The FAA’s Hiring Scandal | Hacker News Reader

The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

tracingwoodgrains.com

739 pointsfirebaze666 comments

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership.

This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.

> This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed.

Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes

Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes

> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology

In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology.

The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.

> using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.

I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words.

This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.

Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them.

When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash.

I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.

The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.

If they wanted more applicants, then they shouldn’t have been disqualifying good applicants on the basis of their biography.

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever given the facts on the facts on the ground. Have you read the article at all?

What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to being short staffed. Rather, it’s more likely they are understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible and eager people in order to meet race quotas.

It’s hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss it as just another instance of crazy Republican screeching.

> The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.

(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).

The ATC academy can only handle ~1800 students per year. The issue is high failure rates at the academy and then at the facilities graduates are sent after graduation; increasing the quality of applicants should be the FAA's #1 goal.

> they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants

Which would mean entirely different things if (a) that were true (b) that were not true.

It sounds as if you are completely convinced that it is not true, but what is your conviction based on, and why do you think they believed the opposite (or perhaps you take the position that they did not, in fact, believe this) ?

My position is that whether or not this is true, this is not the basis for sound and equitable policy. If I were black, I would probably be a little offended at the insinuation.

I agree with calling people out.

> This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.

So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist.

Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to equity. So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?

Company A: Our equity policy is to only hire white men! We are proud of how we are striving towards equity with our new DEI policy.

observer: Damn those DEI policies ruining everything.

To me it is obvious you do not blame 'DEI policies' but the leadership and corruption in Company A.

> So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?

Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.

There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."

This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.

> Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example).

I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.

> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.

I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.

The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.

The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.

If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this:

Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity.

Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents.

When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away.

Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost.

Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.

I would more likely say that the qualities that make one popular or wanting to deal with the bullshit of managing Americans disputes are in opposition to the qualities that make one qualified. See: almost every politician that’s not a Democrat. Incompetence is staggeringly bipartisan.

But you also have MTG who literally believes “they” control the weather so I’m not sure exactly why you single democrats out here or even the it to any kind of ideology specific consequence.

I don't completely understand it but Republicans manage cognitive dissonance better.

Around 1994 I was interested in Trotskyism and Anarchism and wasn't sure if we needed to get the 4th international back in the US or start a 5th international.

I believed in this really stupid kind of vanguardism where if you put up the biggest and most radical flag you would get everyone to rally behind it. I reformed because I got tough love from black nationalists who told me in no uncertain words they wanted to decide things for themselves and not get bossed around by some white guy.

A modern form of this involves the adding of random stripes to the rainbow flag which means that when you really do put that flag up you won't have anybody under it, at least not when the going gets tough, when it rains, etc.

For one thing left-wing movements have this divergent character where they feel they have to follow all these people who are subaltern for different reasons. Right-wing movements have this convergent character that moves towards something which makes it much easier form them to manage inconsistencies.

> manage cognitive dissonance better.

what on earth does this mean?

It means he's neck deep in outgroup homogeneity.

Having contradictory beliefs that don't really make sense if you look at them together but still listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show, still showing up and really voting Republican consistently, etc.

On the other hand leftists are always telling Hispanic people that they have to have solidarity with black people, telling trans people they have to have solidarity with animal rights people (or the animals?), etc. And... crickets. The people never quite tell you that they don't agree with you but they don't really give money, they don't really listen to you, they don't really turn out at your march, they don't really vote for you, etc.

I've been there, done that, and lived it. If you listen to people you make a little more progress than you make by just flying a really big flag. The antipattern is common in articles from Trotskyite papers which you will find collected here:

https://www.wsws.org/en?redirect=true

Often there is some issue that the people involved see as an isolated issue, but the Trotskyite always wants to smack it together like a Katamari Ball [1] with other issues and conclude a socialist revolution is necessary and the answer from most people is [2] [3] [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(Beatles_song)

[3] "But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao: You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow"

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw

[Edit] From what you are saying, if someone is looking to be in a tribe, I would agree the American right is a good fit for that.

A group that wants to privilege winners is more likely to win than a group that wants to privilege losers, for one thing.

I was shocked at how long it took Labour to beat the Tories in the the UK in the last decade. I mean the Tories kept screwing up over and over and it had to go really far before voters finally gave up on them.

It's easy to conclude that politics in the US are like professional wrestling and the Democrats are getting paid to lose.

and yet Labour in less than a year in office have manage to underperform the Tories to a disasterous degree for the UK

> When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. ... she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it"....

This is what always happens to politicians. Their mumbles become coherent. Shyness fades. Vague dithering words transform to bold calls to action. Infirm display vitality.

This is what politicians do. Otherwise they would be school teachers and programmers.

From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.

Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.

It's all connected, DEI(B) is just the latest revision of the beast.

DEI quotas have been around for decades. We just used to call it affirmative action and it was far less aggressive and blatant.

It was MORE blatant and transparent, which IMO is the bare minimum for government-sanctioned racism. If we are going to do AA, we owe it to EVERYONE to make it clear exactly how and when we will do it. Sneaking it in disingenuously will rightfully piss people off.

Affirmative action is strictly _better_ than some of the DEI nonsense. With affirmative action, you just reserve a bunch of positions for minorities, and then give them out based on merit.

With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards.

> With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards

Do you have a source for this.

I have worked for dozens of enterprise companies with DEI policies and not a single one dropped standards to attract "minorities".

> to call a spade a spade

intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.

Yes. It was also often career suicide to criticize DEI indicatives.

Even if the criticism was intended to be constructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

There's zero difference between this memo and what is frequently said by people who just don't like black people (because it's too bad optics to say "I just don't like black people").

People who just don't like pakistani people spend a lot of time talking about pakistani child rape gangs. Does that mean we should ignore the pakistani child rape gangs?

What part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

serves the role of "pakistani child rape gangs"? Right now the analogy does not makes sense to me. "pakistani child rape gangs" are reprehensible, nothing that extreme comes to mind when I think of James Damore's memo or similar.

Why would a person misrepresent the memo when the file is there for anyone to read?

From an internal US pov, yes you are correct that's exactly what the culture is here. Call out the obviously lowered standards for women and minority candidates and expect severe consequences to your career.

like the n word?

> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda,

I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.

Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories.

> I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories

And yet, although this is a fact, the choice and the phrasing paints a particular story.

> Taking old, resolved scandals

The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.

ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.

COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though.

I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and don't mention it:

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-0...

> When training at the academy resumed in July 2020, after the four-month shutdown, class sizes were cut in half to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines.

> The pandemic hit controller hiring and training hard with on-the-job training for developmental controllers significantly dropping at facilities, resulting in delayed certification. In fiscal year 2021, the controller hiring target was dropped from 910 to 500.

> Since then, the FAA has been working to restore the training pipeline to full capacity. The agency’s Controller Workforce 2023/2032 Plan had a hiring target of 1,020 in FY 2022 (actual hires were 1,026) and 1,500 in FY 2023. The is set to increase to 1,800 in the current fiscal year.

Yep, COVID didn't help either.

However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.

I'll never find it, but a few days ago someone here posted an anecdotal story that class sizes were between 10-20 and failure/drop rate was ~50%.

I probably read the same thing, the most galling to me wasn't the failure rate it was that once you've failed you can never reapply.

For some jobs, your aptitude should matter. If a test has some discriminating power between people with aptitude and those without aptitude, then perhaps failing that test should really matter. For ATC staff perhaps OCD-adjacent traits are good and ADD-adjacent traits are bad. Maybe you don't want someone with epilepsy in ATC even though that's unfair.

Maybe we all want to be Olympic athletes and a few work hard to become so, but what should happen if we lack some necessary skill?

US lawyers get multiple attempts to take the bar exam, as an example. Should they?

Bar exam is different because it's just taking a test. Testing is really easy to scale.

This is more not allowing something who dropped out of law school due to academics to be readmitted because law school slots are precious if your goal is to make X amount of lawyers per year.

Across 2023 and 2024 the en route academy pass rate was ~66% and terminal pass rate was ~73%. Of that, ~25% of en route trainees fail at their facility and ~15-20% of terminal trainees fail at their facility. There are ~2 en route trainees per terminal trainee.

Here ya go:

Academy attrition on page 38.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

Figure, it was in a PDF that search engines had trouble scraping. I feel like FAA is burying this data on purpose because it looks terrible.

Reading deeper, on page 40 that has historical data, starting FY14 when this survey had been implemented and initial class hired, Academy Training Attrition appears to be much higher though all I can base this on is comparing bar graph sizes. So yes, this change to hiring process did impact staffing levels because academy attrition was higher.

Possibly but I'd argue it's far from a smoking gun.

The sequester of 2013 did a number on things and they hired to maximum capacity in the years after to make up for lost time. It stands to reason that by filling training to the max, they'd have more washouts due to lack of more attention during training.

