U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
reuters.com
reuters.com
Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in India doing something that could be argued is software development and now doing a master's at a large state university. To be honest I'm not sure how they got in or are able to graduate.
Generally if you are hiring on work product skills (coding for software folks) and can show that your test is unbiased and you hire to the test, then you can avoid being found guilty of discrimination even if you hire a disproportionate number of a certain group. To be rock solid you also need to show that your applicant pool is highly diversified and has representation from all groups. Sometimes that means going out and seeking out candidates (like women or hispanics) who are self selecting to not apply. And why you really do better if you blind the resumes your HR staff sees before they sort them into phone screen and skip piles.
Personal bias also potentially factors into how you describe it (so consider presenting it written, in the same format for everyone). E.g. let's say the interviewer goes into extra detail or ask for confirmation of understanding from candidates they favour.
Passed through all the on-site interview problems and then they silently dropped me. No "we're sorry, you're not a good match." No emails, no phone calls. Nothing.
How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?
When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester.
That's the last time we were tested on a long range of algorithms, except indirectly if we happened to need a given algorithm to complete our work later. In the 22 years since, I've probably needed e.g. a depth first search once, and many of the algorithms I learned I've never touched on since.
So for many, it boils down to whether or not you cared about and liked that course. I happened to love it - I read the set texts the first weekend of the course, and spent a lot of time reading up on algorithms in the years before and after. But for a lot of my class mates it was a course they had to endure to get to more interesting stuff. Many of them would go on to do very well in other subjects.
If they can't figure out a problem like FizzBuzz given a complete description, then that's a deeper problem. But a lot of algorithm questions can sound like they are on that level because we expect people to know a catalogue of algorithms that most developers don't actually need through most of their careers.
For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 15 minutes.
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?
It's through a combination of:
1. Tests being based on memorization, not actual knowledge or programming. If you manage to stuff enough keywords into answers, it's possible to pass.
2. Lots of group work. The 20% of students who actually know how to program finish the project while everyone else slacks off and asks for help "with this one thing."
3. Outright cheating. There's a thriving market in recycled homework and exam answers.
Recent undergraduate grad here. A lot of the algorithms I've seen on technical interviews were only covered once or twice in the curriculum. Basically, one such algorithm would come up in either the data structures or algorithms class, we would then work on it for the given assignment/exam, and finally we would move on from it. Subsequent course work would barely reference it.
These things are best learned through repetition. Unfortunately, with all of the other CS coursework topics that I was being educated on, it seemed like there was little room for the repetition to take place. (At least, not in the stereotypical four year timespan assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge.)
I'm sure that there are many more people who could complete FizzBuzz on a homework assignment, with the help of the Googles, than could do so in an interview. And there are many mid-tier MS programs that are happy to take money from international candidates and give them every opportunity to keep paying.
Absolutely. They may even have washed out at higher numbers. The applicant pool described in the complaint definitely isn't representative of US CS majors nationwide, so you can't use it to draw inferences about the quality of students overall.
On the other hand this process makes about as much sense as requiring that I know how to shift a non-synchronized manual transmission in order to pass a driving test. Nobody is implementing most of these algorithms from scratch, and if they did it would be a bad practice without having a good reason to do it.
Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to-be-minted computer science PhD student who was also an intern. Most of the systems have pbs[1], a batch system that prioritizes jobs from users based by amount of requested time, number of nodes, etc. The seminar leader (and I have before) referred to it loosely as a queue, because it sort of is, and the CS guy kept interrupting the talk (may be two or so times) to point out that PBS really wasn't a "queue" because it didn't respect FIFO in a strict sense... I mean, sure, he did know what a queue was, but I'm pretty sure that isn't the most interesting problem you could have.
[0] there was one fact I found useful, which was where to find their docs online. Other than that, it was the sort of stuff you can find by just reading man pages and such. Waste of time but checked off a box for the internship which made the funders happy, I suppose.
So, no esoteric data structures, but you really do have to know how to use the standard ones. It tends to trip up people who might have some book knowledge of CS but don't know how to apply what they learned. There's also a difference between knowing that a tree might be useful and being able to actually write some code to build a tree.
But the thing is, the next interviewer will have different preferences - there's no standardization here.
Now they might have been useful for something, but I suspect they are just playing the numbers game and showing up to a lot of interviews until they get in. So even if say 5% of coders are useless that 5% is vastly over inflated in the interview process.
The point of schedulers is much more complicated than a straightforward queue, as they seek to project how best to utilize system resources into the future.
Strange he would be so pedantic. Everyone in HPC certainly does call it a queue, as you noted.
Ah! You're in for some surprise down the line. Fizzbuzz almost always clear out large amount of applicants.
Anecdotally, in European universities, bachelors are the "get in as many people as we can for the tuition fees", while masters are the "let's be as selective as we can get away with".
I imagine quite many would be upset if they found out they were not being held to equal standards, and would probably point to foreign students paying more as the reason.
(Identifying such Universities will be left as an exercise to the reader.)
If you cant get into the ivy league of your own country, usa schools are a backdoor prestige option for the wealthy.
Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.
Now I have a close friend from China, and the mistery is solved: others are doing their exams/essays/assignments for them.
Keep in mind though, this is likely a huge generalisation (not all Chinese cheat and other nationalities cheat as well), and I put more than half of the blame on the universities themselves (they earn a lot of money accepting these kinds of students), but long-term, it really dilutes the value of this education in my eyes.
Ya think? Sorry man I wouldn't be profiled as a cheater like that due to race or citizenship.
Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students
[0]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-m...
On a more anecdotal level one of my fiancee's friends was dating a guy who sold SAT answers for a while.
I have a couple of friends who teach at international high schools here in Shanghai. It takes quite a long time to get through to the students that plagiarism is not okay and is taken seriously.
By the way no one brought up race in this thread until you did.
Twice we hired someone based on the phone interview and it was someone else who showed up.
The third time it was someone reading interview answers off a chat client window.
I'm mostly annoyed because it reduces the value of the phone screen and requires more face to face interviews.
Indians cheat. A lot. It is just a different culture. Students in three different groups would turn in the exact same solution to a coding assignment, and they'd all get the same grade. I was baffled at first, then furious, and finally just learned to laugh about it, while understanding that they were only screwing themselves by not learning the material.
However, it did mean that the training programs would push out a ton of students that did not know a thing about programming, and definitely should not be in the industry. But it is understandable in a place like India where a software engineer can make a lot more money and earn far more respect than many of the alternatives.
