U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

Post by TulliusCicero » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:10 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #370

morgante wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe. With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should also be similar. This assumes a normal distribution for the metrics that you are hired for, something that may not be in fact true, ie. Poisson or exponential distributions are reasonable. What you can take away from this: Your own developers may not be as…

Post by gaius » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #309

guelo wrote: post #12

Here's the actual government complaint, the allegations are listed in sections 10 and 11, https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... My concerns, 1) why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians? 2) The complaint is concerned about the use of employee referrals. Studies have shown that building t…

Yes. This has all kinds of alarm bells going off. I don't care who you are or what you look like. I don't care how old you are, your gender, sexual preferences, citizenship status, and so forth. I'm certain that having a large mix of these will make my work environment more productive and interesting, but for each candidate I have much more important things to think about. The job is to make technology do stuff for p…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #351

statictype wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did ... 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...

> 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"? But this has no context. What kind of bias, what kind of issues. The example wrt asians has this context.

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #323

microcolonel wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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Post by Chris2048 » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

mikeryan wrote: post #216

TallGuyShort wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same complaint is the basis of sexism in the tech industry 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.