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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#591

Post by AnthonyMouse »

snailmailstare wrote: post #581
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still going to try to reduce the errors by each party as much as you can. The point is that if they each do the right thing 99.9% of the time, the overlap allows you to prevent a problem 99.9999% of the time. Whereas if you compromise one of them so that it's 80% instead of 99.9%, the chance that something makes it through the net increases by a factor of 200.

It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that? If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained aga…

It's not about a particular pilot, it's about the system as a whole. As long as 99.9% of aircraft don't require any remediation, the air traffic controllers have the bandwidth to catch the few that do. Until you don't have enough air traffic controllers.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#592

Post by AnthonyMouse »

what wrote: post #521
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of failure. Humans are fallible. So, for example, both the pilot and the air traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct…

> If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct. They did. Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.

They did after it was too late, because the crash happened. Unless the crash was intentional (and I'm not aware of any evidence of that), getting the warning sooner could have given the pilot more time to correct.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#593

Post by XCabbage »

th0ma5 wrote: post #536
like_any_other wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

He concedes no such thing. Reserving jobs for members of a "black coalition" that any black person can join is obviously DEI, not cronyism. It's a de facto race-based filter, not one based on favour-trading or past links to the applicant.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#594

Post by XCabbage »

sneedle wrote: post #465
immibis wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

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.

The problem, of course, is that due to "disparate impact" doctrine, this (and colourblind hiring in general) is de facto illegal, and DEI scale-tipping is de facto mandatory (even though it's almost always de jure illegal).

Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.

There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#595

Post by lazide »

XCabbage wrote: post #593
th0ma5 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He concedes no such thing. Reserving jobs for members of a "black coalition" that any black person can join is obviously DEI, not cronyism. It's a de facto race-based filter, not one based on favour-trading or past links to the applicant.

Why not both? Near as I can tell, Cronyism goes hand in hand. Someone has to gatekeep who counts in what bracket, someone has to represent the bracket, etc.

And the beauty is, the more brackets, the more true this is, and the more can be extracted from the system.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#596

Post by lazide »

intended wrote: post #585
WillPostForFood wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It looks like the thing that stopped the slot filling was funding, not a dearth of candidates. We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10. That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants. The Math is missing a third variable.

Having been on the (explicit) receiving side of this - you just don’t fill the other positions until you find the right candidates (where right is whatever criteria you can’t say out loud - though has been said out load often in the last few years).

Alternatively, this is a way for your boss to meet budget targets while not explicitly laying people off, and giving hope to people that help is coming.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#597

Post by vichle »

tstrimple wrote: post #410
vichle wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every forum needs to be an arena for your polarized world views. This used to be a place where all types of scientific and tech related content was posted. Not so much right now, everyone is just throwing shit at each other but with nicer choice of words than on Twitter.

And this forum isn’t specifically made for you. Ignore it and move on. Just like other people do for other subjects they aren’t interested in. The ego to think that things that don’t interest you specifically have no place here while plenty of others are engaging just fine.

Of course it isn't made for me, and I do not expect it to be. The fact that you assume so points to a lack of empathy on your end, something that I think most Americans could really use more of right now.

As another sibling comment previously stated, this forum is mainly for employees of US tech companies. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that this forum could do more to keep the number of polarizing non-tech topics to a minimum - there are plenty of other forums where those discussions can and do happen. It's not like there's a tech twist to the political discussions here anyway, it's just poop flinging like everywhere else.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#598

Post by sethammons »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #271
hitekker wrote: post #196

For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.

Wow, how can anyone take that test and defend FAA hiring practices. This is dystopia level nonsense

Congress stopped it 9 years ago.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#599

Post by snailmailstare »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #591
snailmailstare wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that? If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained aga…

It's not about a particular pilot, it's about the system as a whole. As long as 99.9% of aircraft don't require any remediation, the air traffic controllers have the bandwidth to catch the few that do. Until you don't have enough air traffic controllers.

The pilot is an example consistent with no actions to correct pilots. Double controllers and these pilots can now fly twice as many missions before they kill someone.

Controllers talk like an extra 9 for them is the focus and it is for them, the public acting like their ceremonies are about fixing the majority of the problem is a bold faced lie.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#600

Post by sethammons »

yeahwhatever10 wrote: post #473
dml2135 wrote: post #449

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?

Are people not?
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