I was friends with some of them who engaged in this. After being straight up asked for help during one exam, I warned them not do it, and that this behavior would get them kicked out of school here, but it didn't matter. Most were very smart and talented, and really didn't need to cheat. But they did anyway. Cultural thing, I guess.
Visas are faked, resumes are complete rubbish and it is my suspicion that the hiring managers/committees are bribed directly or indirectly.
I know people with 0 years of experience drawing salary of $110K from a large company by showing fake 8 years of experience.
Sadly all people involved are from my home country India. It really saddens me that we arrive here as economic refugees and destroy the very system that is so welcoming to us.
If you read the suit itself, there is a lot of wiggle room for Palantir. Here is the threat (paragraph 14 B) "An order permanently enjoining Palantir and its officers, agents, successors, divisions, subsidiaries, and those persons in active concert or participation with them... "
Here is how they can easily wiggle out: (paragraph 14 D.) "An order requiring Palantir to provide complete relief to the affected class of Asian applicants.." and (paragraph 14 E.) "An order requiring Palantir to hire Asian applicants from the affected class list."
It is foolish to create one bucket called "asian" and throw in people from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia Philippines in addition to those from China, Japan and Korea. I personally do not think that the students have time to sit around and play the "race card". They've probably moved on to other things.
I've also noticed the lack of diversity in startups that is disproportionately affecting minorities. Software being what it is is usually a trade off between many solutions that actually work in the short term. So it is actually pretty easy to hire friends of friends and so on and if they can get something to work, you'll convince yourself that you've hired the right person for the job.
Friends being friends will easily pass the "culture fit" test.
Anyway I see a lot of direct and veiled comments against interview candidates from Asian countries with reference to their accents etc. I don't think HN should be the place for such comments. Having worked in the Bay Area, I can say that an accent is the last thing on anybody's mind once you've proved competence.
I can't speak for elsewhere, as I went to university in Australia, but down here we have a MASSIVE foreign student population as a percentage - International education is currently Australia's third largest export overall - mostly from India and most parts of Asia (kinda our closest neighbours).
My personal, very anecdotal experience is that Indian students were either amazing, or very much not very good. The route seemed to be do ANY degree in India, followed by a (one year?) Masters in IT in Australia. This then legitimised their IT bonafides.
The Indian culture also has a different attitude to cheating - it is seen as much worse to fail than to be caught cheating - and I saw this play out a fair few times, to the point that in one exam 5 Indians had to be physically separated for passing paper back and forth. We also had one girl who said to her lecturer "I don't see why it matters, I'm never going to work. I just need a degree so I can go home and marry a good man".
Now, to answer the quote, the reason this continues is due to the Australian need for the foreign $$$. As a result, very few foreign students are (or is it were?) disciplined for these infractions. Several times it has been a massive scandal down here (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mymaster-essay-cheating-scandal-mo... although it seems common: http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-m...), and many locals worry it devalues their own education.
On the flipside, the very best students in my year were foreign, and often Indian, so this was not a one-size-fits-all situation.
YMMV, but the Australian universities need for foreign student $$$ has lead to MUCH lower standards for foreign students passing than locals, at least in the past.
(yes, technically anyone from Asia is Asian, but when someone says 'asian', it doesn't evoke the mental image of a caucasian Russian who lives in Novosibirsk.)
ahh, Georgia Tech
It is possible that I'm clueless, and cannot identify clueless people.
Thanks to you, TIL that Tech is a state university. Never knew.
Your organization is almost certainly not like Palantir so I'm not sure where your sympathy is coming from.
My concerns,
1) why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians?
2) The complaint is concerned about the use of employee referrals. Studies have shown that building teams from referrals can be a big productivity boost because it enhances team cohesion. While employee referrals can lead to a monoculture it doesn't seem that the federal government should prohibit it.
If the applicant pool was overwhelming black and Palantir hired more white people because of referrals, there would be more uproar.
Ultimately, the implications would be that if that logic were applied to government positions, (ie, if government positions took into account referrals more than merit) you could end up with a government that is overwhelmingly white and/or arbitrarily discriminates against people applying to positions.
In this case, I can see how "increased cohesion"—although decreasing the "jobs project" value—would be extremely helpful for increasing tax-dollar ROI.
I highly doubt Palantir did any kind discrimination based on race.
The initial demographics of the founders and the early team has a large impact on the rest of the hires in my experience at previous startups. Main reason being that the early people are more prone to hire from referrals in their network of people they know.
Some things to consider:
P(qualified | referral) > P(qualified | all applicants)
P(same race | referral) > P(different race | referral)
and thus:
P(hire | referral applicant) > P(hire | all applicants)
I don't see any evidence of malicious or specific racial discrimination.
Part of the benefit of ensuring a diversity in government roles is aiding governments to better provide services for all aspects of society, not just the minority who hold those roles.
There are a lot of things that a government does that can't be measured as a direct monetary benefit.
Currently, we seem to just think of the government as a machine that turns dollars into achieved consensus goals at some fixed (very low) efficiency. We never seem to say "what if we measured [metric] out per dollar in, and then tried to make that ratio increase?"
seen companies at local airport bidding contracts who have minorities who are merely paid to be on the board so they qualify for the contract.
want to know one reason the government is so large, intrusive, and inefficient, look no further to rules that enforce everything but efficiency.
And that's part of the problem with government doing things. It does not handle intangible considerations very well.
I don't care who you are or what you look like. I don't care how old you are, your gender, sexual preferences, citizenship status, and so forth. I'm certain that having a large mix of these will make my work environment more productive and interesting, but for each candidate I have much more important things to think about.
The job is to make technology do stuff for people. This means you must have technology skills and people skills. Folks can argue about the ratio, but as a first approximation, for the vast majority of commercial software development work, it's about 10 percent tech and 90 percent people skills. We aren't building the next Google. We're going down the hall to talk to the CSRs about why the IVR system is acting up.
I have interviewed devs. I found them almost universally atrocious both in tech and people skills. I found no correlation between certifications and actual ability to perform (except a positive correlation between advanced degrees and feelings of self-entitlement.)
Do whatever tech tests you want, and for sure capture a ton of metrics. But the only process that has made any sense to me over the years is the team audition process. It's a play. We have try-outs. For a few folks we pick some candidates and backups. Everybody shows up for a sprint or two and the rest of the team sees how it works out.
I don't see that universe as being anything close to the universe the government allegation seems to assume, where ratios of one category of candidate should translate into the same ratios of successful applicants.