> The sequestration in 2013 and subsequent hiring freeze resulted in the FAA not hiring any new controllers for nearly 9 months across FY 2013 and FY 2014. The effects of this disruption on the hiring pipeline, as well as the FAA Air Traffic Academy’s operations, were substantial.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

Yep, hmmm. It just sucks that this data which should be easy to find is not and FAA clearly has since they put out the report with it.

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

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

I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation.

You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers.

That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio.

Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the impact of having a 56% higher attrition rate!

Here's a bunch of plans to comb through for the full numbers. I don't have a spreadsheet off hand.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-11/FAA-Controll...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

Alas - my key point is this: the statement

> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes."

may have been highly attributable in 2018 timeframe but the real culprit is just as likely the 2013 sequester - I'd caution to say any one cause is the reason but rather there is a combination between a shift in applicant pool, having to deal with a slight burst in retirements, recovering from sequester and revamped training processes. Heck - maybe even not having an administrator from 2017-2018 might have caused issues.

In the cold light of 2025 with impacts from COVID still reverberating, I'd doubt hiring practices as much as any other arbitrary reason.

When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading.

Yes, academy attrition.

I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.

My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.

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

Of course not. Multiple things can be (and are) factors at the same time. I'm not asking people to ignore COVID, I'm asking them to not ignore this.

Ok-but you make a sweeping statement about the impact to safety and ATC numbers in the wake of an air tragedy - do you expect me to weigh this as heavily as COVID?

While I agree with the surface evaluation(you have likely lower quality initial candidates(not necessarily race induced) = more academy failures = more pressure on upstream DEV/CFC training) - you'd need to identify a few things such as why the spike didn't occur in 2014-2016 in such large #s compared to 2017, what safety data tells us about this time and how number of flight actions per controller has changed over time after this hiring change.

I find it somewhat disingenuous to consider safety and tie it back to this as you present it as the only cause while failing to mention other inputs.

This is NOT TO SAY you do not have a very valid discussion here - I just am frustrated to see it tied into modern day without hashing through other modern causes - folks who want to point a finger at "disadvantaged candidate hiring." get all the hay they need when nothing else is mentioned.

It wasn’t “Covid” — it was the vaccine mandate.

Yes, the scandal is not over because the FAA continued to conflate diversity with performance.

In 2023, the FAA set several, major goals for DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FY23%20OSI-M%20and%2...

Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion = Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...

Too many examples. Compared to 2016, the FAA of the 2020s was better at hiding their written bias. Nonetheless, they failed to attract the talent they needed.

The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.

With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case.

The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.

Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?

if this question is in good faith, you can read about this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory that answers your question.

It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et al

> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.

- Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

This is not a serious answer. IMO the fairest but not necessarily most accurate characterization for Ibram X. Kendi would be charlatan (others could say he's deliberately inducing racial hatred and stoking division). Additionally, according to recent news Boston University fired him and closed down his "antiracist research" center.

He's an academic with multiple publications in the field. How am I, a lay person, supposed to tell if he's a charlatan? He certainly takes himself seriously and has a successful academic career.

Any example could be a false Scotsman. If my example is bad, please provide some that are better. I tried to educate myself on this five years ago and I looked up the people who were recommended to me by DEI practitioners. At the time, Kendi and DiAngelo were held up as icons of the movement.

In American public school twenty years ago we also read Why Do All The Black Kids Sit Together In The Cafeteria. That would also be a good place to start learning about this ideology. Or is that book written by a charlatan, too?

This kind of goalpost moving is as predictable as it is disappointing. You cannot argue with an ideology if it can't be defined, so the practitioners of this one -- descended from Deconstructionism so no wonder they are happy to play word games -- won't allow opponents to define the ideology in the first place!

Well good job, folks, because the reaction to this movement is MAGA.

As soon as they "fired" him he was hired by Howard to direct a new institute there.

That just leads to an endless cycle where each group tries to avenge discrimination by the other group.

DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce. There's nothing that implies exclusion unless you are intentionally bad faithing the meaning.

Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white people!

There's a difference between forcing a white person to give up a seat, and letting a black person sit anywhere on the bus. But both of these are being labelled "DEI" in this thread.

Again, nobody is arguing that the FAA didn't shoot themselves in the foot by introducing a dumb assessment that threw out good candidates. But I think there should be nothing scandalous or wrong with the FAA trying to be available to more candidates.

The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to use it for more forceful discrimination.

It would serve those who truly just want to make sure our society all starts from the same starting line to come up with a new term, one that encompasses meritocracy as the goal along with generous helping hands along the way (training programs, tutoring programs, outside-the-class mentorship opportunities). And to focus on helping lower _class and income_ folks get a leg up, not on including or excluding people by characteristics that are a circumstance of birth (skin color).

> The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to use it for more forceful discrimination.

Nah. The problem is dishonest hucksters who want to broadly label everything, regardless of applicability, as bad in an effort to provide their supporters with an easy “anti-X” bumper sticker.

DEI advocates came up with DEI to do precisely what you suggest - the right wing rebranded it as “everyone hates white men” and “be afraid of black pilots”. Almost like they just did the same thing with “woke” and “CRT” before it.

It’s extremely tiring to have people like you waltz into conversations to complain about terms you’re busily redefining, being used in their original context, because you don’t like what your own redefinitions imply.

> _class and income_

Yes, part of my company’s DEI effort was to ensure that a JD didn’t, for instance, specify a college degree if it wasn’t really needed. Thank you, again, for restating things that are already occurring because you’re not a part of those conversations or are unaware of those conversations.

> DEI advocates came up with DEI to do precisely what you suggest - the right wing rebranded it as “everyone hates white men”

Ironic that you're posting this on a story that shows DEI was applied in exactly the opposite way you're claiming, because certain people passed the AT-SAT at higher rates so they had to be eliminated from consideration before they could even take it.

The DEI label has indeed been placed on overtly discriminatory practices. At 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at carried out explicit discirmination under the banner of DEI. One such DEI policy was reserving a segment engineering headcount for "diverse" candidates. Quite literally forcing white and Asian men to give up their seat.

You're not in the position to unilaterally declare what DEI is and is not. I don't deny that there are plenty of non-discriminatory DEI programs that genuinely do aim to reduce discrimination. I don't think it's a good move to try and deny that DEI encompasses exclusionary and discriminatory practices, when so many people have witnessed exclusionary and discriminatory DEI programs firsthand.

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

Huge difference.

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

If I deliberately hire whites more than other races nobody would deny that is discrimination. If I deliberately hire more minorities than whites, that is not discrimination?

That depends: Are you underpaying them? The question, "why" matters here a lot.

"I tend to prefer minorities because I can underpay and get away with more" is a thing that exists in the real world. See: Immigrant farm workers and H1B visa holders.

Is that discrimination against white/majorities or is it a kind of discrimination against minorities? It's injustice, for sure but I point it out because DEI policies, discrimination, racism, and sexism come in many, many forms. There's a ton of nuance and grey areas.

I think specifically hiring somebody because of their race is not just problematic but outright racist. I don't care if you are doing it because you want to underpay them or because you just dislike their race.

If somebody decided he wanted more white people because he prefers whites, that would be discrimination. Nobody denies that, but when the races are swapped, suddenly it is nuanced? Give me a break!

The "nuanced" argument you're responding to at least gives a window into why LLMs all talk about this same sort of nonsense and have this same bias. This kind of thinking is absolutely rampant these days -- especially on Reddit, which makes up a large portion of the training data.

Using race as a metric in your hiring decisions, for any reason at all, is illegal. You simply cannot do it. Not as a tie breaking point, not a plus factor-- nothing at all.

The law is crystal clear on this:

https://x.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/1752006517761421719?t=v...

Yet it is impossible to implement Affirmative Action without discriminating based on race.

And no one is going to care if some farmer won’t hire white people for his farm.

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

Affirmative action is racism. So is the lack of affirmative action.

Turns out this is a complex topic. Anyone pushing a simplistic viewpoint either doesn’t understand the topic or has ulterior motives.

So what is the answer? Because racism in hiring is illegal.

What I said is based on the 14th amendment, as part of the highest law of the land.

Perhaps anyone pushing doubt with ZERO substance behind their claim has ulterior motives.

Holy shit.

You can still delete this.

If your candidate pool is 80% white and you hire 25% minorities, is that discrimination? I have seen people argue (rabidly!) both ways on that question.

Discrimination involves deliberately factoring the applicant's class into hiring decisions.

Discrimination isn't determined by looking at single digit percentage differences in aggregate statistics.

That is not deliberately hiring whites? That is just hiring whites by happenstance. I am talking about choosing the white candidate because he is white.

That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:

> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.

That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.

I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"

I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.

DEI: Diversity Equity Inclusion

Diversity of race (encouraging racism), equity of income (encouraging envy), inclusion of "the marginalized" (discouraging free association)

Except, as a government program, this turns from mere encouragement to forcing the issues, under threat of fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death.

In the words of famous actor Morgan Freeman; "If you want to end racism, stop talking about it." (1)

1) https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubl...

