Some of the comments here seem to suggest people might be instinctively identifying with Palantir when they talk about their own difficulties in trying to find qualified job applicants. It's without a doubt incredibly hard to find qualified job candidates, and there's a huge number of factors that can go into making any hire/no-hire decision, but for those very reasons these types of lawsuits from the DOL are both hard for them to win and pretty rare, which suggests to me that there's a fair amount of objectively quantifiable evidence pointing towards discrimination. I think, unfortunately, that it's much more common for widespread discrimination to never be addressed in certain companies than for the federal government to overzealously sue corporations on marginal evidence.
I don't think there's any question that Palantir is going to be ultimately ok as a company, however the law suit turns out. Even if the ruling was to wrongly come down against them, they'd pay $___ million, change their hiring processes so they're at least less likely to be sued again, and then move on with their lives as a hugely valuable multi-billion dollar corporation. Discriminatory hiring processes, on the other hand, I think need to be routed out wherever they may occur because systemic injustices ultimately hurt our society as a whole.
This allegation is very serious and I think needs to be taken seriously. When our instinctive reaction to an accusation of discrimination is that it's more than likely overblown or outright false, we're implicitly endorsing the idea that discrimination is both rare and always obvious, neither of which I think are true. I'm not ready to make any judgements about Palantir as a company or its hiring process, but it seems very likely that they (like any company) have blind spots in the way they're hiring that disadvantage some groups, especially if the DOL thinks there's enough evidence to win a court case over it. The great news for Palantir is that even if that's true, it's not an issue that really affects any core component of them as a company and it's 100% fixable with some extra HR spending.
I think the more constructive take-away from a news article like this is to think about what we ourselves do to eliminate bias from our hiring and potentially talk about what works and what doesn't. No one wants or needs us to hire unqualified candidates, but it's undesirable for us to unfairly exclude groups of qualified candidates because of race or any other discriminatory factor, both because of the societal implications and because we end up missing good candidates in a time where good engineers are in incredibly high demand. Like I said, establishing fair hiring practices is a hard problem; it goes a lot further than just trying to "do the right thing" and reaches into a lot of core parts of how we perceive the world. As engineers we constantly try to study and adjust for our imperfect brains' natural tendencies so that we can build more useful products and get more done. Why can't we try to fight bias in the same way?