How do you hire people without 2 weeks vacay to burn on this process?
This is almost certainly because they're using recruiters, and the recruiters are funneling them candidates who aren't representative of the broader CS-degreed candidate pool.
1. Yes, 20% Asian hiring rate is pretty decent when you compare to the general Asian population at large. However, the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians.
2. Palantir is involved in government contracting, so there are also very specific regulations for compliance https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html
3. The lawsuit is being brought on by the Department of Labor. IMO, generally government agencies are usually reluctant to initiate lawsuits that they are afraid of losing.
4. It might be malicious, it might not be. But Palantir was given multiple chances to correct their compliance issue: "The Labor Department sent Palantir a notice in October 2015 about its findings, according to the lawsuit. Both before and after that notice, labor regulators attempted to secure Palantir's voluntary compliance, the lawsuit said, but they did not succeed."
It's abnormal, sure, but that doesn't imply that the abnormality is Palantir's "fault." It might be that, say, one department of one major University, which happens to have an outsized Asian student population, heavily encourages its grads to apply to Palantir.
As a result, Palantir would see one "general" applicant stream, from all walks of life, but with a self-selection effect filtering for people who are (in their own opinion) good matches for working at Palantir; and then one applicant stream of people who happened to go be in the Maths program at University X and didn't want to say no to some advisor's strong recommendations.
The self-selected stream would be better hires than the "coerced into applying" stream for obvious reasons; and the "coerced into applying" stream would also likely be much larger than the self-selected stream. If the people in the "coerced into applying" stream, then, fit a certain profile, it would appear in the resulting data that people who fit that profile are worse candidates than you'd expect.
Doing a causal factor analysis to the applicant graph, though, would immediately show that the contributing factor of being Asian (or whatever else) is "screened off" by the contributing factor of being an alumni of University X.
Given that Palantir is full of the very people who can do this sort of analysis, though, I fully expect that if this is the case, they'll end up attempting this argument on a judge. Probably with amusing results.
My question is how the government is determining the "qualified applicant pool."
Not everyone with a CS degree is qualified to develop software. In my experience, only a minority of CS graduates are qualified to program.
I'm guessing there is some confounding variable here which predicts both ethnicity and poor qualifications. Perhaps being a master's student looking for a visa sponsor.
An “Internet Applicant” is an individual who satisfies all four of the following criteria:
* The individual submitted an expression of interest in employment through the Internet or related electronic data technologies;
* The contractor considered the individual for employment in a particular position;
* The individual’s expression of interest indicated that the individual possesses the basic qualifications for the position; and
* The individual, at no point in the contractor’s selection process prior to receiving an offer of employment from the contractor, removed himself or herself from further consideration or otherwise indicated that he/she was no longer interested in the position.
The “basic qualifications” which an applicant must possess means qualifications that the contractor advertised to potential applicants or criteria which the contractor established in advance. In addition, the qualifications must be:
* Noncomparative features of a job seeker (e.g. three years’ experience in a particular position, rather than a comparative requirements such as being one of the top five among the candidates in years of experience);
* Objective (e.g., a Bachelor’s degree in accounting, but not a technical degree from a good school); and
* Relevant to performance of the particular position.
The problem is that you could find literally thousands of developers with a CS degree and 3+ years of experience who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
Here is one of the jobs in question (I think): https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/12db3e3a-33ca-4896-b4a5-c853e...
It's pretty sparse. It looks like a CS degree is not necessary. Granted, those qualifications also seem vague. That could be bad for Palantir, because it could be argued that most of the people applying met the minimum qualifications. Conversely, it could be bad for the OFCCP because it could be argued that the applicants really did NOT meet the minimum qualifications. It's pretty subjective.
If you go to the apply page, the only thing that is absolutely required is a resume, a full name, and an email. Could it be that some people applied thinking that this was all they needed to apply? Maybe Palantir expected everyone to put some kind of proof they had coding experience.
Anecdotally, I knew a Chinese guy who had a big Chinese mailing list to talk with other Chinese people across the country. They really helped each other out - ones with great writing skills would write testimonials for Linked Ins. It could be a case that Palantir was shared in a community like this and it was noted that not very much is required to even apply.
The OFCCP could be exploiting the same facts: Palantir did not define very many minimum qualifications, so it can be assumed that anyone who applied was qualified.
Because, sure, perhaps many of the Asian applicants are poor enough at English that it outweighs whatever got them into the qualified-pool. But I would guess that would be a problem for every SV tech company. So how does Palantir's stats compare to theirs such that it warrants the DoL to file a lawsuit?
What if the job involved frequent client contact and you needed to asses a high English ability? That would no doubt discriminate against a lot of non native speakers who might have the requisite degree, but would they be qualified? There is also the issue of degrees or other certifications being usually useless to assess real world coding ability, and certainly useless to assess interview whiteboarding questions.
Government agencies are afraid of having a reputation like this so they don't touch questionable suits. Otherwise, agencies would receive even more frivolous complaints. Agencies are political. Settling weak cases looks bad to the voters. However, agencies are required to investigate every claim no matter how stupid. The people who hope to settle are ones with failed investigations. Those have to pay for their own lawyers, eg Pao vs Klein Perkins. On the other hand, companies have more incentive to settle when government agencies are suing because the case is tight.
Many of my friends could not get into their first choice colleges or didn't get scholarships even with perfect grades, extracurricular activities, etc but some of my friends from other larger minority groups got full scholarships even with average GPAs. They laughed at us for working so hard, called us geeks, and then got scholarships because of only ethnicity.
I know this is controversial topic, hence, throwaway account. But this is open secret in Asian communities. Hopefully, this lawsuit will change this ridiculous discriminatory quota system.
Are you absolutely certain of that? How did you know?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904256
Similarly, it's established that Asians tend to meet a much higher SAT cutoff than blacks and whites.
http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asian-...
It's pretty safe to say that most blacks at Harvard don't deserve to be there and it probably should be an Asian in their place. You just can't say which specific blacks and Asians it should be.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080423221308/http://www.umich.e...
Furthermore, this specific point system in question was ruled unconstitutional and is no longer in use.
I'm a dev from India. I work hard and always try my best to stay as honest as I possibly can, and I think I'm fairly competent. For the last job offer I received, I had to take around 7 interviews (phone + in-person) along with take home problems. Recently I'd been wondering if it would be a good idea to do a Masters in US, maybe specialisation in Machine Learning/Deep Learning. But it seems most people here would dismiss candidates like me because "Asians people cheat" or "Asians aren't competent enough".
