U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 3:59 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #281

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this. You have to fix the c…

I was a white kid, and I wanted to be a basketball player much more than a programmer. I just wasn't any good at it.

Choose a 20 year old black man completely at random and pit him against the worst player in the NBA. What result do you expect?

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

#292

Post by sqlplus » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:00 AM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #181

Who in their right mind would want to work for oracle in 2017? That's like fighting for a gig at DEC circa 1997. They're doing candidates a favor by refusing them entrance on the Titanic.

I am a fierce critic of Oracle ( see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13432376 ). But I know many people who in their right mind would want to work for Oracle.

* People who love RDBMS technology. Oracle's Database division is big and has a lot of veteran and very skilled software developers and architects who work with the Database kernel code. New employees can also work on this code. I am sure a lot of people would like to work on the database kernel with skilled and intelligent teams. RDBMS as a domain can be fascinating for developers. It involves everything from compiler design (SQL) to system programming (memory management, locking semantics, concurrency, etc.)

* People who love to work on open source and get paid well. Since Oracle ships its own Linux and since the database is also certified to work on many Linux environments (not just Oracle Linux), Oracle takes the responsibility of patching security problems in the supported open source environments if the upstream does not patch in time. A lot of people like this kind of work where they can work on open source, security and development at the same time and get paid while doing so.

* System programmers. Many developers working on the Oracle Database are involved in system programming.

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

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

#293

Post by meanduck » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:07 AM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #268

ninkendo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region. That is a drastic oversimplification. The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified. Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large. Whi…

Since graduating college I've stayed continuously employeed at several different Bay Area tech startups, so I'm pretty sure I have at least decent technology skills. Yet I've been to several interviews where questions about race/ethnicity were brought up (and I failed to get offers from those companies that ask such questions). I can only imagine what it's like being a woman going for these positions. My point, a lot…

I am sure this has been mentioned to death. But I always find this contradictory. Companies cannot be soley profit driven if at same time they artifically reducing supply of eligable candidates. That makes no business sense.

So if companies are rejecting someone that means as whole (read net), they are expecting more bang for the buck.

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

#294

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:11 AM UTC

bobdole1234 wrote: post #213

zo1 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." People have been trying to hammer that distinction for a long time. For certain people, it just doesn't "stick". They believe there is a boogey man, and by golly they will make sure to get the state to punish any scenario that hints to its existence. If anything, I'd argue t…

I'd argue that most people will only pay lip service to the idea of equality until someone steps in to actually force them to walk their talk. Most of the problems I've seen with diversity hires being "less capable" has been because they've had to work with people who are poor communicators and can't get past the idea that not everyone has the same shared background they do. That means your co-worker from Taiwan does…

> I'd argue that most people will only pay lip service to the idea of equality until someone steps in to actually force them to walk their talk.

Most people don't care about anything. But apathy isn't inequality unless it's applied unequally.

> Most of the problems I've seen with diversity hires being "less capable" has been because they've had to work with people who are poor communicators and can't get past the idea that not everyone has the same shared background they do.

Lack of shared background is a type of being less capable. People use Star Wars metaphors because when everybody gets them, the metaphor is more engaging and takes less explaining than the non-metaphor version.

And you're making this out to be a problem, but it's really only an advantage of cultural assimilation. Hang around coders for a while and you'll decide it's time to see Star Wars. Which you can do even if you're originally from Taiwan.

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

#295

Post by davidgay » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:17 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #272

pps43 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Any telltale signs? I'm assuming it's not the difference between native English speaker and ESL, but specific words or grammar patterns? Can you tell from my comment history whether I was educated in the US?

I spent The "tell" that I'm primarily relying upon is that you often drop articles where a US-native speaker would use them. Just one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13197570 (that was as far back as I went) I think most native US speakers would use "the gun industry" and "the film industry". Several later comments drop an "an" or "a" article as well. You also have a habit of using a comma splice rather…

Dropped articles is a good indicator of (most) Slavic language speakers, but not of most European languages. E.g., French would not have dropped those definite articles either.

