U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

The exception is Asians. Asians are vastly overrepresented. I don't think this is a bad thing. It is meritocracy in action. But it violates the common notion that meritocracy and equality are the same thing.

[1] http://www.unz.com/gnxp/silicon-valley-has-an-asian-people-p...

Bonus question: should the HR department be allowed to ask for ethnicity ahead of time or would noneligible applicants have to sacrifice precious time in futile interviews?

Lottos: are known to give each ticket a fair chance based on a published set of rules. I think if that existed for hiring then many of the issues we see here would be gone. Unfortunately for many jobs it is difficult to give a test which is a fair sole determiner of suitability for work. And if I understand correctly also illegal in some jurisdictions, more or less because it can be abused.

Roads: maintenance does in fact vary by the wealth of the supporting area. Try driving from Nebraska to Kansas on US77 for a stark example. In addition, roads are networks and thus it makes sense to subsidize maintenance of connections to increase overall network value.

Police: some people do indeed advocate a form of this because they say police already relatively over-investigate crimes of minorities. That is, a white person has a higher chance to get away with any one given crime (for some categories)

Speaking personally, I found that work environments with lots of new or unamericanized immigrants had little collaboration, little in-office comraderie, and no socialization outside of work (e.g. pub nights). It was boring and I pined for a culturally American setting. Sometimes "multicultural" just means the subset of all cultures involved.

So by that I mean, why can't we just evaluate individuals based on their own merits? If you want to stop inequality, fight to stop inequality of opportunity. Stopping inequality of outcomes makes little sense.

Hostile forks do not change the project, they create a new one. License changes are of course restricted by law, as are all other ‘decisional powers’ (as any reasonable person would assume).

> Congratulations, you're biased in favor of people with more outgoing and assertive personalities. ;)

Not my problem, a technical project is not a therapeutical session for people who can’t speak their mind.

> Proportional requires that contributions be quantifiable. I'm not aware of any accurate, objective way to do that. (If there was, it would also be a solution to the "how to measure productivity" problem.)

You only need a good enough comparison to differentiate two people if there is a dispute. This is often a very clear-cut case. If it isn’t, let the rest of the project decide in whatever way is appropriate.

> What does "technical advantage" include? Switching costs imposed on users? The level of skill required from contributors? IDE-computable code metrics?

I don’t see why different projects could not have different metrics there, to be decided upon by the project/core team? If it’s a fun-in-your-free-time project, you can expect as much as you want from future contributors and don’t give a shit about your users, conversely, if you try to sell it, you may need to take switching costs into account.

> Wow, working only on clearly-defined problems must be nice. What happens when the ambiguity is part of the problem space?

If your problem space is not well defined you have bigger problems than a code of merit you may or may not like. Do more research first until the problem space is defined. Apart from this trivial tidbit, the sentence obviously aims at ambiguity in communication, where there is never any place for it. Not using words ill-defined words or ambiguous constructs seems like a decent idea in general.

Most of the problems I've seen with diversity hires being "less capable" has been because they've had to work with people who are poor communicators and can't get past the idea that not everyone has the same shared background they do.

That means your co-worker from Taiwan doesn't recognize your carefully constructed metaphors based arounds star wars quotes, and they will likely try their best to understand what you meant, but you should have just communicated like an adult instead of an excited teenager.

The concept itself perpetuates the boogey man.

We see these lawsuits and each one subconsciously implies, "Yep, racism is still a big problem in the industry. Here's another big company being sued for it. It's a good thing we have the Dept of Labor watching out for stuff like this. Who knows what these companies would be getting away with without it."

But it's the lawsuit itself that makes you think that, regardless of how much actual racism in the industry plays into it. It's self-perpetuating.

I agree the state should be acting at a much higher level to solve these problems. This could take the form of education incentives to get a more diverse workforce or do something about income inequality that prevents some demographics from pursuing certain career paths.

If I see a large software company located in an area where a lot of Asians reside and there aren't many Asians there? Then something funny is going on.

Discriminatory hiring practices are but one of many symptoms of the disease.

Palantir got sued for hiring Asians at a ratio of 20%. 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool.

That is a drastic oversimplification.

The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the pool of people who have the right education and experience.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who graduated with the appropriate degree for which they're hiring (in most cases).

Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who got accepted into those schools.

Which can only hope to be reflective of those who chose that education/career path to begin with.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the population that sought out things like math and science when in secondary school.

Which only then can only hope to be reflective of the general population.

At each step there is filtration. It's affected by people's upbringing, their role models, what advertising they were heavily exposed to as impressionable children, who their friends are, who their teachers were, whether computers were popular when they were going through school, the list goes on and on.

The problem of under and over-representation in tech is a real one, but pretending that companies just need to somehow make up for all of this filtration, at the very very end of a literal lifetime-sized pipeline, is folly. Outreach needs to happen much, much, much sooner than that. At the end of the day, companies are at the mercy of who's in their hiring pool.

Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described:

>most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).

The fact is we already have things like state-sponsored racist entrance policies to our most prestigious educational programs. In law school, it can be several standard deviations worth of LSAT points-- that is a VERY big deal. Even pointing this out, though, means someone is going to flip this on its head and misconstrue it, calling me the evil monster you described.

As I said in another comment, you're never going to see equality of outcome. The NBA will never be dominated by people of Asian descent. Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs. Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men. Men will always have more statistical outliers existing in the "fat tails" of male distributions relative to distributions of women. People are different. It doesn't mean better, or worse. For example, I'm not that exceptionally good at maths, but my friend is -- he's not any better of a person than I, though, and no sane person would make that argument. There's nothing wrong with being different. Demanding that everyone be the same will end up with us in Harrison Bergeron's world, and in that long-run scenario everyone ends up losing except those who take joy in ruling over others.

I believe it important to ensure everyone has equal outcome with respect to human rights, civil rights, and human dignity. There is no good reason why we cannot provide everyone with these. I believe that's where attention should be focused, and we're getting off track by pretending everyone is the same and demanding that the only reason for anything else is that the NBA is racist against Asians! (or coding companies are racist/sexists against whomever it is that doesn't have coding jobs).

There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this.

You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players.

You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice.

Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.

There is no polite way to put it, but I would be surprised if among black applicants having a "black" name did not predict worse actual performance than having a "white" name. The same goes for white applicants with "white trash" names. If there are Asian equivalents, same for them.

But we don't have equality of education, equality of upbringing, etc. so it's natural that given the equality of opportunity we get unequal results.

So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time.

The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.

2) We can use words until the end of time to weigh the merits of state-forced equality. Same could be said about anything else that is non-scientific in nature: i.e. we could also argue about the relative merits of state-forced equality in communism vs capitalism in the same way. You can never prove anything this way in non-scientific fields, and at best all that can be done is hope to convince the other person that your reasoning is superior. However, before we got to that point, I'd even reject it on moral principle: it is immoral for government to enforce racist or sexist policies that discriminate against certain groups of people. Yes, it's in the name of moral outrage (equality), but note government-sanctioned use of force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if it is almost undeniably immoral, i.e: (America funding Jihadists in the Syrian War, Vietnam, Nazi Germany, the Opening of Japan, the Inquisition, etc., etc.).

Further on #2, one of the insights of modern economic theory has been that it can many times be actually better to make adjustments to free market outcomes ex post rather than use heavy handed regulation to force an arbitrary result ex ante. If I were king, I'd much rather see everyone with free access to healthcare, housing, transportation, and education than focus on how many women are working in male-dominated roles like offshore oil drilling in the north sea (or coding, whatever arbitrary field it happens to be).

Why should it? This reflects a very strong a priori position that people are exactly the same and don't systematically vary in their interests, cultural values, etc.

Where's the positive evidence for this (latent, implicit) positive claim?

My point is that I think that an Asian person, applying to a company known to be favorable toward Asians in hiring, would signal their ethnicity somehow in their resume. At least, that would be the smart play for that person.

There are plenty of advocacy organizations that badger, and attempt to shame, companies into buying their "consulting" services. Services that consist primarily of coming in, counting your employees by the hue of their skin, or whether their genitals are innies or outies. Then, after you've paid them stupid amounts of money, they provide a seal of approval. See Project Include or the Rainbow Coalition.

In one workplace & location in the US: The H1B workers were...not very good. Adequate, and hard working, but not highly skilled and they were brought in mainly because the location didn't want to/couldn't pay wages good enough to hire skilled US-based talent. There the H1B workers were (in general) fearful and unwilling to complain, because they knew their personal odds of getting another US gig were NOT guaranteed. This left me understanding the various H1B complaints, as the workplace was terrible.

In another workplace in a different US location, the H1B workers were equal or better than any US-citizens working there. The workers were highly sought after and were interested in speaking up to make the workplace better. Switching jobs for them WAS a hassle, but a very doable hassle, so the workplace had keep them as happy as non-H1B workers. This left me understanding the OTHER side of the H1B issues, as these workers raised up rather than lowered their workplaces.

I've had multiple friends spend months uncertain if their visas would be renewed (Most companies seem to employ offshore lawyers to handle the visas on the other ends, and I've heard some horror stories about those lawyers sometimes vanishing, or misfiling). Also, I've had friends that had to stay put in a job during a certain phase of getting their green cards - a change in job title would reportedly move them back to the end of the queue of that step. (No idea about the specifics)

All in all, I've found it pretty hard to generalize about H1B workers and the process as an entire whole.

It's because immigration has been politicized in the U.S., and the average citizens' understanding of immigration is what they read in the news.