I expect better from my fellow HN-ers.
I've seen lots of very incompetent Indian applicants. That doesn't mean I won't happily interview another Indian developer because I also know that there are lots of very competent Indian developers. Some of the best coworkers I've ever had were Indian.
Anyone who lazily dismisses you because "Asian people cheat" are themselves incompetent interviewers. In my experience, it's actually incredibly cheap/easy to suss out the competent people with a quick 15-minute phone screen.
I hope you not discouraged from pursuing your specialization in the US.
What is happening here is more like cultural racism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_racism
If their employee racial ratios matched the US population, then they will get bashed like this.
If their employee racial ratios match the 'qualified candidate pool', then they'll get bashed for not hiring enough women and black people.
We haven't as a society agreed on the right way to deal with race, but there's certainly plenty of loud and angry people supporting their own points of view...
You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population. That assumption is, and continues to be, the problem.
Here is one specific context where they are facing potential penalties because employee racial distribution != candidate pool racial distribution.
On the other hand, in a different context, tech companies as a whole are taking a lot of flak because employee racial distribution != population racial distribution.
> You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population
How is this even up for debate? Women and blacks are both underrepresented in majors like computer science compared to the population average. That flows directly into the candidate pool that tech companies need to hire from.
And this article cites one specific example where the 'qualified candidate pool' looks nothing at all like the American population average.
You're saying if that candidate pool only had 15% women, we'd want Palantir to hire just 15% women?
Well, yes, that's only fair. Efforts to expand the ratio of women in the qualified candidate pool notwithstanding.
Governments then create indexes which companies and politicians game because it's cheaper to "positively discriminate" in hiring than to put effort into attracting qualified candidates or fix the broader social issues, and then the population as a whole judges everybody by the index the Government created.
They'll deny someone for all kinds of reasons, and you really don't want to find this out after a hire. In DC being pre-cleared basically guarantees employment.
The other way this happens is by cultural biases causing discrimination, but not intentionally with some specific goal in mind.
I'm operating only on anecdotes, but in the tech industry, discriminating against Asians at the intern/ground level seems to be a non-issue. Maybe different story when you get to management, and maybe different story when you bring gender into the mix, but I didn't think Asians as a whole had issues with employment discrimination at the ground level. I could just be wrong on the aggregate statistics though.
If you try to sell a lot of secret spying services to the government (which I think Palantir does?), they probably think it helps if your employees don't look/sound Chinese, seeing as the government might be afraid of China's espionage efforts.
I also don't know how much trouble they have getting clearance for someone that grew up in China compared to other countries.
(again: I have no idea, that's just a random guess)
"The current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form the countries of South Asia."
If it's about hiring non-citizens, then I think there's a legitimate procedural issue around employees needing clearance levels, but I'd find it hard to believe that there would be a lawsuit over racial biases if it's driven by clearance requirements making non-citizens ineligible.
Who would be more likely to be compromised by last year's OPM database hack by the Chinese (supposedly) which contained info on most of the cleared government and contract workers in the US?
* A guy of European ancestry from Anywhere, USA who has no family, friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
* A naturalized US citizen from China whose friends, family, and associates still live there, and who often travels back for visits.
Even if the naturalized American - Chinese citizen was not corrupted himself, countries like China would not be above threatening his relatives still there.
There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems:
1. You should be filtering for foreign connections in general, not for ethnicity. That test already happens in the process of getting security clearance.
2. You can leverage people in plenty of other ways that do not involve threatening friends or relatives. Both the US and China have teams in government agencies that do that for a living.
3. Oh man this is a huge can of worms when it comes to civil rights, equality, and constitutional issues in general.
That makes for a not-very-accurate filter that is ethically suspect that is also not hard to bypass for the seemingly valuable intel underneath. Seems like bad ROI.
Perhaps I really am naive as you say, but on the second order of analysis it seems to me like an ineffective policy if it were actually a policy.
The U.S. government decides who gets clearances. Contracting companies submit prospective employees for contractor positions based off of their qualifications. This is done by a worksheet considering the essential skills for the position and points for education, previous experience, etc. Contracting companies have no business pre-screening based off of anything more than U.S. citizenship.
Chinese espionage actions have not been about coersion; they've been about incentives and appeals to heritage. The only notable Chinese-linked espionage cases in recent history have been first-generation immigrants, with nationalism and loyalty appeals, not threats against family members.
I haven't seen any denials of clearances in the Industrial Security Clearance Decisions [1] based off of simple national origin claims.
The odd thing is that there are fairly straightforward ways to write position descriptions such that the "qualified applicant" pool is as small and well-defined as you want it to be. This is practically a subspecialty within HR. That they are getting sued would seem to imply that they didn't do any of the normal procedural stuff that most companies have their HR departments doing to head off such accusations, meritorious or not.
I used to run an import/export business......Pakistan guys would try to connect online to score a business visitors visa. Some were upfront, others had no problem wasting 5 hours of your time with a fake business deal in hopes you'll sponsor a visitor visa at the end.
That's the sort of thinking that led to japanese internment camps.
A very good question: What does any company, or any person, have to gain by discriminating?
Yet, many do.
But for a company Palantir's size, I would expect the law of large numbers to push hiring preferences towards being more or less representative of the industry, after controlling for things like security clearances and other domain specific issues.
The missing piece of information to me is whether there really is something wrong with their company culture that would cause hiring preferences to deviate away from "generally average in the aggregate."
"Culture fit" is a notorious discrimination problem in startup-land, but it often just comes from wanting to hire people who share similar interests and socio-economic factors rather than race -- but it can have the same effect. For example, if somebody started a company that hired people overwhelmingly on their music preference, and that preference was Blue Grass, the employee pool would probably not well represent the racial makeup at large.
Alternatively, they trashed resumes with south east asian names and schools becuase they usually arent even usa citizens.
As far as I understood the whole discrimination and quotas fiasco for minorities always talk about the general population to be compared with.
Who doesn't favor employee referrals for interns? You can be encrusted in diamonds and you're going to get put in the back of the line behind the known quantities and get-in-so-and-so's-good-graces hires for an intern position. There's also the fact that people start to favor/discriminate schools based on history. Had a great intern from Stanford? Hire another Stanford kid. Had a terrible intern from Texas Tech? Scratch all the TT kids who apply for a few years.
