text editor, various twilio SMS utilities, a high-performance pastebin server) end up using stacks, trees, hashmaps, and bloom hashes as logical responses to the problem descriptions.…

> As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work? I certainly wouldn't want to work with somebody who is knowledgeable but will wimp out the moment you ask them a tough question on the spot.

I would argue that a workplace that is continuously stressful is not healthy, and optimising your interview process to filter for this is probably not a great idea.

Additionally, I would expect that when asked a "tough question" at work that you would have both the time and resources available to find or determine the answer, things that one likely doesn't have in an interview (and certainly not to the same extent).

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

#323

Post by ivanhoe »

microcolonel wrote: post #304
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like a lousy excuse to me. As a web developer, my entire job revolves around computing trees; and that is (as of now) the most common development environment in the world. My side projects (graphics demos/toys, a multiprocess text editor, various twilio SMS utilities, a high-performance pastebin server) end up using stacks, trees, hashmaps, and bloom hashes as logical responses to the problem descriptions.…

Not sure what do you mean by computing trees in this context, but I personally as a web dev for 15+ years have never-ever had to e.g balance a binary tree or do any other low level operation of that kind. It's important to learn it at some point to be able to understand how it all works, but afterwords you just don't write the low level stuff yourself, ever. If given enough time I'm pretty sure I could come up with some solution for reversing a linked-list, probably even the optimal one, the same way I could probably also figure out how to fix my car when broken... but that doesn't make me a mechanic

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

#324

Post by dqv »

morgante wrote: post #321
dqv wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An “Internet Applicant” is an individual who satisfies all four of the following criteria: * The individual submitted an expression of interest in employment through the Internet or related electronic data technologies; * The contractor considered the individual for employment in a particular position; * The individual’s expression of interest indicated that the individual possesses the basic qualifications for the p…

Thanks for linking. Do you know what the specific qualifications were in this case though? The problem is that you could find literally thousands of developers with a CS degree and 3+ years of experience who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.

>Do you know what the specific qualifications were in this case though?

Here is one of the jobs in question (I think): https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/12db3e3a-33ca-4896-b4a5-c853e...

It's pretty sparse. It looks like a CS degree is not necessary. Granted, those qualifications also seem vague. That could be bad for Palantir, because it could be argued that most of the people applying met the minimum qualifications. Conversely, it could be bad for the OFCCP because it could be argued that the applicants really did NOT meet the minimum qualifications. It's pretty subjective.

If you go to the apply page, the only thing that is absolutely required is a resume, a full name, and an email. Could it be that some people applied thinking that this was all they needed to apply? Maybe Palantir expected everyone to put some kind of proof they had coding experience.

Anecdotally, I knew a Chinese guy who had a big Chinese mailing list to talk with other Chinese people across the country. They really helped each other out - ones with great writing skills would write testimonials for Linked Ins. It could be a case that Palantir was shared in a community like this and it was noted that not very much is required to even apply.

The OFCCP could be exploiting the same facts: Palantir did not define very many minimum qualifications, so it can be assumed that anyone who applied was qualified.

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

#325

Post by pyronik »

hinkley wrote: post #150
sib wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax dollar ROI for taxpayers (since they are the "investors").

Stop that. Stop that shit right now. You are not an investor. You are not a consumer of services. This is not a business, and we don't need a CEO. You're a CITIZEN of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, and don't you dare forget it.

>Stop that. Stop that shit right now.

Why are you trying to shut down debate? It's a good point. I want my tax dollars to be maximized and not used to somehow enforce your idea of racial justice.

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

#326

Post by vonmoltke »

microcolonel wrote: post #304
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like a lousy excuse to me. As a web developer, my entire job revolves around computing trees; and that is (as of now) the most common development environment in the world. My side projects (graphics demos/toys, a multiprocess text editor, various twilio SMS utilities, a high-performance pastebin server) end up using stacks, trees, hashmaps, and bloom hashes as logical responses to the problem descriptions.…

> As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work?

To add to roganartu's very good point about what filtering for that says about your company, you seem to be buying into the pervasive myth that "stress" is some universal and fungible thing. The stress of an interview is not of the same nature as the stress of, say, having a key server go down and take your company down with it. It's a fool's errand to think you can manufacture stressful situations in an interview and get a read on how the candidate would perform in a real situation.

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

#327

Post by vonmoltke »

morgante wrote: post #270
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)?

If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs. I'm sure I wrote a DFS long before I had heard the term. I hate brain teaser interviews as much as the next guy, but being able to do basic operations on basic data structures is pretty much the minimum to be a developer.

> If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs.

In ten years of full-time professional development I have never needed to recursively walk a graph. Hell, the only data structures in the software I worked on for the first six (real-time signal processing code) didn't use any data structures other than lists, arrays, and C structs. I would not be able to answer the interview question that started this subthread, despite my track record of efficient and well-designed code.

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

#328

Post by morgante »

vonmoltke wrote: post #327
morgante wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs. I'm sure I wrote a DFS long before I had heard the term. I hate brain teaser interviews as much as the next guy, but being able to do basic operations on basic data structures is pretty much the minimum to be a developer.

> If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs. In ten years of full-time professional development I have never needed to recursively walk a graph. Hell, the only data structures in the software I worked on for the first six (real-time signal processing code) didn't use any data structures other than lists, arrays, and…

Are you sure? Keep in mind that a graph doesn't always come up and slap you saying that it's a graph.

This very comment thread is a graph which is being printed depth-first.

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

#329

Post by dnautics »

dastbe wrote: post #248
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.

Do you give them a graph data structure or something that is explicitly a tree?

A acyclic graph is isomorphic to a tree, but the way you access the vertices and edges is completely different.

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

#330

Post by arghnoname »

Retric wrote: post #316
skybrian wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had many people with 3-5 years of 'experience' developing not know how to find the smallest element in an array. Initially I was thinking it would be a quick check to see if people thought about null values, but apparently this is a hard problem... Now they might have been useful for something, but I suspect they are just playing the numbers game and showing up to a lot of interviews until they get in. So even…

I think it is interview paralysis. They can't believe an interview answer is ever supposed to be O(n). I've had it happen to me where I get tripped up on relatively easy problems because the initial easy solution I came up with wasn't sufficiently clever and magically log n or some such thing.
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