>including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out

I think that is the crux of the issue right there. It's taken as a "sky-is-blue" level fact that everyone is equal in all regards, and therefore any inequality in outcome is a function of bigoted policy at some level. This is despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, which kind of elevates DEI to an ideological position rather than a logical one, and arguably undermines the confidence of people who would ostensibly be considered "DEI Hires".

Companies have largely side-stepped this however, because underneath it all, they still want the most productive workers, regardless of their labels. So they implement a farcical DEI to keep up appearances, while still allowing hiring of whoever is deemed the most productive for a team.

I'll try to assume good faith, but this is the sort of framing often used in the waning days of unpopular ideas.

That's not what DEI ever was. It fundamentally came down to evaluating disparate impact and then setting targets based on it. The underlying idea is that if a given pool (in the US, generally national- or state-level statistics) has a racial breakdown like so:

  10% X
  30% Y
  60% Z

But your company or organization had a breakdown of:

  5% X
  25% Y
  70% Z

You are institutionally racist and need to pay money to various DEI firms in order to get the right ratios, where 'right' means matching (or exceeding) the population for certain ethnic minorities. The 'certain ethnic minorities' value changed over time depending on who you would ask.

The methods to get 'the right ratios' varied from things like colorblind hiring (which had a nil or opposite effect), to giving ATS-bypassing keywords to minority industry groups (what the FAA did here).

I think it’s helpful to distinguish between botched DEI efforts and the broader intent behind DEI. Just because certain organizations implement it clumsily or rely on simplistic quota-filling doesn’t mean the entire idea is inherently flawed—any more than a poorly executed “merit-based” system would mean all attempts at measuring merit are invalid. If anything’s really losing credibility right now, it’s the myth of a pure American meritocracy.

At its best, DEI is about recognizing that systemic barriers exist and trying to widen the funnel so more people get a fair shot. That doesn’t have to conflict with a desire for genuinely skilled employees. Of course, there are ham-fisted applications out there (as with any policy), but that doesn’t negate the underlying principles, which aren’t just about numbers—they’re about improving access and opportunity for everyone.

Can you provide an example of what you would consider a good implementation of DEI efforts, as opposed to a "botched" one?

For me, the best DEI successes are the ones that reduce bias without relying on clumsy quotas. Blind auditions in orchestras led to a big jump in women getting hired. Intel’s push to fund scholarships and partner with HBCUs broadened their pipeline in a real way. And groups like Code2040 connect Black and Latino engineers with mentors and jobs, targeting root causes instead of surface-level fixes.

Hilarious that you mentioned the blind auditions in orchestras because now the DEI goons want to get rid of them! They say it hasn't got enough minorities in. Absolute proof that these people care only about race and don't give a damn about fairness. Source https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...

The article you linked discusses how problematic the other non-blind parts of the audition are: leaving people out ahead of the blind audition, pre-advancing people, and so on. One of the conclusions was that if the whole process was actually blind, the outcome would be better.

That article is not “absolute proof” of anything, it’s just a discussion if blind auditions are the be-all end-all. Your comment is very low quality and unnecessarily hostile. Referring to Black people discussing how to get more minorities interested in orchestras as “DEI goons” is one step removed from a slur.

I intend to slur the DEI goons. My opinion of the DEI bureaucracy is such that there is no way to express it politely. 'Contempt' and 'hate' would be such an understatement as to be dishonest.

So what do you think of all the "DEI" hires in the Trump administration? Or do you think a second-rate alcoholic domestic abusing Fox News host is the best individual on the merits to run the DoD?

Not a fan

Yes, famously the Australian Government tried that and undid it as pesky white men were being hired at a greater rate because of them[1].

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

The difference was within the margin of error (only a 3% change), which is very inconclusive. That's fine. Making the world a more inclusive place is hard. There's lots of people (see this thread) who clearly believe that certain races and genders are biologically superior.

I think the vast number of small and medium sized companies who quietly opened their hiring funnel up to a wider audience, would be considered good implementations. Not all companies reached for quotas and other hamfisted efforts that detractors constantly point to.

DO you have examples of companies whose funnels were not open to "wider audience" prior to DEI? Lets say this century.

Tech has been meritocratic for decades with few exceptions.

Examples are going to be hard to come by. No company is going to publicly admit that they used to be limiting their hiring pipeline in such a way. Admittedly, this also means that I'm speculating that the number of companies are "vast". Surely many have quietly made the change.

Sample size of one, I worked in the past for a company whose entire staff was white men, 100%. Except for a single role: the receptionist at the front desk. There is no reasonable biological explanation for this extreme distribution.

There are tons of studies that have shown that if your name is sounding like you're from a minority your chances of being invited for an interview are significantly lower. Similar if you include photos.

As a side note, it's quite ironic that engineers often tend to complain about performance metrics and that they are being gamed, not really a good measure of merit..., but the same people turn around and argue that the everything should be a meriocracy.

DEI was the reason GitHub was forced to remove its meritocracy rug. Do you remember that? People questions whether it was a meritocracy based on disparate impact[1].

It has almost never been about widening the size of the funnel, and almost always about putting the thumb on the scales for chosen people.

[1] https://www.creators.com/read/susan-estrich/03/14/whats-wron...

> If anything’s really losing credibility right now, it’s the myth of a pure American meritocracy.

It only became a myth when we were forced to consider factors beyond merit in hiring.

The part that always made this obviously insane for any systems-thinking person is as follows:

For the sake of the argument, assume that X, Y, and Z all have ~100% equal preference for positions A, B, and C at a given company or organization, and assume that it is merely “historical/institutional discrimination” that has led to X, Y, and Z percentages of A, B, and C failing to match X, Y, and Z population percentages at any given company or organization.

If both of these suppositions were 100% verifiably true, then it would stand to reason that, due to historical/institutional reasons, there would not be equal percentages of X, Y, and Z people who are competent at A, B, and C positions, relative to X, Y, and Z population percentages—because competency at a given position at a given company/organization is not generally something you are born with, but a set of skills/proficiencies that were honed over a period of time.

Therefore, the solution in this scenario should be to solely focus on education/training A, B, and C skills/proficiencies for whichever X, Y, and Z populations are “underrepresented”—plus also, presumably, some sort of oversight that ensures that a given person of equal competency/proficiency is given equal consideration for a given position at a given company/organization, regardless of whether they are X, Y, or Z.

But this would necessarily mean that, for some period of time until sufficient “correction” could occur, X, Y, and Z percentages for positions A, B, and C would continue to fail to match X, Y, and Z population percentages… because one doesn't simply become proficient at A, B, or C overnight, in the vast majority of cases.

However, the “DEI” proponents wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to claim that not only are the preceding assumptions regarding equal population group preferences completely, verifiably, absolutely true—but also, that this problem should be solvable essentially overnight, such that, in short order, one could casually glance at a given slice of employees/members of a given company/organization and see a distribution of individuals that maps ~1:1 with the breakdown of the population.

Any systems-thinking person could (and did) rather easily realize that this is just not how systems like these work—you cannot “refactor” society so easily, such that the “tests” (output) continue to “pass”, simply by tweaking surface-level parameters (“reverse” hiring discrimination). If the problems are indeed as dire as claimed, then instead, proper steps must be taken to solve the root causes of the perceived disparities—and also, proper steps must be taken to ensure that the base assumptions you started with (~100% equal career preference between population groups) were indeed correct to begin with.

This is not to say that things were and are perfect, or as close to perfect as we can get—nor that attempts to improve things and reduce and remove bias and discrimination as much as possible are anything but noble goals.

But if you want to solve a problem, you have to do so correctly, and that is quite clearly not what has been done—therefore, perhaps it's time to take a few steps back and reconsider things somewhat.

This is where the "critical mass" argument comes in: you (allegedly) need people who superficially look like you in the roles to inspire you to learn the skills needed for that position. Thus, working to correct poor education due to systemic racism isn't enough, you need to also temporarily fill role-model positions with less-qualified candidates.

And this argument reveals the grotesque truth of the matter: it's not actually about ensuring that everyone is treated equally and fairly—it's actually about socially engineering segments of the population other than one's own, to act in accordance with one's wishes, such that one feels good about oneself. This is all done utterly selfishly and self-servingly, regardless of not only whatever said population segments actually desire for themselves, but also regardless of potential nth-order consequences of these actions for the rest of society.

Additionally, in acting this way, one unwittingly (I hope!) infantilizes these other population segments, robbing them of agency and self-determination in the process!

The whole thing is a complete mess, top-to-bottom—and, as a society, we are long overdue in reevaluating this entire line of thinking and how willfully we accept it at face value.

> The part that always made this obviously insane for any systems-thinking person is as follows [...] if the problems are indeed as dire as claimed, then instead, proper steps must be taken to solve the root causes of the perceived disparities—and also, proper steps must be taken to ensure that the base assumptions you started with

That's why a smart systems-thinking person kept it to themselves.

It's a funny thing. It's one of those issues where everyone in the room will publicly always nod and agree with at the time, yet everyone thinks "this is not going to lead to a good outcome".