We'll see how this pans out, but like most of the other people in this thread, I'm inclined to give Palantir the benefit of the doubt at the moment.
Think of it this way: In the U.S. in 1950, white men[0] controlled access to resources like education and jobs, and shared them only with other white men, intentionally discriminating against non-white and non-male applicants. In the past 66 years, network-based hiring practices have extended that systematic discrimination well past its expiration date. White men still dominate those resources, in large part because they network with and therefore hire each other. Who has good schools in their neighborhood? Who got into the good college? Who are their college buddies? Who do their professors and other mentors know? etc.
Isn't time we broke that cycle? Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc.: If we step back from our expectations, conditioned over our lifetimes, those photos are absurd - and represent an enormous waste of talent, self-determination, and achievement.
----
[0] Really it was Protestant, heterosexual white men, and maybe some other parameters applied too, but let's keep this simple.
But they're not just white men. Not even just protestant heterosexual white men. They're white men with rich parents and Ivy League degrees and so on. And when you realize that, you realize that the percentage of CEOs who have rich parents and Ivy League degrees is higher than the percentage of CEOs who are white men. A century ago the graduates of Harvard may have been 100% white men, but the graduates of Harvard are less than 1% of 1% of white men.
The thing you're training your sights on is the scenario where 67% of the candidates are white but >85% of the employees are white. Here's how we got there: The company hired 100 people. First they hired 65 white people who the owners know ("the privileged"). Then they hired 35 more people who all got there on the merits, 67% of whom are white. Company is now 88.45% white.
But let's separate the <1% of people (arguendo all of them white) who get the job no matter what and fill the first 65 slots, from the 67% of people who are white but still have to compete for the job like everybody else. What happens to those people? They suffer the same fate as minorities -- competing for 35 slots instead of 100 because 65 were lost to the Old Boys Network. So that 67% of people fills 23.45% of the slots when it should have been 67%. That's how it is now, before you change anything.
Now suppose you require the company to balance on race. All the people the owners know are still in. They only made up 65% of the employees, up to 67% can be white, they all get to stay. But now only 2% of the slots are available to 67% of the population, because they were classified as the privileged elite when they weren't.
It isn't a race problem, it's a class and social mobility problem.
I think that's a very good point.
However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of society, it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized racism it would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!
I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've never seen data supporting it.
It's clearly not a coincidence, the problem is that part of the cause is present day racism and part of it is the economic fallout of historical racism, and they're separate because only the first is actually a race problem. The second is just a slice from the general problem of poverty and mobility and has to be solved in the same way.
But that means the statistics don't mean anything unless you can identify what caused it, because it changes what we have to do about it. If black people are underrepresented because of real live racists then we need to hunt down the racists, but if they're underrepresented because they're poor or raised by single parents or other such things where everyone like that is underrepresented, then we need to fight poverty and promote premarital contraception and so on.
And in practice it's going to be both, but that doesn't save you any work. You still need to find each root cause to destroy it. The problem isn't that there aren't enough black Senators, the problem is that a promising black entrepreneur who would otherwise have become a Senator had no choice other than to go to a racist loan officer who denied the loan. The lack of black Senators is the consequence.
> Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!
A hundred psychology experiments have shown that if you put people on a team and put some other people on another team, they'll instantly become adversaries. To actually eliminate racism you have to destroy the idea of it. It was never a real thing -- the human race is the only race. To make it go away we have to stop having "African Americans" as a category. They need to be just Americans.
I mean your PhD friend is clearly wrong. Weren't the people still in Kenya the ones not captured as slaves? Otherwise they would be in Alabama. But the stupidity of the argument doesn't phase because it isn't meant to convince. It's meant to rationalize a win by The Other Team when Our Team is supposed to be better at everything.
But we can't convincingly argue that race isn't important and people shouldn't identify with it, while at the same time making a big deal about racial disparities and rehashing the differences between races.
> I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've never seen data supporting it.
The reason there is never any good data one way or the other is that people keep trying to measure the empty space. You can't just go to companies and do a survey that says "how many black people didn't you hire because you're a dirty racist?" So what people do instead is to say that there is X amount of disparity, and if you account for income then this much goes away, and if you account for education level then this much etc., and then whatever is left at the end is labeled the contribution of racism.
But there are arbitrarily many confounders. If you account for enough of them then the whole amount might be "explained," but it isn't really because you e.g. accounted for credit history but that includes the racist creditors who maliciously ruined the credit of minorities. It turns into a political fight over what factors should be considered and there is no answer. And even if there was, it would only tell you how much racism there is, not where it is.
But there is a simple solution, which is to realize that the exact number is irrelevant. It isn't zero. Nobody seriously claims that there is no racism at all. It doesn't matter if it's 50% or 0.0001%. You do the same thing in each case -- fight every instance of racism you find.
But actual racism, not statistics and aggregates. Your friend with the PhD is Wrong. It is now your responsibility to fix it by convincing them.
It's inevitable, and it happens from both ends of the hiring funnel. When I decided it was time to look for a new job, the first thing I did was to look at where people I'd worked with before had ended up. I knew those were places where I would be qualified to work, would be likely to advance my career, and where I would be happy on a daily basis. This is incredibly valuable information for me as I live my life.
(This is in addition the business's gain of being able to save dozens of engineer-hours discarding junk candidates from the hiring process, thousands of dollars in job advertising, and tens of thousands on recruiter fees.)
Asking everyone to destroy this information and waste resources on alternative sources in the service of a more valuable but vague, distant and nebulous goal is... impractical. Pursuing it any regulatory manner would either be a joke or carry a crushing burden on the ability of business to actually conduct business and might very well violate Constitutional protections on the freedom of speech. It would fuel backlash and resentment. It cannot possibly be the best way to do things.
If you want to fix this then we need to find a world where individual self-interest and the pursuit of this goal are at least roughly in alignment with each other. That means making hiring for minorities and the poorly-connected better, rather than making it worse for everyone else - and, from a human perspective, is about making connections between human beings rather than trying to sever them.
Really? You don't think Jews had good jobs in 1950?
If we are talking about the U.S.: Jews were widely excluded from society. I know an American man who is Jewish and went to college in the 1950s. His whole family changed their last name so he could get in; many colleges barred or put quotas on Jewish applicants. Jewish lawyers couldn't work in many leading 'white shoe' firms. Jewish people couldn't join the country clubs and other social organizations where serious networking and business took place. Remember also that the KKK and similar groups preached hate against Jewish people as much as against black-skinned people.
