Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 415 posts

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

#381

Post by vonmoltke »

morgante wrote: post #374
Balgair wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You're right that the actual population of all job applicants over time is equally qualified to the employed developers. However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job…

> However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job.

Actually, you only have the sample of developers you interviewed for the job. How many didn't get an interview? Are you confident that your resume filter is good and that the resumes rejected were actually bad?

> Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50 places before getting a single offer.

Following up my previous point, how many interviews did that yield? The discussion here is over developers who look like idiots in the interview. Confusing that with applications clouds the discussion.

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

#382

Post by sctb »

bitter-pill wrote: post #230
vietdung2910 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Based on my knowledge, India is not in southeast Asia. Source: I'm from southeast Asia.

Indians all want to say they are asian....

This account seems to have been created to post only unsubstantive comments in this thread. Creating accounts is fine, as long as you contribute meaningfully to the discussion.

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

#383

Post by morgante »

vonmoltke wrote: post #381
morgante wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're right that the actual population of all job applicants over time is equally qualified to the employed developers. However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job…

> However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job. Actually, you only have the sample of developers you interviewed for the job. How many didn't get an interview? Are you confident that your resume filter is good and that the resumes rejected were actually bad? > Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50…

> Actually, you only have the sample of developers you interviewed for the job. How many didn't get an interview? Are you confident that your resume filter is good and that the resumes rejected were actually bad?

More specifically, I have the sample of developers who I did a phone screen with.

I'm reasonably confident that my resume filter is "good" in the sense that it's not rejecting people prematurely. If your resume shows any hint that you'd be able to do the job (ie. any amount of programming job experience and/or a CS degree) then I'm willing to give you 15 minutes.

> Following up my previous point, how many interviews did that yield?

A dozen or so. I'm deeply skeptical that the pool of applicants would be better than the pool of interviewees.

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

#384

Post by Devthrowaway81 »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #196
Devthrowaway81 wrote: post #144

I interviewed for Palantir in 2010 for a QA position. They flew me in from East Coast, and took good care of me. I didn't accepted the offer as I went on to accept a SW position in a different company. I didn't felt like I was biased against. I'm not sure about Palantir's bias against Asians, but the tone of comments here are surely negative and partially racist. Let me think, if I really meant "racist". May be it is…

You mention a bunch of random companies .. what is the common thread?

Google 'em or ...

Palantir - racial bias scandal Theranos - technical fraud scandal Snap, Reddit, and Path - sexual harassment scandal

It's difficult to think about working for companies tarnished by scary scandals. There are thousands of jobs in the bay area. If you as an employer can't keep the pristine image. You'll be ignored. Period.

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

#385

Post by vidarh »

morgante wrote: post #275
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…

> basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed FizzBuzz is not some arcane algorithm. You don't need to study it. It's literally writing a loop, testing equality, and printing some output. I don't know how you could program professionally and not be able to solve FizzBuzz.

People should be able to solve FizzBuzz provided it is explained properly and fully.

This is the same for a lot of the basic algorithms we learnt and forgot.

This, to me is the big caveat. Just as there are a lot of people who are horrible at solving stuff they should easily be able to, I've conversely seen so many horrible interviewers that under-specify the problems they ask about because they assume people should understand algorithms that would make it easier to understand, or just assume people will infer things most people wouldn't.

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

#386

Post by lawnchair_larry »

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.…

Are you not aware that most languages provide that for free? Note that the question was about implementing, not using. People use them all the time, but they don't reinvent the wheel to do so when it is in the standard library and has nice abstractions already.

Why is a web developer implementing a DFS by hand every day? I would not hire that person.

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

#387

Post by sriram_sun »

gerby wrote: post #364
sriram_sun wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing Apples and Oranges. The Asian student applicants on whose behalf the DoL filed the lawsuit have to be U.S citizens. If you read the suit itself, there is a lot of wiggle room for Palantir. Here is the threat (paragraph 14 B) "An order permanently enjoining Palantir and its officers, agents, successors, divisions, subsidiaries, and those persons in active concert or participation with them... " Here…

I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these "Asian" candidates are playing the race card, and actually have not so good intentions with Palantir which deals with highly sensitive information. I would be wary, and if I was Palantir, I would bite.

The candidates don't file a complaint with the DoL. DoL already has information on ethnicity. All Govt. contractors are required to collect this information. The applicants of course can refuse to divulge that information I believe.

It is foolish to create one bucket called "asian" and throw in people from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia Philippines in addition to those from China, Japan and Korea. I personally do not think that the students have time to sit around and play the "race card". They've probably moved on to other things.

I've also noticed the lack of diversity in startups that is disproportionately affecting minorities. Software being what it is is usually a trade off between many solutions that actually work in the short term. So it is actually pretty easy to hire friends of friends and so on and if they can get something to work, you'll convince yourself that you've hired the right person for the job.

Friends being friends will easily pass the "culture fit" test.

Anyway I see a lot of direct and veiled comments against interview candidates from Asian countries with reference to their accents etc. I don't think HN should be the place for such comments. Having worked in the Bay Area, I can say that an accent is the last thing on anybody's mind once you've proved competence.

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

#388

Post by danieltillett »

mildbow wrote: post #348
danieltillett wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit. It is obvious to Palantir. They are rightly recognising that talent is much more evenly spread despite attracting a disproportional number of Asian candidates at the top of the funnel. They are trying to fix a broken funnel by discriminating at the end of the process. I don’t think anyone would think the appropriate solution is to just hire 73% pe…

Feels like we are talking past each other :) Of course it's obvious to Palantir: they are the ones doing it. Of course it's not obvious to DOL: they are the ones with the lawsuit. Of course it obvious to anyone that demographics at various level of any funnel wont/cant be translated to the bottom. What's not obvious are the causes in this specific case.

I will agree that we seem to be talking past each other :)

I don't know the cause of the broken funnel, but that does not stop me from being to identify that there is something broken with how Palantir are filling their funnel.

I do think the DOL are looking at the wrong end. What Palantir needs to fix is how they are filling their pipeline so that they capture a much more representative cross section of the talent pool. I am pretty sure Palantir have not deliberately set out to do this, but there is something about their selection criteria, advertising, or outreach that is going wrong to end up with such a skewed funnel.

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

#389

Post by DanielBMarkham »

gaius wrote: post #373
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everybody shows up for a sprint or two and the rest of the team sees how it works out. How do you hire people without 2 weeks vacay to burn on this process?

It's an internal hiring model. There's a different one for externals.

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

#390

Post by dragonwriter »

danieltillett wrote: post #388
mildbow wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like we are talking past each other :) Of course it's obvious to Palantir: they are the ones doing it. Of course it's not obvious to DOL: they are the ones with the lawsuit. Of course it obvious to anyone that demographics at various level of any funnel wont/cant be translated to the bottom. What's not obvious are the causes in this specific case.

I will agree that we seem to be talking past each other :) I don't know the cause of the broken funnel, but that does not stop me from being to identify that there is something broken with how Palantir are filling their funnel. I do think the DOL are looking at the wrong end. What Palantir needs to fix is how they are filling their pipeline so that they capture a much more representative cross section of the talent p…

> I do think the DOL are looking at the wrong end.

Its illegal for Palantir to discriminate in the end DOL is looking at irrespective of whether or not they should be doing something at the other end.

Post reply on HN