So basically everyone could see the train crashing at some point but nobody would say anything.

An evidence of this is as soon as the "floodgates" opened, all these companies started dropping DEI initiatives and closing departments like that. If their bottom lines clearly showed they had improved their financials due to it, they would adamantly defend it or double down. But they are not:

Boeing:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/boeing-quietly-dis...

Meta:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/10/tech/meta-ends-dei-progra...

Not sure how you'd call this phenomenon? Ideological prisoner's dilemma? It should have a name, I feel.

> An evidence of this is as soon as the "floodgates" opened, all these companies started dropping DEI initiatives and closing departments like that. If their bottom lines clearly showed they had improved their financials due to it, they would adamantly defend it or double down.

Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the reason, not financial performance. The Meta representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the initiative affected the company's bottom line.

> Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the reason, not financial performance. The Meta representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the initiative affected the company's bottom line.

Of course they won't say it doesn't work. They'll cite external pressure or other reason. But they get pressure from customers for privacy and other issues, yet that doesn't phase them much. So if they saw clear advantage to the policy, say it just improved their bottom line, stock price, etc, they would have easily brushed away the "pressure" and said "sorry, we're here to make a profit and this makes us a profit, tough luck".

If the real reason these companies dropped the policies was that they were unprofitable, and their bottom lines showed it, then why did they wait until exactly November 2024 to all drop them at once? Surely they could have discovered this many quarters ago. Did the policies just suddenly become unprofitable right as the next political administration was decided? Why would company directors across entire industries just sit there nodding their heads, as you say, voluntarily not making more profit for shareholders? It doesn't seem like the bottom line was the real reason in this case.

They may have feared the negative PR of dropping the policies would be more costly than the policies themselves.

They couldn't drop it as it would have affected their ESG rating, which impacts the ability to get loans and raise capital, etc.

Looks like you've been getting downvoted, but I think you raise perfectly valid points -- and I say this as a proponent of DEI, but not of quotas (or this type of population matching).

I believe that the best solutions occur when we try to address root causes -- sincerely attempt to address them. The problem is that even in doing that, you often have to introduce inequality into the system. For example, mortality rates for black females giving birth are multiples higher than white females. To address this will likely mean spending more money on black female health research. The question is where is the line. Is prenatal spending inequality OK? Is early childhood development inequality of spending OK? What about magnet HS? What about elite colleges? What about entry level jobs? Executive positions? Jail sentencing? Cancer research? Etc...

The other thing we can do is simply say, "This is too much. Lets just assume race doesn't exist." This is almost tempting, except outside of government policy race is such a big factor in how people are treated in life -- it seems like we're just punting on a problem because its hard.

I think when we as humans can say, "Hmm... there is someting impacting this subset of humans that seems like it shouldn't. I'm OK overindexing on it." then we will make progress. But I think while we view things as "this is less good for me personally" it will always be contentious.

The conundrum is that by thinking this way about population groups that are not your own, and imposing your will—no matter how well-intentioned—upon them, you are undermining the agency and self-determination of said population groups.

I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined—and while this is certainly possible in theory, it's essentially impossible to do under the auspices of what currently qualifies as “political correctness”.

> I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined

How do you discover deeper-rooted causes if you can't be provided resources to study the distinction? How can you understand why black women are 3x more likely to die at child birth than white women if the funding agencies don't care about the answer?

That sure is a topic that is well outside the purview of this discussion. But for what it's worth, I generally don't place a lot of stock in studies that report such findings anymore—their methods don't usually hold up to much scrutiny, in my experience.

It’s about things that may have impacts on future outcomes with discrepancies based on race. Probably some correlation with child outcomes and their mother dying at birth.

DEI started as exactly what the original poster stated. It then has transformed many times, including through quotas (ruled unconstitutional in the 70s), and something similar to what you're talking about, to the more modern notion which is more about getting the best candidates from all populations.

Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has happened. For example, https://www.ashkingroup.com/insights-media/the-power-of-blin...

The only place I can think of where the opposite is with college admissions, but college admissions is a weird thing in general in that I've never understood why admissions is tied to a stronger academic record (ties into, what's the goal of a given college). In areas such as sports, the impact has been even greater -- and there it's not even colorblind, but simply opened up the pool, and is more metrics driven than just about any profession.

Not really. Everything is downstream of the pressure on organizations to address disparate impact. Some examples:

When a company is under pressure to boost the number of X engineers, they quickly run into the 'pipeline problem'. There simply isn't enough X engineers on the market. So they address that by creating scholarship funds exclusively for race X.

When a school is under pressure to have the racial makeup of it's freshman class meet the right ratios, it has to adjust admission criteria. Deprioritize metrics that the wrong races score well on, prioritize those that the right races score well on. If we've got too many Y, and they have high standardized test scores? Start weighing that lower until we get the blend we're supposed to have.

The goal of the college is not to get the students with the strongest academic record: it's to satisfy the demand for the right ratios.

Repeat over and over in different ways at different institutions.

> Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has happened. For example ...

The study underlying that post is a great example of another downstream effect of DEI efforts. That study did _not_ show what the headline or abstract claimed.

When you hide the gender of performers, it ends up either nil or slightly favoring men. That particular study has been cited thousands of times, and it's largely nonsense.

http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...

The study did show it. The author of this critique properly notes that Table 4 is not an apples to apples comparison. The author of the study notes that expanding the pool of women as used in Table 4 likely brought in less talented musicians disproportionately.

Table 5 does the more apples to apples comparison. The critique notes that sample size is too small, but it captures 445 blind women, 816 blind men, 599 non-blind women, and 1102 non-blind men auditions. That's certainly sufficient for a study like this.

The study also does reflect how when a population feel like there is less bias against them in a system they are more likely to participate -- even if that means on average the level of "merit" might go down, but those that make it through the filter will better reflect actual meritocracy -- and that's what this study showed as well.

No, it doesn't. This is a dramatic reach and complete misunderstanding of the stats. The data in table 5 is not statistically significant.

If you go down to table 6 (which is also incredibly weak), it shows the opposite: men are advancing at a higher rate than women in blind auditions.

Andrew Gelman reviewed the link as well and agreed:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...

Table 5 is stat sig. There’s not a p-value given but the effect sizes are large. The knit place it’s not is the semi-final and final rounds with their smaller sizes.

And table 6 shows blind auditions significantly increased the chances of women advancing from the preliminary round and winning in the final round. However women were less likely to advance past semifinals when auditions were blind. But still a net win.

Gellman is focused on the “several fold” and “50% claims” it made. But the paper shows 11.6 and 14.8 point jumps, which are supported by the paper.

Re-read the original link, posted again below. The claims you're making are specifically addressed and are wrong.

There are multiple critical reviews of this paper. It is well-known to be largely nonsense.

http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...

I’ve read it and the author doesn’t address them. Unless they have access to additional data, such as their claims about the standard errors in Table 5 (only the Finals result has large enough errors to possibly discount). The original paper is pretty clear.

>>I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out."

I don't think anyone objects to that, but the unspoken part that seemed to be enforced was "...even if it means lowering standards and overlooking the best qualified candidates for the job, as long as we get kudos for meeting our diversity targets."

Right, if you look at the documents there was clear racial discrimination involved.

It's bizarre to see people say that since the media initially didn't report on the full story, telling people the full story is similar to "state-sponsored propoganda." That mindset appears to be saying that once the media has made up a narrative for the story, people should be hostile to other pertinent information, even when it's uncovering major aspects of the story that the media didn't report on.

That kind of attitude runs counter to anyone interested in finding out the truth.

Edit: Also worth pointing out the author's original article on this scandal was written a year ago, and a followup was recently written to clarify things in response to increased discussion about that article. They're a law student who initially wrote about it after coming across court documents and being surprised that there had been almost no coverage regarding what actually had happened.

> How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?

The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels.

There are two separate arguments happening:

Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.

Did changing their application process create a shortage of ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too many mediocre candidates.

The thing I keep looking for is dropout/failure rate. If their change in hiring procedure resulted in higher dropout/failure rate, then yes, this impacting ATC staffing but it would have been slow burn.

ATC staffing is bottlenecked by the training dropout/failure rate. 1000 people a year go in, pretty sizable dropout or fail so you are left with 500. If 700 are retiring, that's -200 overall. At some point, that -200 year over year becomes impactful.

So, if you need more people, you have two options. Increase the class size but obviously that's expensive and makes the problem slightly worse up front as you are pulling qualified people into instructor roles.

Or try to filter out those who will drop/fail in hiring process so they don't occupy class slots. One of the ways FAA had done that is CTI college courses because those graduates had lower drop/fail rate.

>Probably not!

The linked article explicitly disagrees with this opinion. In fact it comes to almost literally the opposition conclusions:

>Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.

>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.

That's not to say that you are wrong and the article is correct, but in a discussion that is started by an article, and when the article addresses exactly the points you are making, I feel that it is helpful to give explicit reasons why you think the article is mistaken.