Which is fair, because immigration is a bureaucracy that the average citizen doesn't need to be an expert at, but this complexity makes it easier for misinformation to spread about it.

Yeah, we all know a huge corporation would never lie, especially not such a shining beacon of progressive virtue as Oracle, where profit always takes a backseat to human decency. I mean, it's not like such a huge company can spare a few hours of paperwork drudge to set up such a scheme; they certainly don't have legions of Romanian dudes ready to file any form they're told to file to keep their job.

TBH, you don't even need to lie. How many government bureaucrats are deeply familiar with wages of a Fusion Enterprise Foobar for Middleware Cloud Baz Devop Ninja, a position that likely exists only in Oracle itself? Just make sure the position is properly "jailed" internally so all hires are consistent ("we don't have any DBAs here, we only have BigData Deployment and Maintenance Specialists for the Cloud Grid, totally different thing") and publish the job "locally" in places nobody will ever pay attention to, or on an intranet job-site where no application will ever be reviewed or actioned.

> It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages.

I agree that there are easier ways, like relocating all your operations in cheaper countries - something Oracle has already done almost 100%. But half the developing world seems to be on fire at the moment, and the other half "suffers" wage inflation at increasingly rapid pace, so watchagonnado...

Publishing the position locally is easily skirted: It's not published in places that people look at, it's not written in a way that makes it sound appealing, and often has some nonsensical requirements: In practice, you don't get local workers applying to them.

Then, there's how you hire for positions as junior as possible, and you keep the person there for 6+ years (the green card process can take pretty much forever if you are mean enough to your employee).

I was an H1B. My compensation was pretty fair when I started compared to the US employees around me, but as years went by, I kept taking on more responsibilities, but my salary didn't change to match. Once the green card process started, changing jobs became extremely unappealing, not just because risks of having to restart the green card process, but because to apply for a green card, my employer asked me to agree to pay attorney fees and costs if I left before the green card was awarded plus one year. Any job worth applying to would have been higher responsibility than the paper job I had been hired for originally, so would I be able to transfer by PERM filing across employers in the first place? Not guaranteed. So I kept the job: Being European in the early 2000s, there was a signifiant green card backlog for me, but not a decade long, so I could wait. All in all, I was an H1B for 8 years.

In the next 3 years after I got the green card, I changed jobs a couple of times and my salary more than doubled: I went from being called a plain engineer that just happened to report to the CTO to becoming principal engineer at a Fortune 500 corporation. It's 5 years later, and last year I made 5 times what I was making in my last H1B year: That level of catch-up doesn't come from me improving that much in the last few years, but total catch-up from where I started from.

Imagine what the big outsourcers, who handle many thousands of H1B applications a year, can do to suppress wages further.

I suspect there are other reasons why you're being rejected. This seems like paranoid thinking. Most companies won't provide a rejection reason as a matter of policy.

People in the country on an H1B lose their lawful status immediately after their employment ends, which means being unemployed for any period of time carries risk of deportation. Most people don't want a change in their work situation to translate into being forced to leave their country of residence.

Between these two points, I'd expect people here on an H1B to have a narrower field of jobs that seem attractive - high-risk startups aren't going to be appealing to most, and to generally be less mobile than those who don't fear deportation if a new position doesn't work out. Because of this decreased mobility, employers can get away with paying less.

And the article is light on the details, so we're left to our imaginations.

But, if Oracle was under no legal obligation to provide the information (and the article is not clear), why would they?

Yes they should. Otherwise all the powerful organizations in the country are under the heel of the government.

It doesn't matter. That wasn't the argument stated; What was proposed was "Why does it matter if you have nothing to hide."

> They do not (and should not) have the same rights.

Corporations are protected from illegal search and seizures just like people.

> Does anyone read the article anymore?

I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to the previous poster.

Of course it is. The context is/was (as stated by the previous poster), if you have nothing to hide, then why not be completely open?

Which is what my point is; You don't need to justify your reasoning for privacy. It is a constitutional right. No justification is needed.

Hey, we're going to assume you are guilty. Can you prove otherwise?

To generalise an entire company, a kind of global one at that, as that, just comes of as incredibly bitter and nieve.

Certainly, for example with men and women, there would be physical tasks were women can not reach the level of men.

Oracle has many many departments. Do you know about Server Technologies (the RDBMS department)? When I applied for Oracle Server Technologies in 2016, I found their interviews to be of the same difficulty level as that of Amazon and Google. They expect a single candidate to know everything from real world work involving Linux kernel details and system programming to abstract concepts like probabilistic data structures, hash trees, distributed computing algorithms, etc. And they expect you to write working code free of bugs and syntax errors in the interview to prove that you know what you are talking about.

In my experience, not many companies in the Silicon Valley expect this kind of rigor and knowledge in the interviews except for the likes of Amazon and Google.