Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

tracingwoodgrains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 724 posts

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#531

Post by [deleted] »

xyzzyz wrote: post #236
legitster wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever given the facts on the facts on the ground. Have you read the article at all? What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to…

[deleted]

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#532

Post by like_any_other »

alcima wrote: post #516
aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evi…

Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.

"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#533

Post by widowlark »

squigz wrote: post #500
widowlark wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more isnt the problem. or its not the first problem. >predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass. Thats not '3% of the applicants are black'. It's '3% of black applicants pass the test' Starting there alone would yield meaningful results - at the end of the day, you gotta pass the test. Changing the test so more people pass is illogical and dangerous.

Okay, but... HOW do you enable more black people to pass the test?

You offer more and better training for everyone. It's not the job of the organization itself to enable their success - just offer a fair test. Others, like the organization mentioned in this article, can and should focus on specific constituent representation. However, the goal of getting more of a specific group into an organization is NOT more important than the safety and efficacy of the organization.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#534

Post by armada651 »

ramblenode wrote: post #262

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…

Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any points.

The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#535

Post by davorak »

lmm wrote: post #496
immibis wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's zero difference between this memo and what is frequently said by people who just don't like black people (because it's too bad optics to say "I just don't like black people").

People who just don't like pakistani people spend a lot of time talking about pakistani child rape gangs. Does that mean we should ignore the pakistani child rape gangs?

What part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

serves the role of "pakistani child rape gangs"? Right now the analogy does not makes sense to me. "pakistani child rape gangs" are reprehensible, nothing that extreme comes to mind when I think of James Damore's memo or similar.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#536

Post by th0ma5 »

like_any_other wrote: post #532
alcima wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.

"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

... You concede that it was cronyism here. Unless you want to expand on what you are saying.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#537

Post by WillPostForFood »

alcima wrote: post #516
aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evi…

Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.

I think might be misreading the article.

It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.

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:

You might be confused by this line:

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

That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#538

Post by WillPostForFood »

lukas099 wrote: post #501
sneedle wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.

Depends if you are able fill the slots, and how quickly.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#539

Post by thot_experiment »

typewithrhythm wrote: post #439
thot_experiment wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are really good points, it's depressing as hell to see the the quality of discussion around this stuff. Obviously DEI is great when it's trying to fix things on the input side. Perhaps I can simplify this argument. If you have a lift heavy things job, which we can agree that women on average are worse at, you shouldn't hire more women by quota, but you could provide free weight training for women. Both things a…

The problem is both are still sexist; where is the money to pay for training coming from? If it's a government initiative then it's taking from all to only give to women. If it's a publicly owned company, then can you actually make a convincing case that it's a benefit to stockholders? Only in the case of a private company does this lack ethical issues, but at that point it's just some billionaires whim.

Yes we actually want to take from everyone and give to disadvantaged people, we should do this as a society because even crudely implemented it is a good first approximation of capturing externalities shareholder value fails to.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#540

Post by davorak »

rayiner wrote: post #427
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…

The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can ack…

> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.

I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.

Post reply on HN