Yeah nobody is arguing it because even the FAA admits it's true. When you talk about a "tradeoff" between quality and diversity that is an admission that DEI lowers quality.

Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?

Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires.

This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal.

Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on.

What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted.

So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.

Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.

You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications?

The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.

That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar.

There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know.

And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.

How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants pass (vs. ~60% previously) not “lowering the bar”?

"One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness) is to correlate test scores with job performance. After reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from .69 to .60..."

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&co...

That was the recruitment pipeline. You still had to pass the hiring one.

This is akin to schools that got rid of testing requirements. Agreed it was a terrible choice that should get reversed. But, to say that standards went down on graduates of the schools, you would look at the scores of graduates from said schools.

And to be clear, the expectation of lowering standards for admits to a school would be a higher dropout rate. More stress on the school and testing protocols. But this is not, itself, evidence that graduates are worse.

It's valuable to note that this paper is from 2006, and states:

"Reweighting was based on data collected from incum- bent ATCSs who took AT-SAT on a research basis; some of these employees achieved overall scores less than 70 (that was one of the reasons for the reweighting effort – a belief that incumbent employees should be able to pass the entry-level selection test)"

> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Respectfully, thats not accurate.

The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.

The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.

The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.

> Taking old, resolved scandals

In what way do you consider this resolved?

The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).

The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)

The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI.

For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"):

https://archive.ph/Qgjy5

The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.

I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here.

If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article)

Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?

If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.

Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works. Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself showed that the quota is some fraction of total applicants that results in minimal impact to performance.

Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.

The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can.

So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics.

Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.

There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above.

If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect.

So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.

Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we might come up with a threshold of 70 for the minimum score and call this "qualified". Then if you have to fill 5 slots and you got candidates scoring 50, 75 and 95, you should hire the latter two and keep the other slots unfilled until you get better candidates.

But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.

Assumptions:

1. there is a test that is a decent proxy for job performance

2. the relationship between job performance and test score above some passing score is linear

These both sound "common sense", but I suspect fail for a huge number of real world scenarios.

According to the article they actually tested the first assumption and it was true.

The second assumption is not required. If people who score a 95 are only 5% better at the job than people who score a 70, all else equal you'd still pick the person who scored a 95 given the choice.

Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic". My experience has been that beyond a certain threshold on a given test, job performance is essentially uncorrelated with test performance.

As for the article, it's not given me particular solid vibes, a feeling not helped by some of the comments here (both pro and con).

> Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic".

Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".

Also, if you had a better test then you'd use it, but at some point you have 10 candidates and 5 slots and have to use something to choose, so you use the closest approximation available until you can come up with a better one.

> Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".

Sorry, but I just don't agree. There are "qualifying tests" for jobs that I've done that just do not have any sort of monotonic relationship with job performance. I'm a firefighter (volunteer) - to become operational you need to be certified as either FF I or FF II, but neither of those provide anything more than a "yes, this person can learn the basic stuff required to do this". The question of how good a firefighter someone will be is almost orthogonal to their performance on the certification exams. Someone who gets 95% on their IFSAC FF II exam is in no way predicted to be a better firefighter than someone who got 78%.

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants

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

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.

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

It looks like the thing that stopped the slot filling was funding, not a dearth of candidates.

We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10.

That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants.

The Math is missing a third variable.

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

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

Advertising your jobs to more people (including black ones) might help you find more candidates. If you're not finding enough candidates AND you're only finding white candidates, something is wrong, innit? There are all those people who aren't white who might be candidates who for some reason you're ignoring.

How long do you go before you call it quits, and how many white candidates do you need to pass over before you find ‘enough’ black candidates? What consequences need to happen with all those unfilled roles before it is ‘enough’?

Especially since the market of people willing to work the job AND take the pay AND work in the area is not infinite.

We’re talking about a group which went out of its way (apparently) already to recruit folks with the specific colors they wanted + these other criteria.

Don’t forget, everyone else in the country has been having similar constraints and has been trying to do the same thing near as I can tell.

Why do you think they were sharing test answers (it seems), and still only got x candidates in?

And also, doesn’t this entire thing seem actively unfair and racist (albeit to everyone except the chosen minority) instead of what at worst was perhaps a passively unfair and racist situation before? (Albeit to everyone except the majority)

How is that actually any better, except that it pisses off the majority instead of the minority?

Seems like a good way to lose elections, frankly. Or have a majority of the population angry at every minority out there.

Why pass over any white candidates?

You have more spots than you have qualified candidates. Even if you take your second band candidates, its still short the number you need.

Because if your hiring numbers (and workforce composition) don’t line up with what the gov’t expects (applies even more to the gov’t itself) then as a hiring manager you’re in deep shit.

Straight from the president up until Trump (for many administrations), affirmative action is required.

And what the gov’t expects is that your workforce composition aligns with the population as a whole, percentage wise.

Again that doesnt make sense.

You have 100 open positions.

You filled 50.

You left the other 50 spots open so that you could have the right composition amongst HALF of the required workforce?

Heck, if you hire everyone, you solve this problem completely.

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

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

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

Curious to see if "disparate impact" criteria gets softened, i.e., impose requirement to find "intentional bias" (c.f. status quo)

What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.

Which part of setting up a stall in a job fair in a more diverse part of town is "forcing blacks into the job"?

From what I saw, people did that years and years ago. What happens when that isn’t sufficient?

There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.

> There are only so many black people in the country.

The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.

If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.

> Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black.

It doesn't mean that at all.

Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.

Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality. This doesn’t mean that the FAA should mess with its hiring process in an ill-conceived and very likely illegal attempt to make it look like the problem doesn’t exist.

But, to me, it would be absurd to suggest that the air traffic controllers should be “diverse” in the sense that a “minority” group should be represented in excess of its representation in the overall population, that there aren’t enough black people the US for a fair hiring process to achieve this, and that therefore an unfair process should be used to increase this sort of “diversity”. That’s all kinds of wrong!

> Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality.

No, this is false. You don't appear to know what you're trying to postulate.

Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc.

There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?

As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?

We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?

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

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

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

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

No? What are you talking about?

Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.

The article specifically talks about how the college courses were in community colleges, not bastions of privilege of any kind.

> AND you are hiring traditionally

And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.

By "hiring traditionally" they may have meant "posting a job description and application instructions". They definitely didn't continue to interact with the CTI schools.

What they didn't appear to do, at least it is not discussed, is targeted advertising towards underrepresented groups.

The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...

They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.

No, that's not an answer to that specific question.

Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.

If you have a qualification test that feels useful but also turns out to be highly non-predictive of job performance (as, for example, most college entrance exams turn out to be for college performance), you could change the qualification threshold for the test without any particular expectation of losing job performance.

In fact, it is precisely this logic that led many universities to stop using admissions tests - they just failed to predict actual performance very well at all.

> Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.

No, but it was the best predictor of job performance and academy pass rate there was.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear... (page 41)

There are a fixed number of seats at the ATC academy in OKC, so it's critical to get the highest quality applicants possible to ensure that the pass rate is as high as possible, especially given that the ATC system has been understaffed for decades.

That is NOT what the first study you've cited says at all:

> "The empirically-keyed, response-option scored biodata scale demonstrated incremental validity over the computerized aptitude test battery in predicting scores representing the core technical skills of en route controllers."

I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

> I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

You're mistaken, it's the opposite. The first one found that AT-SAT performance was the best measure, with the biodata providing a small enhancement:

> AT-SAT scores accounted for 27% of variance in the criterion measure (β=0.520, adjusted R2=.271,p<.001). Biodata accounted for an additional 2% of the variance in CBPM (β=0.134; adjusted ΔR2=0.016,ΔF=5.040, p<.05).

> In other words, after taking AT-SAT into account, CBAS accounted for just a bit more of the variance in the criterion measure

Hence, "incremental validity."

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

You're right, and I can't remember which study it was that explicitly said that it was the best measure. I'll post it here if I find it. However, given that each failed applicant costs the FAA hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can safely assume that there was no better measure readily available at the time, or it would have been used instead of the AT-SAT. Currently they use the ATSA instead of the AT-SAT, which is supposed to be a better predictor, and they're planning on replacing the AT-SAT in a year or two; it's an ongoing problem with ongoing research.

> I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

Given the limited number of controllers, this is going to be an issue in any study you find on the topic. You can only pull so many people off the boards to take these tests, so you're never going to have an enormous sample size.

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

How is that a criticism? It is always possible that someone could invent a better test.

In any case, the second citation directly refutes your point in another sub-thread with AnthonyMouse, the assertion that higher-performing applicants above the cutoff do not perform better on the job:

"If all applicants scoring 70 or above on the AT-SAT are selected, slightly over one-third would be expected to be high performers. With slightly greater selectivity, taking only applicants scoring 75.1 or above, the proportion of high performers could be increased to nearly half."

Also:

"The primary point is that applicants who score very high (at 90) on the AT-SAT are expected to perform near the top of the distribution of current controllers (at the 86th percentile)."

Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.

"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you consider cronyism except ‘members of this organization share cheats and get each other in’?

"Cronyism (noun, derogatory): the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications."

Cronyism is advancing the interests of your personal connections. Friends and family. If you want an explicit cutoff, the Dunbar Number suggests this group should have 100, maybe 150 people in it.

Conversely, there's 40 million black people in the US, and I really doubt anyone is even associated with all of them, much less calling them one of their friends.

You can change who you're friends with a lot easier than you can change your skin color, so the two result in different problems. They're both bad, of course. Similar to how "wage theft" and "shoplifting" are different crimes, even though both of them involve taking money from someone else.

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

Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism, and is the same problem.

In this case, a criteria for joining this ‘fraternity’ is the color of their skin.

Hence double applicable with DEI.

Why do you keep insisting on ignoring half of what you are pasting?

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

First, the FAA and the NBCFAE are different organizations.

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

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

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

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

Are all internal promotions cronyism?

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

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

I’m saying going out of your way to get people from a specific organization that you are also a member of hired where you work, is cronyism.

Also, going out of your way to hire people of specific skin color where you work, is racism.

Seems like a bunch of folks at the FAA were doing both here, yes?

Totally agreed on this being racist, illegal, and just absurdly unethical. I just think the way you're understanding the word "cronyism" is going to lead to a lot of confusion, because it's not the way most people use it.

I'll offer up the Wikipedia definition, since it is perhaps slightly clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronyism defines it as "friends or trusted colleagues".

give up. you won't convince anyone. if corruption have any minority scape goat, it's "them".

I think might be misreading the article.

It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.

Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

You might be confused by this line:

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees

That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.

It can be both.

I get that you’re trying to contribute to the conversation, but you do realize that what you’re saying sounds racist?

In addition, this is a diversion from the elephant in the room, which is that right after some dramatic executive action, many people died within a short amount of time due to a crash that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with chaotic governance.

Oh no, what he said sounds racist! He shouldn’t contribute to the conversation then.

If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family.

I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.

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

If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of time before one of the pilot errors the system was designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a collision.

There's obviously some number of mistakes one party can make in a single incident such that the other has a limited probability of preventing an accident. If flight control is the robustness, it would take flight control with a lot of free time to be reducing those mistakes in pilots by following up on all sorts of errors unrelated to an incident until a pilot rarely makes multiple overlapping mistakes.

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

It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that?

If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained again.

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

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

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

There are already many actions to correct pilots. But human efforts are never perfect and we don't expect them to be, for both the pilots and the air traffic controllers. Which is why they're designed to backstop one another, and why compromising either one of them increases the probability of a collision.

> If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.

They did.

Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.

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

Congress stopped the shitty behavior quiz 9 years ago

> The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

> The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

Separate from the above posts, the FAA continued their discriminatory policies. For example, setting several DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...

The problem is it hasn’t been resolved, there is a big lawsuit about it still working its way through the courts.

A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.

> be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?

Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was interesting

From the article:

> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.

This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will be in the first few sentences they say.

The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to place in it.

Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.

Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy reflects on the changes some seek.

> Likely yes.

Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...

That is the frustrating part - the article had it's lane and just had to stick in it.

Instead, we get someone extrapolating and guessing when we have actual data from COVID on class delays/size reduction(as well as more controllers retiring earlier) coupled with lower training intensity while air traffic was depressed.

This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?

Because COVID happened much sooner and has likely had a bigger impact than the hiring practices from a decade ago - notice we don't have a concrete number of "disadvantaged qualified candidates" from this article. Whereas, I can point COVID with actual numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952695

If we're going to say "Did that contribute to a shortage of qualified ATC..?" then you have to considering all inputs into what is a current conversation rather than extrapolate your already asserted points from the article.

Weren't you the one who said ...

> the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.

Looking at [1], the difference between planned and actual hires in 2013–2015 was 1362, much higher than during 2020–2022 when it was just 384 (and this is using the pre-COVID target).

I don't know what happened in 2013–2015, but whatever it was, it seems to have had a 3.5 times bigger impact than COVID.

Well, we do know one thing that happened: this scandal.

[1] https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...

You know what also happened in 2013?

> The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a hiring freeze to help blunt the sequester’s impact, but that threatens to disrupt the pipeline of new air traffic controllers needed to replace the thousands of workers eligible for retirement.

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/air-controllers-caugh...

We know that happened as well.

In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal.

Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.

Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.

Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.

It’s also still deeply embedded in education. DEI might be less popular in the workforce but in primary and secondary education stuff like lowering standards, ignoring test failures, removing gifted classes, merging special needs classes in mainline, changing classroom conflict resolution to not remove disruptive kids from classrooms, etc are all still going strong and increasing in prevalence. That will have a ripple effect in the workforce for decades after the Overton window has shifted back.

And in the US the federal government can’t stop it as it’s mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would only have limited influence there.

Athletes are the original DEI. And Trump (the president!) didn’t have good grades.

> Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop.

See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this

Resolved? By whom?

> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..."

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

"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment."

It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.

> The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.

Except it was demonstrably of the opposite of this. The bigraphical questionnaire rejected 90% of applicants for no justifiable reason.

In practice, diversity is much easier to achieve by reducing the opportunities of the undesirable demographics. This is one such example.

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

The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.

> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.

I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.

Add to that the effort to repeal California’s ban on affirmative action: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-californ...

It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. This is a deeply unpopular idea, so it gets hidden behind various labels. Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).

> It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs.

I draw a line between "need explicit racial references in hiring" and the "biographical questionnaire" in the article. The later was explicit deception, what I want to call fraud though maybe dose not fit the technical definition, and was correctly labeled cheating since the answers were apparently handed out. I can not lump all this activities together and label it as one thing at least due to the line I drew above and likely other lines I would draw as digging in to more details.

> Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).

I think you are simplifying too much here. The way this reads is that everyone on the other side of the issue to you is either masks off and is like Ibram Kendi, or is masks on and hiding it how they are like Ibram Kendi.

I do not buy it is that simple, the world is more complex than that with people that have a wide variety of motivations and goals.

Read Tracing Woodlines’ articles. The biographical questionnaire was a means to achieve indirectly what the FAA couldn’t achieve directly (explicit racial preferences).

I’m not oversimplifying it. A lot of people want explicit racial preferences to achieve racial diversity. That’s both unpopular and (now) illegal, so you get lots of different workarounds.

Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial preferences. But in practice DEI programs turn into racial preferences and quotas because those people won’t stand up to the ones who want preferences.

> Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial preferences. But in practice DEI programs turn into racial preferences and quotas because those people won’t stand up to the ones who want preferences.

I see leadership wanting to move with current politic climate and when they go to implementing things not really caring who they hire other than who is going to make their lives easier. That then results in hucksters, con artists, selling their services, quick fixes, cookie cutter solutions, to those leaders who then get what they wanted, fitting in with the current political climate, not real fixes which are often hard, can have unknown risks and timelines.

Blame bad leadership, blame hucksters, and con artists, that is where I lean.

> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".

And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.

"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."

Spot on for this guy.

If you look at the articles on this blog, it’s clear the author has an agenda. The site is filed away as “view with suspicion” for me

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

How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again.

Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.

Working effectively in ATC without burnout hanging over your head constantly favours a certain amount of neurodivergence. A certain kind of delight in detail, delight in predictable progression of system. The overload needs to invigorate , not fatigue.

This doesn’t make ATC professionals better people. It doesn’t make them smarter. It doesn’t make them superhuman. It makes them better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits probably make them worse at many others.

We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.

Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more comfortable and easier.

Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and neurological development. is there really any difference, or is neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity?

Different is not a value judgement.

In case you [need citation] of this analysis, please see the 1999 "documentary" Pushing Tin, starring John Cusack. :)

Not all people are the same.

Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than others.

Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something exceptionally simple.

What's a better word?

Autism...

That is really not what I meant. I meant that people have a variety of innate cognitive strengths and weaknesses, similar to physical strengths and weaknesses. Clinical autism and other disorders are when a cognitive trait becomes so extreme that it represents a significant obstacle to normal functioning in the context of your cultural environment.

innate personality types?

Maybe it’s become politicised or fetishized and we need a new word again. But yeah, that was kinda my point. Hire people that thrive in that environment.

Neither the FAA situation nor the article are about neurodiversity.

> We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.

In the situation of hiring people for specific jobs, filtering for a perceived "neurodiversity" would have no scientific basis.

Fortunately, hiring doesn't work this way. The idea is to hire for people who are qualified for and capable of the job, not to try to evaluate questionable proxies like neurodiversity.

I think you maybe misunderstood what I was saying. I’m saying that neurodivergence is why some people thrive at certain jobs that others would find exhausting.

Ergo we should test for ability, not some arbitrary representation of race, sex, or other non-task related metric.

Testing for ability is exactly what they were originally doing before the NBCFAE got involved in the FAA's well established hiring process.

I get your point, but to be clear this is already what they were doing since 1989 up until 2013.

