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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#251

Post by thomastjeffery »

wand3r wrote: post #31
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…

This is kind of like the argument that communism is great but no one has been able to implement it correctly yet. "Setting targets" having highly paid DEI consultants, and identity based hiring is what DEI is. Lowercase diversity and inclusion are good ideals, which I think is what you are saying. Uppercase DEI are the exact policies we are talking about here.

Where do you think communism has been implemented correctly?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#253

Post by oremolten »

legitster wrote: post #225
bz_bz_bz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.

With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case. The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.

Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#254

Post by jwlake »

AdamN wrote: post #167
s3r3nity wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of the US... I'm old enough to remember when Biden nominated someone with no aviation experience to lead the head of the FAA, and also had corruption charges while acting as head of the LA transit system....AND Democrats were in _favor_ of that lack of experience: "Democrats...spinning his lack…

We would call those qualifications to be a Sr. Principal Engineer or higher even ... not an SVP in charge of 1M+ people. Hegseth is way out of his league.

I love how people think managing 1M people and 100 people are different. In both cases it's all delegation. You can't oversee more than 10 people in any realistic sense.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#255

Post by Manuel_D »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #246
Manuel_D wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have the list of answers Snow told candidates to pick? It'd be simple to cross reference those with the biographical questionnaire weightings?

To my knowledge that was not recorded anywhere. However there are interviews with participants on the call: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG... One of the reasons why I think he was bullshitting was that according to the testimony, he said to answer the question about how many sports you played in high school honestly, but that wast the wrong information because that one of the questions w…

> he said to answer the question about how many sports you played in high school honestly, but that was one of the questions where some answers would give you more points than others.

That's exactly what is alleged: Snow told applicants which answers were worth the most points. This is what Snow himself claimed, too.

And the FAA's internal investigation did have witnesses say that they were instructed on how to respond to the Biographical Assessment:

> One witness said during the call, participants told they were looking at questions on the BA test but did not know what to enter on the test. According to this witness, [redacted] responded with information that should be entered on the BA test.

If the voicemails are recorded anywhere, that will put this question to rest.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#256

Post by insane_dreamer »

AdamN wrote: post #167
s3r3nity wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of the US... I'm old enough to remember when Biden nominated someone with no aviation experience to lead the head of the FAA, and also had corruption charges while acting as head of the LA transit system....AND Democrats were in _favor_ of that lack of experience: "Democrats...spinning his lack…

We would call those qualifications to be a Sr. Principal Engineer or higher even ... not an SVP in charge of 1M+ people. Hegseth is way out of his league.

> SVP in charge of 1M+ people

it's more like CEO in charge of 3M+ people and a $850 billion annual budget (of your money)

not to mention global repercussions

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#257

Post by stackedinserter »

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:…

> left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny

Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#258

Post by adolph »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #209
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the criticism was intended to be constructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#259

Post by dingnuts »

oremolten wrote: post #253
legitster wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case. The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.

Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?

if this question is in good faith, you can read about this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory that answers your question.

It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et al

> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.

- Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#260

Post by gadders »

paulddraper wrote: post #243
gadders wrote: post #179

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name. It should never, ever be about hard quotas. It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

> It should never, ever be about hard quotas. And yet, it is. The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category. A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?

Ish. Yes, if everyone in your company (of a significant size) is the same, then that is a fail.

However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics.

And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?

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