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

131–140 of 415 posts

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

#131

Post by hiram112 »

munchbunny wrote: post #76
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I thought too. I would imagine if something like this were the case, it would be more likely done out of clearance concerns or even a genuine fear of infiltration, than for customer facing optics.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I have trouble believing that one group of US citizens as a whole has more "loyalty" issues than another. Is it a concern about spies? Racially biased hiring practices seems like an overly broad way of trying to address focused espionage. If it's about hiring non-citizens, then I think there's a legitimate procedural issue around employees needing clearance levels, but I'd find it hard to be…

You are naive.

Who would be more likely to be compromised by last year's OPM database hack by the Chinese (supposedly) which contained info on most of the cleared government and contract workers in the US?

* A guy of European ancestry from Anywhere, USA who has no family, friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.

* A naturalized US citizen from China whose friends, family, and associates still live there, and who often travels back for visits.

Even if the naturalized American - Chinese citizen was not corrupted himself, countries like China would not be above threatening his relatives still there.

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

#132

Post by noobermin »

Devthrowaway80 wrote: post #85
ones_and_zeros wrote: post #49

Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…

I have had a similar problem - interviewed dozens of people with exactly that pattern and they were universally clueless. No idea how seemingly-good Masters programs bring in so many people with zero basic CS knowledge.

As someone who might apply once I get my PhD, what does basic CS knowledge mean for you? Like what a tree is or fizzbuzz? Hopefully it isn't that terrible...how someone can make it through any amount of CS related schooling and not know the basics?

Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to-be-minted computer science PhD student who was also an intern. Most of the systems have pbs[1], a batch system that prioritizes jobs from users based by amount of requested time, number of nodes, etc. The seminar leader (and I have before) referred to it loosely as a queue, because it sort of is, and the CS guy kept interrupting the talk (may be two or so times) to point out that PBS really wasn't a "queue" because it didn't respect FIFO in a strict sense... I mean, sure, he did know what a queue was, but I'm pretty sure that isn't the most interesting problem you could have.

[0] there was one fact I found useful, which was where to find their docs online. Other than that, it was the sort of stuff you can find by just reading man pages and such. Waste of time but checked off a box for the internship which made the funders happy, I suppose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Batch_System

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

#133

Post by tn13 »

ones_and_zeros wrote: post #49

Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…

I met Mr. X who earns over $10K in cash each month. Job ? Answer interviews on other people's behalf. The setup is sophisticated. Screens shared, Headphones with two inputs and what not.

Visas are faked, resumes are complete rubbish and it is my suspicion that the hiring managers/committees are bribed directly or indirectly.

I know people with 0 years of experience drawing salary of $110K from a large company by showing fake 8 years of experience.

Sadly all people involved are from my home country India. It really saddens me that we arrive here as economic refugees and destroy the very system that is so welcoming to us.

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

#134

Post by douche »

api wrote: post #100
throwaway8976 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens (or asked in person at job fai…

I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all ?

Computer science programs, even at very prestigious schools, don't really require you to know anything about programming or practicality using computers. The amount of real hands-on work I did for classes in my entire undergrad career is less than I do in a good week at work.

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

#135

Post by cwilkes »

palakchokshi wrote: post #75
Jugurtha wrote: post #69

What is the definition of Asian, here? One has to remember that Middle Eastern countries and Pakistan are in Asia. Given the nature of what Palantir does, it is easy to guess why it would discriminate against a certain category of people who have ties to foreign countries in general, and sensitive countries in particular. It is the same problem intelligence agencies faced when they wanted Arabic/Urdu speakers. Those…

There are well established processes to vet someone who might be handling sensitive information. There are security clearances that can be obtained. The fact that someone is from a foreign country should not be the basis of discriminating against them. Secondly if Palantir works on highly sensitive data it probably requires applicants to be US citizens. So essentially it is probably discriminating against Asian Ameri…

This is for internships ... does Palantir have interns working on highly sensitive data? I don't know but I doubt it.

Then again they might as from what I've read about the company it is more like a glorified ETL shop. Granted upwards of 80% of a data scientist's job can be cleaning data.

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

#136

Post by bcheung »

derefr wrote: post #98
onmatest wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess for the second part that the government prohibits it because it could result in unequal opportunities for job seekers based on race. While referrals are more acceptable in non-government-sponsored companies, government-sponsored companies are held to higher standards because that is where taxpayer dollars are directly headed. If the applicant pool was overwhelming black and Palantir hired more white peo…

The general form of this question is: do we care more about government departments in their role as equal-opportunity jobs projects, or do we care more about the government being "effective", doing the most it can with each tax dollar? In this case, I can see how "increased cohesion"—although decreasing the "jobs project" value—would be extremely helpful for increasing tax-dollar ROI.

In terms of tax dollars, I'm disappointed that I had to pay for this to begin with. It's a waste of money.

I highly doubt Palantir did any kind discrimination based on race.

The initial demographics of the founders and the early team has a large impact on the rest of the hires in my experience at previous startups. Main reason being that the early people are more prone to hire from referrals in their network of people they know.

Some things to consider:

P(qualified | referral) > P(qualified | all applicants)

P(same race | referral) > P(different race | referral)

and thus:

P(hire | referral applicant) > P(hire | all applicants)

I don't see any evidence of malicious or specific racial discrimination.

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

#138

Post by toomanybeersies »

derefr wrote: post #98
onmatest wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess for the second part that the government prohibits it because it could result in unequal opportunities for job seekers based on race. While referrals are more acceptable in non-government-sponsored companies, government-sponsored companies are held to higher standards because that is where taxpayer dollars are directly headed. If the applicant pool was overwhelming black and Palantir hired more white peo…

The general form of this question is: do we care more about government departments in their role as equal-opportunity jobs projects, or do we care more about the government being "effective", doing the most it can with each tax dollar? In this case, I can see how "increased cohesion"—although decreasing the "jobs project" value—would be extremely helpful for increasing tax-dollar ROI.

Governments are not businesses, and should not be run as such.

There are a lot of things that a government does that can't be measured as a direct monetary benefit.

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

#139

Post by munchbunny »

hiram112 wrote: post #131
munchbunny wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I have trouble believing that one group of US citizens as a whole has more "loyalty" issues than another. Is it a concern about spies? Racially biased hiring practices seems like an overly broad way of trying to address focused espionage. If it's about hiring non-citizens, then I think there's a legitimate procedural issue around employees needing clearance levels, but I'd find it hard to be…

You are naive. Who would be more likely to be compromised by last year's OPM database hack by the Chinese (supposedly) which contained info on most of the cleared government and contract workers in the US? * A guy of European ancestry from Anywhere, USA who has no family, friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there. * A naturalized US citizen from China whose friends, family, and associates still liv…

Let's say I take your reasoning and run with it.

There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.

If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems:

1. You should be filtering for foreign connections in general, not for ethnicity. That test already happens in the process of getting security clearance.

2. You can leverage people in plenty of other ways that do not involve threatening friends or relatives. Both the US and China have teams in government agencies that do that for a living.

3. Oh man this is a huge can of worms when it comes to civil rights, equality, and constitutional issues in general.

That makes for a not-very-accurate filter that is ethically suspect that is also not hard to bypass for the seemingly valuable intel underneath. Seems like bad ROI.

Perhaps I really am naive as you say, but on the second order of analysis it seems to me like an ineffective policy if it were actually a policy.

Post reply on HN