Yes, exactly. They had it on lock until someone decided that we should not be selecting for the arguably unusual traits that foster excellence and talent retention in ATC.

> I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations.

This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.

I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds. It’s simply a case of DEI either being implemented in a lazy or stupid way to tick boxes OR it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own. If DEI didn’t exist, the above things would still happen, just for a different reason and possibly different group of activists.

How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills.

And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".

As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy option and just threw out white candidates from the pipeline. I also include “setting hiring targets” as a lazy and stupid way of “achieving DEI,” just for clarity.

This is kind of like the argument that communism is great but no one has been able to implement it correctly yet. "Setting targets" having highly paid DEI consultants, and identity based hiring is what DEI is. Lowercase diversity and inclusion are good ideals, which I think is what you are saying. Uppercase DEI are the exact policies we are talking about here.

I’ve provided a list of DEI hiring policies that don’t fit into your list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302

I said at the top of my thread that the refusal of people in power to engage with criticisms like this thoughtfully has allowed the far right to toxify these debates and I think the downvotes and responses to my comments are minor, but perfect, examples of my point. Instead of discussing the issues and how they should be fixed, the “debate” breaks down into “DEI bad” on your side and “saying DEI bad is racist/sexist/etc.” on the other side.

Blind reviews (and even interviews) are great ways of making hiring more fair. They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches. DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than treating applicants equally irrespective of background. That's the E and I part. The entire premise is that certain groups require special support (fair - e.g.: blind people, wheel chair users), and have been historically excluded because of bias (sometimes true, often wholly false - much of the time differential hiring is path dependent with fewer qualified applicants from a given group).

> They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches.

This is essentially a No True Scotsman fallacy. If it's DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by definition, not part of DEI.

> DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than treating applicants equally irrespective of background.

The first part of this is incorrect. Good DEI is about creating a level playing field (as you correctly point out for blind people or wheelchair users). Obviously, this isn't possible in all cases: I think everyone agrees we wouldn't want a blind taxi driver.

> The entire premise is that certain groups require special support

This is correct. Fair criticism of DEI initiatives can be levied at those which don't do this effectively and instead shortcut by using, say, hiring quotas. I've said multiple times that things like this are lazy and stupid because they don't address the lack of opportunity for disadvantaged backgrounds.

> and have been historically excluded because of bias (sometimes true, often wholly false

This is an inaccurate stating of the situation. Some groups (e.g. black people in the USA) are excluded due to bias. Some have been excluded due to situational factors (young white men in the UK have worse outcomes due to poverty). Good DEI initiatives attempt to counter these, with varying levels of success.

Let me take the article as an example. They identified an advantage for people on CTI programmes, which also happened to turn out good ATC operators. This may have advantaged people who could afford to attend the programmes, which could have skewed white male. A good DEI initiative might have been to put the work into outreach in under-represented areas to get more people of colour into CTI programmes. Instead, the FAA banned CTI programmes, threw the students there to the wolves, and seemed to sneak in a test designed to hit hiring quotas. Not only was this discriminatory, it also actively reduced the number of qualified ATC operators.

Nowhere in this scenarios did I need to fall back on "DEI bad," because I tried to discuss the specific issues within the article.

These are really good points, it's depressing as hell to see the the quality of discussion around this stuff. Obviously DEI is great when it's trying to fix things on the input side.

Perhaps I can simplify this argument. If you have a lift heavy things job, which we can agree that women on average are worse at, you shouldn't hire more women by quota, but you could provide free weight training for women. Both things are DEI, the latter is the kind of DEI we want.

I think in your example, you shouldn't hire by quota, but you also shouldn't exclude women or introduce obstacles that exclude them. It's so weird that this has turned into such a controversial statement!

The problem is that DEI in practice tends to be the other kind of stuff. I think at this point it's actually kinda disingenuous to pretend that "DEI" is "just diversity, equity, and inclusion" (i.e. that you can just point at the dictionary definitions of these words to explain what it is). No, it's a very specific political mindset, and the label is now firmly associated with it. You can't say that "DEI is just equality" anymore so than you can say that about "all lives matter".

> The problem is that DEI in practice tends to be the other kind of stuff

And what does the political opposite of those initiatives look like in practice?

What does it look like in practice when you don't stop and wonder why women make up 20% of your qualified candidate pool, but only 7% of your workforce? (As another poster observed.)

Do you just shrug your shoulders, assume that your perfectly meritocratic (By whose definition?) system is free of any form of systemic or personal bias, and move on, without wondering why?

It's not wrong to stop and wonder why, but if you do, the answers are nearly always systemic, and cannot be solved at any single point by basically handicapping people to "make room".

The problem is both are still sexist; where is the money to pay for training coming from?

If it's a government initiative then it's taking from all to only give to women.

If it's a publicly owned company, then can you actually make a convincing case that it's a benefit to stockholders?

Only in the case of a private company does this lack ethical issues, but at that point it's just some billionaires whim.

Yes we actually want to take from everyone and give to disadvantaged people, we should do this as a society because even crudely implemented it is a good first approximation of capturing externalities shareholder value fails to.

I'm sorry, but I genuinely don't follow what you mean by this...

To expand my point. DEI is explicitly designed not to make hiring fair, but to make unfair hiring policy. Making accommodations for people who need special help (I work with the blind community so that was where my mind immediately went), but who are otherwise capable could hypothetically be part of DEI. But it also predates the term and connects to initiatives like UNCRPD Article 27 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. In other words - helping disabled people or ethnic or sexual minorities gain equal access to work could be described as DEI, but it's not what DEI usually is. You can't simply reframe good initiatives that help these groups as DEI and then wear the glow of that history with reference to what has in practice been an entirely different set of initiatives rooted in ideas like privilege theory, capital A 'Antiracism' and the like.

Explicitly in the American context DEI is primarily about hiring more members of minority groups at the expense of members of majority groups, based primarily on race and sexuality. This is perfectly exemplified in the FAA scandal.

In the context of DEI 'helping' the disadvantaged is never never done by expanding access to educational opportunities in order to find equally talented people who have been financially excluded or barred entry by prejudice. It is always a matter of lowering the bar for certain protected groups, and often also a matter of removing opportunities altogether for members of perceived privileged groups.

This is especially visible in the arts and education here in Europe - where funding and employment opportunities are overwhelmingly based in exclusion. Primarily of straight, white, cisgender men. You site the example of young white men in the UK having worse outcomes. Please point me to a DEI initiative that targets employing them over other groups. What happened at the FAA is what always happens under the banner of DEI, capital A 'Antiracism' and other successor ideology initiatives. The goal is never fairness, and always power.

The issue with these approaches is simple. They are massively divisive. Rather than aiming to address prejudice, hiring bias or systemic barriers to entry - they actively create them, with the justification of historic prejudice. I heard a joke once in college - whats the difference between an activist and a social justice warrior? An activist sees a step and builds ramp, a social justice warrior tears down the stairs.

DEI is a bad idea, rooted in bad ideology and the stolen valour of movements towards genuine equality. As is any ideology that privileges members of one group over another - however 'noble' its adherents pretend to be.

If you're advocating for approaches like blind hiring, or addressing poverty, or providing educational aids to help neurodiverse or disabled people, or free school meals, or free university, or increased arts and community funding or any of a thousand other initiatives that help people based on real need rather than perceived privilege, you'll find me and many others whom you presume to disagree with support you. But the entire brand and practice of DEI and associated initiatives and terminology is beyond saving.

Your entire argument can be boiled down to:

> If it's DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by definition, not part of DEI.

The FAA scandal, among other things I've seen, like Matt Walsh's "Am I Racist?" show there's plenty of DEI initiatives that are simply bad, stupid and lazy. As you've seen elsewhere in this topic, I've also highlighted DEI hiring policies that have thought behind them and attempt to improve diversity without engaging in discrimination.

Bitching about DEI only panders to such divisiveness and does not solve any of the problems with the bad initiatives. Neither does ignoring the problems, or calling genuine criticism "racist." Both lead us to the place we're at today where Trump blames people with "severe mental and psychological issues" for a plane crash.

Here's another way to think of it... Very real substantive criticisms of the whole DEI project and identity politics have been rubbished for years. It was in fact impossible within the liberal left either in the academy or journalism to criticise this stuff without being labelled racist or misogynist.

Meanwhile countless people have experienced being excluded from funding, employment opportunities etc. Countless more have sat through (demonstrably ineffective, and even counterproductive) mandatory reeducation in the form of diversity workshops, antiracism training and so on. This is absolutely a major part of why we got Trump in the first place. The lefts complete unwillingness to address the failure and unpopularity of these policies. It's not a case of Trump demonising otherwise good initiatives. Quite the opposite. Rather, Trump an opportunistic populist, seized on valid criticisms to promote himself as the sane alternative.

Policies that served to derail opportunities for substantive change (Bernie in the US, Corbin in the UK) in favour of shiny new posts in HR at every university and corporation. Vivek Chibber is brilliant on this stuff, I'd recommend you check him out for a more cogent critique.