I don't know the answer in greater detail than that, and my impression is that a person had much more opportunity believing in Judaism than being black-skinned, but clearly there was plenty of discrimination and much more, I expect, in some areas of the U.S.
Even to this day, has any leader of a major country been Jewish? Any country besides Israel? (A quick search found a couple French Prime Ministers.)
> As elsewhere in the United States, the Jews of postwar Los Angles made their most spectacular fortunes in property development. S. Mark Taper, an English Jew with experience in London home construction, arrived in Los Angles in 1939 to lay the basis for one of California’s great real estate empires. Louis Boyer similarly became one of the state’s largest home developers, putting up 50,000 units by the mid-1960s.
> At one point in the late 1960s, Jew comprised perhaps 40 percent of southern California’s homebuilders and at least half of the builders of shopping centers. Other Jewish entrepreneurs provided their building materials. David Familian’s pipe and supply company was the city’s largest. Reuben and Lester Finkelstein built their grandfather’s scrap business into the vastly successful Southwest Steel Rolling Mills, the city’s second largest. Harvey Aluminum Inc., founded in 1934 as a small machine tool company, became southern California’s leading producer of aluminum, titanium, and special alloys.
> Jewish builders not infrequently began investing their savings in banks and savings and loan associations, until Jewish builders-cum-financiers surpassed even the older film magnates as the city’s economic heavyweights. All the while, too, Jews continued to play their traditional role as producers of consumer goods. As in the East, southern California’s clothing industry was largely Jewish, as were liquor and tobacco, and much of the wholesale food trade.
( http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/american-jewry-1945-... , claims to be an excerpt from https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679745300/ )
Being "excluded from society" doesn't mean you get shut out of good jobs. It means you get shut out of certain good jobs. Jews weren't exactly popular in Europe from the Middle Ages forward, but everyone acknowledged that they nevertheless had good jobs.
Disraeli was the English prime minister. (He was formally Anglican, and I find it very plausible that that was politically significant. But it is fairly common for Jews to identify as Jewish by ancestry but not by religion, so he's at least worth bringing up.)
On a different note, I find it interesting how Jews get completely glossed over in opinings such as this one, from elsewhere in the thread:
> IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
That may be true, but I'm not sure what your point is. Certainly it's prejudiced against, and harmful and oppressive to people, even if not everything is bad or someone else has it worse.
> Jews weren't exactly popular in Europe from the Middle Ages forward, but everyone acknowledged that they nevertheless had good jobs
I'm not sure that's the case, about "good" jobs being common. But certainly Jewish people were victims of widespread, brutal, and sometimes horrific discrimination and oppression in Europe. At one point, in the lifetimes of many people still living, 6 million were murdered over the course of a few years, including almost the entire populations of Jewish people in Poland and other countries. And that well-known event was the worst of a long history of brutal oppression. Did some have good jobs at some times? I don't see the point.
> Disraeli
Disraeli converted; he was no longer Jewish. It's nothing like the people of many religions who still claim to be part of their religion but don't observe its rituals or share its core beliefs.
What in the world does that alleged statistic mean?
Left unstated was what
P(portion of Asian applications being >= 74%)
Result of this case: lawyers make a few million bucks. Government gets a few million bucks. Palantir has a few million bucks fewer with which to grow and produce new value. Fewer people get hired. No one wins. Administrative overreach: it's a thing.[1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Administrative-Law-Unlawful-Philip-Ha...
"The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion," said the lawsuit, which was filed with the department's Office of Administrative Law Judges.
You'd kind of expect them to,† given the near certainty that they're being actively snooped upon by various foreign governments. Still one wonders what Labor's definition of "qualified" was in this case, and whether the need for visa sponsorship played a role in the selection process.
† Which should please not be construed to mean that I condone such discrimination (if it's happening to the degree alleged), or that I think it's inevitable. Only, one would suspect, not unexpected behavior for companies working in the so-called "intelligence community", or overlapping it to a significant degree.
Honestly, there is no reason this lawsuit should be pressed. As you pointed out I'm sure there were visa's required for some applicants, and 20% Asian is still good by percentage.
Also, I find it interesting how national average always seems to justify discrimination against Asians when it comes to jobs/college acceptance but then if someone brings up how Asians can be under-represented in things like media representation or politics, some people will say it's because there aren't many Asians who go into acting/modeling/politics.
If the ratio of those hired matches the ratio of applicants how does anyone make a complaint of discrimination?
No it's not. It's in fact the opposite. Sexism is systemic to the point where you're lucky to have 5% of your applicants be female.
They'd complain that the company wasn't doing enough to attract resumes from underrepresented groups. That's the usual thing, anyway.
It does smell like revenge, especially given that the numbers are so unusual and the company is probably dealing with security clearance issues. The fact that the numbers are so strange in the supposed pool should raise lots of red flags about one particular country too: were these people with family connections to China? That is normally disqualifying. Is the company expected to hire people who are certain to fail the clearance process, and then get stuck firing them for that failure?
Seriously?
I don't know what you think is weird....some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did (depending on the truthfulness of allegations, of course).
... which is completely irrelevant to whether Palantir is on the right side of this issue.
If a police department was reported as displaying bias against blacks or muslims, would it be reasonable to respond with "I've had issues with blacks and muslims in law enforcement too"?
Now consider the fact that Palantir does a lot of work for intelligence agencies...
But this has no context. What kind of bias, what kind of issues. The example wrt asians has this context.
Are Infosys or WiPro government contractors covered by EO 11246? The audit process doesn't apply to most employers, only government contractors.
NOTE: An earlier version of this comment incorrectly referenced EO 12466, because of a transposition in reading from the scanned-but-not-OCRd copy of the lawsuit text.
Also EO 12466 is an executive order on Reimbursement of Federal employee relocation expenses. I fail to see how is it related to the topic.
https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html
In this case I'd assume based on resumes.
What should be concerning is it applies to these 3 jobs specifically. Palantir is offering a lot more jobs than what is indicated in the lawsuit [2] [3]. As another poster has said, could it be a poisoned recruiter? I wonder if that will be considered and if it will affect the AI (adversity impact).
[1] https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#...
[2] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...
It wouldn't surprise me if the end lesson that comes out of all this is "be very, very careful who you work with to do your recruiting and the effect it has on your applicant pool". If someone (be it a recruiter or just employees hoping for referral bonuses) pumps your hiring pipeline full of low-grade resumes but who nonetheless represent a particular ethnic group, and you end up turning them all down or turning them down at a higher-than-normal rate, you could really be increasing your EEO exposure without realizing it.
