481–490 of 724 posts
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It turns out you can’t be an ATC unless your worst subject is science. It’s the only question which awards points.
I think you misread something, because that's not true.
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I’ve provided a list of DEI hiring policies that don’t fit into your list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302 I said at the top of my thread that the refusal of people in power to engage with criticisms like this thoughtfully has allowed the far right to toxify these debates and I think the downvotes and responses to my comments are minor, but perfect, examples of my point. Instead of discussing the i…
Blind reviews (and even interviews) are great ways of making hiring more fair. They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches. DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than treating applicants equally irrespective of background. That's the E and I part. The entire premise is that certain groups require special support (fair - e.g.: blind people, wheel chair users), and have been historically excluded because…
It's very hard to find a company that does real "blind" interviews. And by blind, I mean where networking doesn't positively impact your application.
As long as networking boosts your chances of getting hired somewhere, you've got a very wide open door to biases, because networks are almost always biased. I should not be able to give me resume to a friend to ensure the hiring manager gets to see it. Yet I haven't found a company where that behavior is detrimental.
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There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above. If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher sco…
Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we…
1. there is a test that is a decent proxy for job performance
2. the relationship between job performance and test score above some passing score is linear
These both sound "common sense", but I suspect fail for a huge number of real world scenarios.
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Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we…
Assumptions: 1. there is a test that is a decent proxy for job performance 2. the relationship between job performance and test score above some passing score is linear These both sound "common sense", but I suspect fail for a huge number of real world scenarios.
The second assumption is not required. If people who score a 95 are only 5% better at the job than people who score a 70, all else equal you'd still pick the person who scored a 95 given the choice.
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If I deliberately hire whites more than other races nobody would deny that is discrimination. If I deliberately hire more minorities than whites, that is not discrimination?
That depends: Are you underpaying them? The question, "why" matters here a lot. "I tend to prefer minorities because I can underpay and get away with more" is a thing that exists in the real world. See: Immigrant farm workers and H1B visa holders. Is that discrimination against white/majorities or is it a kind of discrimination against minorities? It's injustice, for sure but I point it out because DEI policies, disc…
The law is crystal clear on this:
https://x.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/1752006517761421719?t=v...
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The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership. This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposin…
If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this: Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity. Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the…
This is what always happens to politicians. Their mumbles become coherent. Shyness fades. Vague dithering words transform to bold calls to action. Infirm display vitality.
This is what politicians do. Otherwise they would be school teachers and programmers.
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Honestly, quotas would probably have been better than what was done here. Inventing a test (or 'questionnaire' as it was called here) where the goal was to filter out almost everyone who did not have the answer key, then only giving that answer key to the preferred race is just such a terrible way to do it.
its actually a personality test, that ideally should be designed to be well-suited to filter out personality types that tend to be successful at the job. The scandal was coaching people how to pass the personality test. That's just a waste. You end up getting people who are a bad fit for the job, and will ultimately not be successful long-term For instance, I will ace any aptitude test at 99.9%+ percentile easily (I…
Also, I have a very hard time believing these "correct" answers are representative of the already hired candidates. Worst subject in school was science, worst in college was history, and participated in four or more high school sports, but no correlation on whether they believe it is important to be fast or accurate in their work? Applied to five or six jobs in the last three years? Is bothered "more than most" by criticism from others? [1] I almost find it easier to believe that they were blatantly playing into negative stereotypes of certain minority demographics than that this survey was fit to describe already hired ATCs.
[1] https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
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I don't completely understand it but Republicans manage cognitive dissonance better. Around 1994 I was interested in Trotskyism and Anarchism and wasn't sure if we needed to get the 4th international back in the US or start a 5th international. I believed in this really stupid kind of vanguardism where if you put up the biggest and most radical flag you would get everyone to rally behind it. I reformed because I got…
> manage cognitive dissonance better. what on earth does this mean?
On the other hand leftists are always telling Hispanic people that they have to have solidarity with black people, telling trans people they have to have solidarity with animal rights people (or the animals?), etc. And... crickets. The people never quite tell you that they don't agree with you but they don't really give money, they don't really listen to you, they don't really turn out at your march, they don't really vote for you, etc.
I've been there, done that, and lived it. If you listen to people you make a little more progress than you make by just flying a really big flag. The antipattern is common in articles from Trotskyite papers which you will find collected here:
https://www.wsws.org/en?redirect=true
Often there is some issue that the people involved see as an isolated issue, but the Trotskyite always wants to smack it together like a Katamari Ball [1] with other issues and conclude a socialist revolution is necessary and the answer from most people is [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(Beatles_song)
[3] "But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao: You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow"
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This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?
Because COVID happened much sooner and has likely had a bigger impact than the hiring practices from a decade ago - notice we don't have a concrete number of "disadvantaged qualified candidates" from this article. Whereas, I can point COVID with actual numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952695 If we're going to say "Did that contribute to a shortage of qualified ATC..?" then you have to considering all i…
> the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Looking at [1], the difference between planned and actual hires in 2013–2015 was 1362, much higher than during 2020–2022 when it was just 384 (and this is using the pre-COVID target).
I don't know what happened in 2013–2015, but whatever it was, it seems to have had a 3.5 times bigger impact than COVID.
Well, we do know one thing that happened: this scandal.
[1] https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...
DEI is simply a framework. Like Agile, it can be well implemented if the person implementing it understands the problems it is trying to address, along with its limitations. And just like Agile, it can be poorly implemented when the person implementing it does not understand its purpose, or hates the framework and cynically implements it under protest. In both cases, the poor implementations should not justify throwi…
Are people still using Agile?