Definite article rules do vary a little bit, though, so extra definite articles would be a good indicator of European native speakers...

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

#296

Post by asher_ » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:19 AM UTC

As someone unfamiliar with US law, could someone explain whether it's illegal for companies like Oracle to pay white, male workers more (as stated in the article) or if it's only illegal to pay them more because they are male and white?

The former seems obviously absurd. So, assuming it's the latter, has the government supplied any evidence that this has happened?

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

#297

Post by driverdan » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:20 AM UTC

nomel wrote: post #202

aswanson wrote: post #181

Who in their right mind would want to work for oracle in 2017? That's like fighting for a gig at DEC circa 1997. They're doing candidates a favor by refusing them entrance on the Titanic.

Wow. Maybe someone who needs money for food and shelter? I support several people. If I were laid off, I would need an income within x amount of time before we all became homeless. If I were to approach that limit, I would take whatever job would prevent it. I can safely say you've never been homeless, hungry, or if you have, you had a support structure that loaned you food and a nice warm house. If that's not true,…

If you can get a job at Oracle you can get a job somewhere else. Why would you choose Oracle over the other company?

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

#298

Post by adventured » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:20 AM UTC

flamedoge wrote: post #232

pippy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why merit based evaluation is the only sane hiring practice. I'd love to see legal protection for companies that can provide evidence they strictly adhered to the merit based hires. You can also apply this rationale to your own projects, by including the Code of Merit into your projects[0][1]. [0] https://github.com/rosarior/Code-of-Merit/blob/master/CODE_O... [1] http://code-of-merit.org/

Meritocracy is great. Just when everyone has equal access to education.

Equal access to education can never produce fully equal abilities or equal candidates. Two people are essentially never identical in their capabilities regardless of education. One person will always be 'smarter,' more creative, better at math, have a better memory, write code better/faster/cleaner/etc, whatever-pick-your-thing-here. Most of the world's population could never be capable of being a top 1% programmer, by sheer mental capabilities at birth. Education can never fix the fact that people are not all equally capable of the same things mentally.

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

#299

Post by arachnids » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:22 AM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #181

Who in their right mind would want to work for oracle in 2017? That's like fighting for a gig at DEC circa 1997. They're doing candidates a favor by refusing them entrance on the Titanic.

Recently laid-off people whose continued legal status in the country depended on them finding another job quickly.

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

#300

Post by dlss » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 4:22 AM UTC

tristanz wrote: post #201

dlss wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has actually released a paper on codifying what discrimination looks like for lending ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 + blog post: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/equality-of-opportun... ). It can be trivially extended to discuss hiring. Basically a fair hiring process as defined by the above would be: P(hire | features) = P(hire | race=1, features) = P(hire | race=2, features) This may sound a bit…

Unfortunately this isn't enough. Discriminatory rules such as "don't lend to any zip code that's over 75% black" will pass this test if you include this variable as a feature. The same logic applies to less obvious cases such as purchasing behavior.

While I agree that `P(loan | race=1, black_zip) = P(loan | race=2, black_zip) = 0` does indeed satisfy the condition, I think the kind of discrimination it creates is in some sense out of scope.

This is because if P(loan | black_zip) is profitable > 0, any bank primarily motivated by profit will approve such loans. [this is the statement I believe you meant]

If P(loan | black_zip) isn't profitable > 0 after correcting for race, this would mean is that the neighborhood itself signaled something about the person's likelihood of paying back the loan. Perhaps theft is very common, employment is very sparse or seasonal, vandalism/arson of property is common, etc... because we already corrected for race it amounts to saying "don't approve housing loans for neighborhoods where people regularly burn down houses" or similar. This doesn't seem discriminatory to me.

So while I do agree there are discriminatory issues not addressed by the formalism, your example seems to be handled by using the normal economic models for what decisions a bank should make given a model P(loan).