In one example cited by the Labor Department, Palantir reviewed a pool of
more than 130 qualified applicants for the role of engineering intern.
About 73 percent of applicants were Asian. The lawsuit, which covers
Palantir's conduct between January 2010 and the present, said the company
hired 17 non-Asian applicants and four Asians.
"The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is
approximately one in a billion," said the lawsuit, which was filed
with the department's Office of Administrative Law Judges.
But I'd also ask the government regulators to define "asians". Including East Indians? I'm not sure how the government breaks down their racial statistics but certainly East Indians are Asians. They might not be East Asians but they're Asians.
Not only that but Native Americans and most Latin Americans are to some degree of Asiatic origin as well. So they'd have to define recent, or historical Asian origin?
Further, we'd need clarification on whites vs Europeans. Europeans presently live in Eurasia, which technically is the same landmass as Asia. Beyond that, all Europeans and their white descendants alive today share the same ancestors as the Native Americans[0], which are of clear Asiatic origins. That also begs the question about my Saudi friends from college: they were adamant that they were Asians as they were indeed from the same continent.
So, which "asians" are we talking about here? I think this whole type of thing is a mess and so anti-scientific that it's entirely political. The government and their racial censuses are awfully convoluted. Which should be abolished, as Mexico has been our leader here and already abolished racial censuses long ago- if the US government is truly against racism. Change should always start at the top, leading by good example!
In sum, there's only 5 heavily-populated major landmasses in the world and 4 of those 5 are occupied by a majority with folks of wholly Asian or at minimum, mixed-Asian descent. With Africa being the only real exception. So our government need to get its act together and if they're going to use racial terminology and policy, to do it in a little bit more scientific manner.
The article is unclear, but if the former, given Palantir'a security work with various US government agencies, it might be a factor as others have pointed out.
And, even if they weren't, I'm pretty sure that Palantir could easily have pointed that out in the two rounds of attempted to pre-lawsuit conciliation initiated by the Department of Labor to resolve the identified issues.
The issue for this case will be proving whether or not the applicants actually met the basic qualifications. Interestingly, the language implies that someone must simply indicate that they possess the basic qualifications. It doesn't go into detail on verifying the actual possession of those qualifications.
I'd like to see what exactly is done to verify the applicants actually met the basic qualifications.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#...
[2] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...
Given the nature of what Palantir does, it is easy to guess why it would discriminate against a certain category of people who have ties to foreign countries in general, and sensitive countries in particular.
It is the same problem intelligence agencies faced when they wanted Arabic/Urdu speakers. Those who spoke these languages would never be vetted.
Secondly if Palantir works on highly sensitive data it probably requires applicants to be US citizens. So essentially it is probably discriminating against Asian Americans and not citizens of other countries.
My remark was about Arabic and Urdu speakers who are US Citizens (the possibility that they'd be foreigners didn't even cross my mind). After the Iraq invasion, there were many people who applied to work with Intelligence agencies. US citizens. They just happened to have ties to said countries (you know, your father or grandfather came to the US and you were born here, but your uncle still is in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan).
There was a severe shortage of fluent speakers despite a lot of eager applicants. A "We want native Iraqi dialect speakers, but those who speak it just happen to be of Iraqi descent. We can't hire those" situation.
Then again they might as from what I've read about the company it is more like a glorified ETL shop. Granted upwards of 80% of a data scientist's job can be cleaning data.
I have seen some companies preferring certain race of applicants to maintain diversity in teams even though there are plenty of qualified applicants.
Government contracts are great if you can make them work -- these organizations have big budgets, and many individual layers of the bureaucracy have a "we must spend our allowance or we won't get one next year" mentality. Find a good use case for your tech, hire a couple of people who are good at making gov't relationships and who know how to do the paperwork right, and you're in business.
The flip side of this is that government contracting rules are really, really strict. And the impact of being barred or even partially restricted from government contracting work would be really, really bad for Palantir.
Has this something to do with culture, or the fact that Palantir think that even american asians are leaking information to countries like china, india, etc.
It quite possibly doesn't; discrimination is often done (even when it is done deliberately and overtly) because it serves non-financial interests of the people choosing to do it, not because it is an efficient means of maximizing profits.
(Note that this is a government lawsuit, so it's not like a class-action where additional parties "join" the suit or are included in a class. It's just the government versus the company, with remedies (apparently) to be paid to other individuals.)
They aren't.
> That is, the remedies include remuneration for these applicants, but it doesn't look like there's a clear way for people to indicate that they think they were affected by this bias.
Hiring, not remuneration, of some from the "affected class list", is one of the remedies sought. Since the government has through the compliance audits which identified these issues all the hiring records for the positions at issue, including the information on the unsuccessful applicants, they don't really need people to reach out to them to identify that they think they were affected. If there is an remedy issued that would require identifying affected individuals, they already know who is involved.
I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants, since this cannot reliably be done by surname or by any other indirect method. And since applicants cannot be required to provide this information in an application, there is no direct method either (other than seeking applicants to identify themselves after the fact).
I am curious about this partly because I am an Asian American who interviewed at Palantir and was turned down for not having enough X skills, when I was never asked any questions pertaining to X.
I missed that in reviewing the actual lawsuit (and thought it was an error in the article), but see it on review. In any case, the point that the government knows who the applicants are remains.
> I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants
The government can identify all the applicants. If it reaches the stage at which more information from them becomes relevant, the government can reach out to the applicants for additional information. It doesn't need to rely on the applicants initiating the contact.
Though if, as you indicate, you are personally interested and what to proactively contact the government to make sure you don't miss out on any opportunities, contact information for the office responsible for the lawsuit is in the press release [0] announcing it.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20160926
The processes under the contracting rules at issue are fairly well established, and I suspect if additional information from applicants was relevant they would have actively reached out before filing the lawsuit. I think that this action is about the overall nature of the hiring processes at issue where the key evidence is the internal documentation of the hiring process and decisions made with in it, and not the experiences of individual applicants.
I imagine it must feel weirdly impersonal as someone within the affected class, though, since its both about your experience in a general sense, but not all that concerned with it in a specific sense.
Being a government contractor, this 100% happened at some point or would.
The way you word it, however, says the problem is that they are "attracting 73% of Asians".
If you want to work in the 21st century, get used to working with people who don't have your same exact background.
