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U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#161

Post by temp246810 »

evgen wrote: post #91
temp246810 wrote: post #86

Question: as an employer what exactly am I supposed to do if when I put a req out for an engineer, >>>>50% of applicants are asian? Is the burden really on me to dig through the remaining applicants for good ones? These laws really sound like people with no skin in the game demanding things for which they don't know all ramifications.

You keep records that show the acceptance rate, you keep records of interviews, etc. You are not hiring at the same level where statistical anomalies such as what Oracle was caught in will show up, so unless you do something egregiously stupid like tell a candidate that you are passing on them because you don't hire people who are then you will be fine. "The game" is not your insignificant little company, it is the g…

No need to be condescending - you have no idea who, for whom, or where I hire. I was simply asking a question.

But I can see how someone who says they work at Facebook in their profile thinks, thinks they are hot shit.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#162

Post by SmokyBourbon »

lucisferre wrote: post #133
freditup wrote: post #123

That means we so far have: * Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0] * Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1] * Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians While it's possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire…

Not saying that I agree with quotas as a solution to problems like discriminatory biases in hiring, but how is a quota system "discriminatory"? What race, sex or age group is discriminated against by a requirement that appropriate proportions of those demographics make up the companies employees? (Heck in most cases quotas are simply a low bar, they are not even proportional to the population demographics.) I can und…

Example: The NBA institutes a rule requiring 50% of players to be non-Hispanic and white. This is well below 62%, the proportion of the population that is non-Hispanic and white. This rule discriminates against every black athlete who would have made the cut but didn't because a less-qualified white player was hired instead.

Discrimination means to select one thing over another because of some criterion. It is precisely the correct word for this. Racial discrimination means selecting one person over another using race as the criterion. Racial discrimination is always immoral and is, thankfully, illegal.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#163

Post by fdsaaf »

nanistheonlyist wrote: post #8

The assumption underlying these "disparate impact" cases is that all races or genders have exactly the same distribution of skills. The problem is every time this assumption is tested it turns out to be false. https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country

The crimethink goes deeper than that. IQ indeed differs by heritage. Why shouldn't other personality traits? What if one group has personality traits that on average lead to greater success getting through the process at a corporate hell like Oracle?

It shouldn't matter. I dream of a day when we look at people and people and not representatives of their identity groups.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#164

Post by FT_intern »

namelezz wrote: post #142
freditup wrote: post #123

That means we so far have: * Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0] * Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1] * Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians While it's possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire…

> Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians You mean Indians not East Asians, right? From the OP: > Oracle was far more likely to hire Asian applicants - particularly Indian people

Classifying East Asians and Indians in the same group is redundant to begin with. The difference in culture, languages, etc. between East Asian and Indian immigrants is much higher than the differences between white (European) and Hispanic immigrants and Americans.

On that point, the entire racial taxonomy, especially when used in the context of "diversity in tech", is elementary and useless. The average black American has more in common with an Asian American than an Asian American and an Asian immigrant or a black American and an African immigrant.

If you want diversity, you have it in the tech world. True diversity (in terms of communication style, beliefs, culture, etc.) is found in the taxonomy of country of origin. The tech world has a high immigrant %.

Ironically, the group of people who are most vocal about "diversity in tech" are less diverse than people in tech since most people who are advocating for "diversity" are American.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#165

Post by monocasa »

frandroid wrote: post #113
crooked-v wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systematic discrimination is not the same as literally having a process to explicitly pay non-white people less.

I thought that was the very definition. Replace "process" with "system"...

There are informal systems.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#166

Post by explainthisth »

_m8fo wrote: post #15

Couple points: First, this is where the meat is: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170118-0 Second: "...Oracle nevertheless preferred Asian applications over other qualified applicants in the Professional Technical 1, Individual Contributor Job group and in the Product Development job group at statistically significant rates." [1] [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... --…

I hope your anonymous interview system can authenticate applicants properly. Because we get cheating attempts in the online screening test we use for hiring. Recently, we got five submissions from recent grads of universities around the country. They were modified trivially (with different indentation and variable names) but clearly drawn from the same work. There is no way of knowing if someone was hired to do the test, and didn't share the results. We have also gotten people in on-site interviews who were not the same as the person in the phone interview.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#167

Post by wallace_f »

freditup wrote: post #123

That means we so far have: * Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0] * Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1] * Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians While it's possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire…

>It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire in exact quotas (which would also be discriminatory really).

There already are off-the-record quotas. Who in management hasn't heard discussion at least eluding the the need for a diversity hire? Probably very few people at this point.

I believe a distinction must be made: Equality of opportunity is good. Equality of outcome will lead us to the world of Harrison Bergeron's.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#168

Post by obstacle1 »

sp332 wrote: post #29
gozur88 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also not believable. The idea Oracle had a system that paid white guys more because they were white guys isn't credible without more than just salary evidence.

"Specifically, OFCCP found gross disparities in pay even after controlling for job title, full-time status, exempt status, global career level, job specialty, estimated prior work experience, and company tenure." https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...

So, controlling for a bunch of stuff that doesn't predict value provided to a company by an individual or an individual's level of skill.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#169

Post by belorn »

lucisferre wrote: post #133
freditup wrote: post #123

That means we so far have: * Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0] * Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1] * Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians While it's possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire…

Not saying that I agree with quotas as a solution to problems like discriminatory biases in hiring, but how is a quota system "discriminatory"? What race, sex or age group is discriminated against by a requirement that appropriate proportions of those demographics make up the companies employees? (Heck in most cases quotas are simply a low bar, they are not even proportional to the population demographics.) I can und…

I can think of many situation outside of employee distributions where quota would be discriminatory and wrong, so maybe a better question is what make hiring process so unique?

To give a few examples where quota would not work, lets talk about lotto winner. Why should winners not be on a quota so that winners are proportional to the population demographics? How is it fair that winner demographics don't match the population in race, gender and location?

Or what about having quota on roads in order to create equal road maintenance based on population. You drive through a unpopulated area and suddenly only one car per hour can drive through.

Or say that the police would use a quota system when deciding which crimes to investigate. Would it be fair to base how many murder investigations should be done by cities proportional population to the country? What about police budgets?

It would be nice if we could talk about what other systems that we want quota on and see what commonality there is between those and what distinguish them from the others.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#170

Post by coredog64 »

rudolf0 wrote: post #53
grepthisab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say anonymous, how do you mean it? As in: the interviewer meets face-to-face without a resume in front of them, or the interviewer has a resume but the interview is done over the phone, or a phone interview with no resume?

Well, for one, you can hide contact info from a resume (which is still stored in a system somewhere, with a unique ID). And you can also make the early stages of your interview email or text-chat based (or just a Google Doc, like some companies do), to eliminate any potential bias in things that can be inferred from voice like accent, region, and gender. Obviously once they're on-site for an interview, you can't anon…

I find it pretty easy to distinguish between people educated in the US and those not educated in the US after a fairly small sample of writing.
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