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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#261

Post by clutchdude »

stackskipton wrote: post #217
legitster wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.

COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though.

I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and don't mention it:

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-0...

> When training at the academy resumed in July 2020, after the four-month shutdown, class sizes were cut in half to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines.

> The pandemic hit controller hiring and training hard with on-the-job training for developmental controllers significantly dropping at facilities, resulting in delayed certification. In fiscal year 2021, the controller hiring target was dropped from 910 to 500.

> Since then, the FAA has been working to restore the training pipeline to full capacity. The agency’s Controller Workforce 2023/2032 Plan had a hiring target of 1,020 in FY 2022 (actual hires were 1,026) and 1,500 in FY 2023. The is set to increase to 1,800 in the current fiscal year.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#262

Post by ramblenode »

The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:

> 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. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#263

Post by armitron »

dingnuts wrote: post #259
oremolten wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disc…

This is not a serious answer. IMO the fairest but not necessarily most accurate characterization for Ibram X. Kendi would be charlatan (others could say he's deliberately inducing racial hatred and stoking division). Additionally, according to recent news Boston University fired him and closed down his "antiracist research" center.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#264

Post by sandworm101 »

baby_souffle wrote: post #127
sandworm101 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.

> Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation. This. Commercial jets have had full auto taxi, take off, fly, land capability for a long time at supported airports. A human is still in the loop for parts of it due to the potential for something to deviate from nominal in a novel way a…

A human is in the loop for all parts. Every essential step is done by humans (flap/gear control, throttle up for takeoff). The airplane doesn't make decisions, rather it does what the humans tell it to. Autopilot is not automation.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#265

Post by sfteus »

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…

My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are:

- Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool

- Don't collect demographic data on applications

- Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee

- The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped

- Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result

- If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting

The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision.

Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#266

Post by bz_bz_bz »

taeric wrote: post #230
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications? The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.…

How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants pass (vs. ~60% previously) not “lowering the bar”?

"One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness) is to correlate test scores with job performance. After reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from .69 to .60..."

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&co...

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#267

Post by adolph »

wand3r wrote: post #3

> I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations. This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I a…

> it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future

"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#268

Post by adolph »

scott_w wrote: post #23
ars wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills. And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".

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…

> 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.

No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one modifies a prior claim in response to a counterexample by asserting the counterexample is excluded by definition. Rather than admitting error or providing evidence to disprove the counterexample, the original claim is changed by using a non-substantive modifier such as "true", "pure", "genuine", "authentic", "real", or other similar terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#270

Post by michaelt »

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…

> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that.

Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way.

Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.

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