Unless you believe that talent is disproportionally concentrated in Asian candidates (which they obviously don’t given who they actually hire), then it is telling you that the funnel is broken. The funny thing is if they did hire 73% Asians they would rightly be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians.
It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit.
> if they did hire 73% Asians they would rightly be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians.
Why would they rightly "be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians."?
Anyway, what you are suggesting does happen when listing jobs (eg how startup jobs are marketed towards younger people). Doesn't mean that it's right or wrong in private companies. But to say it isn't wrong when you are taking government money is disingenuous.
It is obvious to Palantir. They are rightly recognising that talent is much more evenly spread despite attracting a disproportional number of Asian candidates at the top of the funnel. They are trying to fix a broken funnel by discriminating at the end of the process.
I don’t think anyone would think the appropriate solution is to just hire 73% people of Asian decent because that is what the funnel provided.
Of course it's obvious to Palantir: they are the ones doing it. Of course it's not obvious to DOL: they are the ones with the lawsuit.
Of course it obvious to anyone that demographics at various level of any funnel wont/cant be translated to the bottom.
What's not obvious are the causes in this specific case.
Asians are culturally inclined towards collective work and are therefore disinclined to the competitive environment of management.
Tongue in cheek comment of the day.
> In 2015, Asians represented 27.2 percent of the professional workforce at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo but were 13.9 percent of the companies' executive workforces, according to a study by pan-Asian professionals organization Ascend.
Actually, from the government filing, it sounds like they are saying a big part of it is very active, through the heavy reliance on an employee referral program.
There's gotta be some other motive here.
Some of the comments here seem to suggest people might be instinctively identifying with Palantir when they talk about their own difficulties in trying to find qualified job applicants. It's without a doubt incredibly hard to find qualified job candidates, and there's a huge number of factors that can go into making any hire/no-hire decision, but for those very reasons these types of lawsuits from the DOL are both hard for them to win and pretty rare, which suggests to me that there's a fair amount of objectively quantifiable evidence pointing towards discrimination. I think, unfortunately, that it's much more common for widespread discrimination to never be addressed in certain companies than for the federal government to overzealously sue corporations on marginal evidence.
I don't think there's any question that Palantir is going to be ultimately ok as a company, however the law suit turns out. Even if the ruling was to wrongly come down against them, they'd pay $___ million, change their hiring processes so they're at least less likely to be sued again, and then move on with their lives as a hugely valuable multi-billion dollar corporation. Discriminatory hiring processes, on the other hand, I think need to be routed out wherever they may occur because systemic injustices ultimately hurt our society as a whole.
This allegation is very serious and I think needs to be taken seriously. When our instinctive reaction to an accusation of discrimination is that it's more than likely overblown or outright false, we're implicitly endorsing the idea that discrimination is both rare and always obvious, neither of which I think are true. I'm not ready to make any judgements about Palantir as a company or its hiring process, but it seems very likely that they (like any company) have blind spots in the way they're hiring that disadvantage some groups, especially if the DOL thinks there's enough evidence to win a court case over it. The great news for Palantir is that even if that's true, it's not an issue that really affects any core component of them as a company and it's 100% fixable with some extra HR spending.
I think the more constructive take-away from a news article like this is to think about what we ourselves do to eliminate bias from our hiring and potentially talk about what works and what doesn't. No one wants or needs us to hire unqualified candidates, but it's undesirable for us to unfairly exclude groups of qualified candidates because of race or any other discriminatory factor, both because of the societal implications and because we end up missing good candidates in a time where good engineers are in incredibly high demand. Like I said, establishing fair hiring practices is a hard problem; it goes a lot further than just trying to "do the right thing" and reaches into a lot of core parts of how we perceive the world. As engineers we constantly try to study and adjust for our imperfect brains' natural tendencies so that we can build more useful products and get more done. Why can't we try to fight bias in the same way?
I'm not sure about Palantir's bias against Asians, but the tone of comments here are surely negative and partially racist. Let me think, if I really meant "racist". May be it is the fear of competition, usually shown by below par individuals, or may be just signs of arrogance.
Either ways, I am N.E.V.E.R. going to apply to companies like Palantir, Theranos, Snap, Reddit, Path, etc. Damage is done. Congrats.
p.s. Throwaway account.
The government, because its a violation of an executive order that applies to all government contracting, and Palantir is a government contractor. (Hence why one of the proposed remedies is cancelling all of Palantir's government contracts and subcontracts, and banning them from future contracting.)
> If the Asians are equally qualified as whites then they are only hurting themselves by excluding them.
If they are only equally (and not more) qualified, and they have to narrow the pool anyway to get a manageable pool for later stages of the hiring process, then they actually aren't hurting themselves, before considering the consequences of enforcement actions like this one.
And yes technically you are correct. But that assumes they are exactly equal. If you exclude a bunch of people for arbitrary reasons then you necessarily get worse results. Some of the best candidates may be excluded.
There may be an argument that the government shouldn't require non-discrimination by government contractors, but I don't think that there is a particularly good argument, that, given the existence of the requirement as a term of every government contract, that the government should not care that a government contractor is just casually disregarding the terms of its contract with the government and expecting to continue to be paid.
> If you exclude a bunch of people for arbitrary reasons then you necessarily get worse results. Some of the best candidates may be excluded.
Since Palantir is a government contractor, the argument that they would be hurting the quality of work they do (which is valid, just not supported by mere equality of qualifications) is another reason the government should be concerned. Remember, this isn't an enforcement action under general anti-discrimination law, its an enforcement action under the specific rules that apply to government contractors.
> "In addition, the majority of Palantir's hires into these positions came from an employee referral system that disproportionately excluded Asians."
Also, the complaint says they tried twice to get Palantir in compliance (starting in late '15) and are only now filing this complaint.
"After federal investigators were unable to prove these initial accusations, the government conducted a separate investigation and was ultimately only able to charge Lee with improper handling of restricted data, one of the original 59 indictment counts, to which he pleaded guilty as part of a plea settlement. In June 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations as part of a settlement of a civil suit he had filed against them for leaking his name to the press before any formal charges had been filed against him.[2] Federal judge James A. Parker eventually apologized to Lee for denying him bail and putting him in solitary confinement, and excoriated the government for misconduct and misrepresentations to the court.[3]"
This premise is unsupported and, I would argue, completely unsupportable. Though I suppose if you start with the premise that the government is trying to mandate particular outcomes, the enforcement actions they take probably look like the target is capriciously moving, but that's just because the premise is incorrect.