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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#201

Post by ndiddy »

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…

The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#202

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#203

Post by legitster »

SR2Z wrote: post #168
legitster wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology. The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild specula…

> using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation. I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words. This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists. Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disad…

The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#204

Post by legitster »

Manuel_D wrote: post #141
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…

> Taking old, resolved scandals The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#205

Post by scott_w »

dbspin wrote: post #200
scott_w wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your entire argument can be boiled down to: > If it's DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by definition, not part of DEI. The FAA scandal, among other things I've seen, like Matt Walsh's "Am I Racist?" show there's plenty of DEI initiatives that are simply bad, stupid and lazy. As you've seen elsewhere in this topic, I've also highlighted DEI hiring policies that have thought behind them and attempt to improve div…

Here's another way to think of it... Very real substantive criticisms of the whole DEI project and identity politics have been rubbished for years. It was in fact impossible within the liberal left either in the academy or journalism to criticise this stuff without being labelled racist or misogynist. Meanwhile countless people have experienced being excluded from funding, employment opportunities etc. Countless more…

> Very real substantive criticisms of the whole DEI project and identity politics have been rubbished for years.

That's a fair point, I've certainly seen aspects of this. I see similar criticisms coming from the left being thrown at the current Labour government as well as the unhinged people calling Harris "Killer Kamala" and Biden "Genocide Joe" (ironic given what Trump just proposed in Gaza). I don't think the far right has the monopoly on idiots and lunatics.

I should counter, however, that many of the criticisms of DEI were also masked racism/misogyny/ableism. Trump's rhetoric should make that blindingly obvious. We'll now get countless people being discriminated against by a hostile federal government and the people who voted for that also need to take accountability for their vote.

This isn't to excuse the poor engagement from the left (especially whilst in government!), merely to point out the nuance of the debate and why "DEI bad" isn't a useful framing.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#206

Post by BenFranklin100 »

taeric wrote: post #162
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…

Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires. This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal. Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration…

Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#207

Post by gadders »

ryandrake wrote: post #156
hitekker wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyt…

>>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."

I don't think anyone objects to that, but the unspoken part that seemed to be enforced was "...even if it means lowering standards and overlooking the best qualified candidates for the job, as long as we get kudos for meeting our diversity targets."

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#208

Post by flocciput »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #8
scott_w wrote: post #6

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity:…

> It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it. The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by meri…

> there isn't another legal way to do it

The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.

This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in poverty that there is a path to success for them.

The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#209

Post by BenFranklin100 »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #86
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…

From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.

Yes. It was also often career suicide to criticize DEI indicatives.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#210

Post by Manuel_D »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #193
Manuel_D wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating. The answers to the biographical questionnaire - which screened out 90% of applicants - were leaked to ethnic affinity groups. If a select group of being being provided with the correct answers isn't cheating, I don't know what is.

No, that's not what happened. The guy from the black affinity group CLAIMED that he knew the answers. But he's a completely unreliable source who was pretending to know things that he didn't actually know. He also claimed to have a list of magic buzzwords that would get your application moved to the top of the pile, but if you look at the list of magic buzzwords that he provided, it was just a list of dozens of gener…

> As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

> “I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2

> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through.

From the first article on The scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

> After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released, Snow took it a step further. As Fox Business reported (related in Rojas v. FAA), he sent voice-mail messages to NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was "about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question."

You can take the bigraphical questionnaire and see the question weightings here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that this was just "buzzwords".

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