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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#151

Post by ryandrake »

aydyn wrote: post #45
scott_w wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since your response is to call me a liar, I won’t dignify the rest of your comment with a thoughtful reply.

I didnt call you a liar, I am claiming that people are not always truthful to themselves. Purposeful ignorance is an easy out. For example, you made a factually incorrect claim about blind hiring, and its considerably easier to ignore that since addressing it devastates your larger point.

He told you something he personally did/witnessed, and you replied with "not true." I'm not sure how else he should have interpreted that.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#152

Post by some_random »

legitster wrote: post #83

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be…

Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#153

Post by Manuel_D »

malfist wrote: post #134
boohoo123 wrote: post #118

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution. Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.

> Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.

But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#154

Post by Manuel_D »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #150
boohoo123 wrote: post #118

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.

Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#155

Post by healsdata »

boohoo123 wrote: post #118

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

Everything is easy until you account for the real world.

A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the application process will immediately be outed for having a disability. The same applies for people who speak different languages.

Beyond that, the application is only one place in which discrimination occurs.

- It also happens during interviews which are much harder to anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that, while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent capable people from becoming qualified.

Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous resume will fix everything.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#156

Post by ryandrake »

hitekker wrote: post #145
legitster wrote: post #83

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be…

That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts: > The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFA…

I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"

I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#157

Post by drawkward »

gundmc wrote: post #28
spectraldrift wrote: post #5

The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the proces…

It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their race.

But but but I was told that DEI lowered standards

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#158

Post by scott_w »

subpixel wrote: post #114
scott_w wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy opt…

> That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time On the demand side (where placement or acceptance or hiring is contingent upon qualifications) the "actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds" cannot be done equitably. Selective institutions are a reflection of the society from which they draw candidates. As society produces more kinds of qu…

I put together some more concrete examples here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302

None of them are “programs that discriminate against qualified applicants.”

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#159

Post by AdamN »

Manuel_D wrote: post #154
IncreasePosts wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.

Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.

So no colleges and universities on resumes?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#160

Post by drawkward »

gedy wrote: post #67
spectraldrift wrote: post #5

The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the proces…

> This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway It seems like you are mincing words, similar to my previous company that wanted to hire more women. They started attending the women-only hiring convention and we could only interview from those candidates (HR filtered out the rest). So while we hired the best candidates we…

the average engineer is not 10x.
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