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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

tracingwoodgrains.com

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#691

Post by sneedle »

theossuary wrote: post #630
caspper69 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not? How non-racist of you (and non-presumptuous) to “eliminate someone’s privilege” based solely on the color of their skin. You do know there are poor and disadvantaged white people too, right? You might even be surprised that they outnumber black people. And shame on you for even thinking you have the right to make such a call, or even entertain such a notion. Talk about privilege.

This is wild. Apparently now being against racism is in fact racist. Glad HN finally figured it out.

[dead]

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#692

Post by worik »

Bad examples of DEI do not invalidate DEI, they invalidate bad implementation of policy

Having a workforce the is purely white men is sub optimal and needs to be addressed. But it needs to be addressed carefully and with good management.

It does not need to be addressed like this

If you want to see a good example of DEI in action look to New Zealand. Forty years ago there were almost no Māori lawyers in New Zealand.

The deans of the law schools got together and decided to do something about it.

It worked, now there are many. Now it is much much harder for the state to accomplish the systematic impoverishment of Māori people and things are turning around

It takes decades done properly, but creates huge improvements in society

This story is a story of doing it catastrophically wrong

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#693

Post by clutchdude »

TraceWoodgrains wrote: post #682
clutchdude wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation. You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers. That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio. Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the imp…

When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading. Yes, academy attrition. I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff…

So are we just going to ignore COVID as an impact on the most recent staffing issues?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#694

Post by apical_dendrite »

adamsb6 wrote: post #428
apical_dendrite wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read it. I've seen all the weightings. My point is that after reading the IG report, I think it's most likely that when he made the following statement he was exaggerating and claiming that he knew the right answers when he didn't: > I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent s…

What do you think the point of such a questionnaire was? Why would you want to filter for applicants who report that their worst high school subject was science and their lowest college grades were in history?

As to why the questionnaire exists - It's the equivalent of something that's very common in the private sector. A company gets thousands of applicants for a job. They only have the resources to interview some small percentage of that. So they develop a very rough filter to narrow down the pool to something manageable. For instance, if it's an entry level job they'll typically just categorically reject anyone who has an advanced degree or more than a few years of work experience because they figure that person will leave for a better job as soon as they can.

That's what the questionnaire was designed to do. The other steps in the hiring process take a lot of time and resources (proctored exam, referrals, medical testing) so they wanted to put a rough filter in front of that to reduce the numbers to something manageable.

As to why they would give a higher weight if you said your worst high school subject was science - that's the part that I think was just an overfit model producing nonsensical results. That kind of statistically-significant-but-nonsensical parameter is exactly what Freedman's Paradox describes.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#695

Post by handoflixue »

lazide wrote: post #674
handoflixue wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cronyism (noun, derogatory): the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications." Cronyism is advancing the interests of your personal connections. Friends and family. If you want an explicit cutoff, the Dunbar Number suggests this group should have 100, maybe 150 people in it. Conversely, there's 40 million black people in the US, and I really doubt an…

Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization? Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism, and is the same problem. In this case, a criteria for joining this ‘fraternity’ is the color of their skin. Hence double applicable with DEI. Why do you keep insisting on ignoring half of what you are pasting?

> Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization?

First, the FAA and the NBCFAE are different organizations.

Second, "Associate" does not mean "employed at the same massive organization". It means someone you actually know, on a personal level. You and I are not "associates" just because we both post on Hacker News.

Third, the question is whether you're associated with the individual, not the organization that they're a part of.

> Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism

If you only hire from Harvard or some other prestigious university is that also cronyism?

Are all internal promotions cronyism?

If you only hire people who live in your city, is that also cronyism? Keep in mind that there's plenty of rural towns that have fewer people than a big fraternity does. Does this change if all th qualified workers in the town are black, so you're only hiring black workers?

You presumably have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise "only hiring US citizens" is also cronyism. Where, exactly, are you suggesting that line should be?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#696

Post by immibis »

lazide wrote: post #689
immibis wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then keep chasing the symptom backwards until you find the root cause. It's standard troubleshooting, not rocket science.

If your problem is who to hire this week, root causing back to someone’s childhood conditions 20 years ago does absolutely fuck all for you.

You're telling me they had this diversity mandate 10 years ago and in the last 10 years all they could think to do was to disqualify white people from hiring and there were absolutely no opportunities to go and encourage people to be air traffic controllers?

Now that's proof that white hiring managers are incompetent! (that's a joke)

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#697

Post by frugalmail »

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…

You're suggesting DEI wasn't the problem then? Using a new colloquial term doesn't suddenly change the foundation of the concern.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#698

Post by frugalmail »

lazide wrote: post #626
polski-g wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using race as a metric in your hiring decisions, for any reason at all, is illegal. You simply cannot do it. Not as a tie breaking point, not a plus factor-- nothing at all. The law is crystal clear on this: https://x.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/1752006517761421719?t=v...

Yet it is impossible to implement Affirmative Action without discriminating based on race. And no one is going to care if some farmer won’t hire white people for his farm.

Affirmative Action is racisim. If you don't believe it, find the FAA people (or college students, law enforcement, numerous other recent cases) that were more qualified and excluded and ask them.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#699

Post by frugalmail »

briandear wrote: post #366
legitster wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce. There's nothing that implies exclusion unless you are intentionally bad faithing the meaning. Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white people! There's a difference between…

That isn’t what happened though. What happened was they intentionally turned down highly qualified white applicants. It wasn’t like they found new “diverse” applicants — they actively didn’t hire people that were qualified and happened to be white. They weren’t being “available” to more applicants, they became outwardly hostile to white applicants. They didn’t grow the pie, they moved the pie. Huge difference.

It wasn't just white, it was minority groups excluded too to make room for other minority groups. I believe a Native American that scored 100% on the entrance exam, with significant experience is one of the major plaintiffs.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#700

Post by frugalmail »

codingrightnow wrote: post #613
avn2109 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..." Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a…

"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment." It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.

It litterally has plaintiffs that weren't hired with 100% scores, and tons of experience. Not only that, sometimes they were minorities, just not the "in" minority. I believe, the second major plaintiff is a Native American.
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