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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#631

Post by modo_mario »

scott_w wrote: post #238
modo_mario wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants Which involved doingwhat exactly?

In our case, the recruitment team started by only headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that pool, they would headhunt any candidate. Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.

Do the teams you're hiring for know that you're looking to avoid contacting whites, Asians or black people depending on the demographics you're missing until given no other option?

Do you try to get an approximation of society with that selective net you're casting? Of the field? Or is it more according to own preference with something like an equal amount of the subsections you can think of?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#632

Post by nielsbot »

arp242 wrote: post #432
subpixel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time On the demand side (where placement or acceptance or hiring is contingent upon qualifications) the "actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds" cannot be done equitably. Selective institutions are a reflection of the society from which they draw candidates. As society produces more kinds of qu…

> I don't even know what 'outreach' and 'financial support' mean in this context Go to a predominantly black school/neighbourhood and hand out flyers with "hey, we have this great programme you should consider applying for!" Provide financial support for candidates who cannot afford to go through the programme on their own means (which will be disproportionately, though not exclusively, from minority groups). And gen…

Exactly. Needed a slightly more imaginative approach that this bad one they came up with. Would also be nice if this early outreach and assistance could be done on a wider scale, not just for air traffic controllers.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#633

Post by perching_aix »

s3r3nity wrote: post #614
perching_aix wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It’s more of a “yes, and…” comment. Namely, both are relevant, but previously only one side was highlighted.

Neither are "relevant" in my opinion, not yours, not theirs. Both are inflammatory, subjective characterizations from different ends of the horseshoe. These are never productive or insightful, and that's why I brought up "Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes".

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#634

Post by TraceWoodgrains »

clutchdude wrote: post #523
stackskipton wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, COVID didn't help either. However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.

Here ya go: Academy attrition on page 38. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

This is really helpful. I take something different from it than you do (it looks like attrition starkly increases after 2014, in ways I'd strongly argue it's reasonable to attribute to the new hiring methods), but I'm grateful you posted it. Do you know if more complete/precise numbers are available anywhere (hiring counts, hiring+attrition, etc?

I'm aware of this but it leaves attrition to be inferred. https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#635

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

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…

From my perspective, the issue is the activists/most motivated to work in jobs focused on and implement DEI appear to judge the outcome and speed of that outcome as the only important metrics of success in any and all fields. The methods of getting there can't be questioned without being cast a racist or right wing or anti-DEI in these circles so its self-reinforcing, and if you aren't in these circles you aren't listened to either.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#636

Post by tzs »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #336
flocciput wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there isn't another legal way to do it The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it. This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high…

> The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it. Except that that won't actually improve hiring outcomes, if by "improve hiring outcomes" you mean "hire more individuals from historically marginalized groups". You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's tr…

> You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's true. But every prior stage of the process, including the stage where children are too young to enroll in kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem. There is no point at which there are enough "qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse on-the-job performance.

So if we take a random assortment of preschool age children and give them all the the same resources and education we are still going to find when they come out of the other end of the pipeline as adults and ready to work those from historically marginalized groups are still going to be underrepresented unless we lower hiring standards?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#637

Post by sfteus »

Manuel_D wrote: post #460
sfteus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 2…

> These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.

We track these, but don't establish guardrails on that fine grained of data.

In your example, it would be balanced by a likely over-representation in urology by male doctors. But when looking at doctors overall, the demographics tend to balance out, with the understanding that various factors may affect specific practices.

To give you a more solid answer, in our data we see that men are a bit overrepresented in our platform engineering roles, while women are within our data science and ML roles. General backend/frontend roles are fairly balanced. Overall engineering metrics roughly fit out guardrails. We look at the same for management, leadership, sales, and customer support.

I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen. I can also say that of those dozens, I think I've only advanced 2 candidates to the hiring committee. So we seem to err on sending a candidate to interview vs trying to prematurely prune the pool down.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#638

Post by sfteus »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #572
Manuel_D wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 2…

Yea when I have done hiring the vast majority of applicants were of specific races and demographics. It isn’t a private companies’ job to skew hiring outcomes away from the demographics of the incoming pool of qualified applicants. If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa. I think it is damaging when hiring outcomes are skewed as w…

> If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa.

I would disagree for the most part. As mentioned above, there are roles where you'll see gender bias that may not be addressable. In the OB/GYN example, I understand some women would only be comfortable with a doctor that is also a woman. That's not necessarily addressable by shoe-horning in male doctors. But again, that can be accounted for in DEI programs.

It's also more understandable to non-remote jobs. Some areas have staggeringly different demographics that could only really be changed by relocating candidates, which isn't feasible for all business. Mentioning this specifically as my company is fully remote.

Otherwise, in my opinion, a candidate pool that is 95% some demographic shows a severe deficiency in the ability to attract candidates.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#639

Post by handoflixue »

lazide wrote: post #595
XCabbage wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're asking the wrong person there. "Both" concedes that it was "DEI"

But to actually answer the question: while it can absolutely be both, you need to provide proof of the additional claim. "People cheated for DEI reasons" and "People cheated for cronyism reasons" are two separate claims. The article provides plenty of evidence for the former and not much for the latter.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#640

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

electrondood wrote: post #622

It's ridiculous to me that we're back in the world of "politician blames bad thing on wokeness" > "everyone has to spend months discussing this as if it's a sane idea."

It's ridiculous to me that a journalist can provide clear evidence that dei initiatives were used to discriminate against people and you can dismiss it by calling it wokeness.
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