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/elite-identity-politics-professi...

> Very real substantive criticisms of the whole DEI project and identity politics have been rubbished for years.

That's a fair point, I've certainly seen aspects of this. I see similar criticisms coming from the left being thrown at the current Labour government as well as the unhinged people calling Harris "Killer Kamala" and Biden "Genocide Joe" (ironic given what Trump just proposed in Gaza). I don't think the far right has the monopoly on idiots and lunatics.

I should counter, however, that many of the criticisms of DEI were also masked racism/misogyny/ableism. Trump's rhetoric should make that blindingly obvious. We'll now get countless people being discriminated against by a hostile federal government and the people who voted for that also need to take accountability for their vote.

This isn't to excuse the poor engagement from the left (especially whilst in government!), merely to point out the nuance of the debate and why "DEI bad" isn't a useful framing.

Your entire argument is the No True Scotsman fallacy, so it's rather ironic for you to accuse others of it.

At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not “DEI,” since they clearly fit under the umbrella of DEI. I simply say they’re bad initiatives.

You might be confused by me saying “DEI isn’t the core of the problem,” but that’s not the same thing as saying “these bad things are not DEI.” I hope this clarifies things for you.

Your mention of blind reviews reminds me of a social experiment I read about several years ago. All of this is anecdotal though. The article was written by someone that administered a web site that paired candidates with employers. Employers would conduct a phone screen via the web site to choose candidates. The web site saw that females had a lower chance of being selected, and based on the assumption that it was their gender being the reason, decided change the pitch of voices to mask their gender. This experiment actually backfired and lowered the chance of women being hired though. The author's conclusion in the end was that women had a lower chance of being hired because they gave up too easily, they couldn't handle rejection as well as men.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/06/30/2035225/women-inter...

I like this method of interviewing. If it results in more men initially then that's fine. As long as the mechanism for hiring is such that it reduces discrimination for everyone, then it's one worth pushing. If there are traits employers reject candidates on en-masse, then at least this data would help us analyze what these traits are.

Once we know what the determining traits for hiring are, we can either debate whether their importance in the job at hand (if there are doubts) or find ways to encourage these traits in underrepresented communities.

Simply pitch shifting somebody doesn't make them sound like a normal male/female speaker. There's a lot more to it, including musicality of speech, word choice, resonant frequencies, etc.

If you pitch shifted the average American woman, you'd probably get a voice that sounded like a gay (camp) man.

> and have been historically excluded because of bias (sometimes true, often wholly false - much of the time differential hiring is path dependent with fewer qualified applicants from a given group).

It's very hard to find a company that does real "blind" interviews. And by blind, I mean where networking doesn't positively impact your application.

As long as networking boosts your chances of getting hired somewhere, you've got a very wide open door to biases, because networks are almost always biased. I should not be able to give me resume to a friend to ensure the hiring manager gets to see it. Yet I haven't found a company where that behavior is detrimental.

You don't seem to understand the difference between equity and equality (of opportunity).

Equity is actively discriminating, based on measures like race or sex to try to force an ideological outcome.

Equality (of opportunity) is treating people the same irrespective of race, sex, etc...

Equity is clearly racist, sexist, bigotry. Progressives seems to think this is okay, unlike previous examples from history, as their preferred race isn't white and their preferred sex isn't male.

Equality (of opportunity) is the opposite - it isn't racist, sexist bigotry.

Where do you think communism has been implemented correctly?

China is an economic giant that strongly competes with the the supremacy of the United States.

"Correctly" is a hard test to pass, because everyone is going to have a different opinion of what is "correct", but it's impossible to honestly say that China's government hasn't been effective and successful, policy disagreements notwithstanding.

Yes, but is China actually communist? That's the point that needs to be contended with, and you seem rather intent on avoiding it instead.

Everyone does in fact have a different opinion on what communism is or should be. That means that we should not pretend that China has exhaustively implemented the entire subject!

Yes, we can point to China as an example of what can happen when a specific group of people implements their specific idea of what communism means. No more, no less. That is literally the point you brought up.

Not even China says that it is communist. It's officially "socialist with Chinese characteristics".

In fact, no country in the world ever claimed to have been communist in a sense of having a communist society. They were all "building communism", rather, with socialism as "intermediate stage".

And there it is. When China needs to be a scary enemy of the US then it’s a communist hell hole. When trying to explain their successes, it’s because they aren’t really communist.

> That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time

On the demand side (where placement or acceptance or hiring is contingent upon qualifications) the "actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds" cannot be done equitably.

Selective institutions are a reflection of the society from which they draw candidates. As society produces more kinds of qualified candidates, the makeup of selective organizations will change.

Change 'at the top' is a trailing indicator, it is the result of a process and not the start of one.

I don't even know what 'outreach' and 'financial support' mean in this context, but I disagree that societal attitudes must change more than they already are changing. In the US, people expect the most qualified candidates to get the job, and they (increasingly) reject discrimination on the basis of race and background. That is why they cry foul when systems and programs are put in place that discriminate against qualified applicants.

I put together some more concrete examples here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302

None of them are “programs that discriminate against qualified applicants.”

This works if your demand is small enough. In the case of the FAA they are hiring thousands of ATCs.

The fundamental issue is that due to upstream inequalities (e.g. worse schools) there are downstream inequalities you can’t smooth out. There are literally fewer black people who know how to read or have graduated high school. So the correct solution is to concentrate resources upstream.

While I don’t disagree, we should remember a few things:

Diversity isn’t just about skin colour. Getting more women in expands opportunities for women, who still suffer pay gaps, and this would help close that.

Even black people who do have enough education suffer discrimination (conscious or not), so working to improve things is a net good.

That’s not to say the FAA did the right thing (it appears not) but it’s important to not just throw our hands up and keep saying it’s someone else’s problem!

outreach and financial support means getting potentially qualified people in the piepeline much earlier in the process, by reaching out to potential and providing financial assistance for those who may not be have the finances.

In this example, before it was CTI schools that were providing most of the candidates. There's a lot of potentially qualified minorities who absolutely have no clue such schools or opportunities even exist, and a few who even if they knew were so financially disadvantaged to take care of the opportunities. Outreach in this case, will be combing high schools and making more people aware of the opportunities, and providing financial assistance for those who may be qualified but are too poor.

> I don't even know what 'outreach' and 'financial support' mean in this context

Go to a predominantly black school/neighbourhood and hand out flyers with "hey, we have this great programme you should consider applying for!"

Provide financial support for candidates who cannot afford to go through the programme on their own means (which will be disproportionately, though not exclusively, from minority groups).

And generally, "most qualified candidate" doesn't really exist. Usually what you have is something like "50% clearly unqualified, 25% maybe, and 25% seems qualified" and that's it. Numbers vary and there are exceptions, but by and large, that's basically how it works. So you need a "tie-breaker", which is usually "person I got along with the best", which is just as biased as "person from $minority_group" as a tie-breaker.

Obviously things didn't go well at the FAA, but it really doesn't take that much imagination to come up with some basic measures that are reasonable and don't discriminate anyone.

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

> As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself.

No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one modifies a prior claim in response to a counterexample by asserting the counterexample is excluded by definition. Rather than admitting error or providing evidence to disprove the counterexample, the original claim is changed by using a non-substantive modifier such as "true", "pure", "genuine", "authentic", "real", or other similar terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Copied from another comment:

At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not “DEI,” since they clearly fit under the umbrella of DEI. I simply say they’re bad initiatives. You might be confused by me saying “DEI isn’t the core of the problem,” but that’s not the same thing as saying “these bad things are not DEI.” I hope this clarifies things for you.

No, that doesn’t clarify anything. Copy-pasting irrelevant responses is spam, please stop.

>> asserting the counterexample is excluded by definition

> At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not “DEI,”

I highlighted the relevant points where I addressed your criticism. I hope this helps but feel free to copy-paste from Wikipedia again.

Spending any tax money on programs designed to only help "DEI" causes is racist.

From rich to poor I see as ethical, but there are current programs that are gated on race. This is taking from all to give to a chosen race, all DEI practices should be eliminated from government actions.

> Spending any tax money on programs designed to only help "DEI" causes is racist.

DEI has only one cause, and that is avoiding discrimination on non-germane axes, particulalry by subtle, non-obvious means, such as relying on biased funnels.

This does not align with any published goal of a dei program, or the actions of people who are saying "I am doing DEI".

This is (anti)-wishful thinking.

The goal of the DEI program in my company was along the lines of:

"Last year, 20% of all PhDs in areas we hire for were women. Yet only 7% of our actual PhD hires were women. Why?"

Whether the actual implementation solved this problem is a different matter. The goal, however, was to reduce bias.

This aligns with my experience with a couple of DEI (or similar) programs at large tech as well. Coupled with really basic training that amounted to "Unconscious bias exists and it can happen to you, make sure you judge candidates by their performance and nothing else", which always seemed pretty reasonable to me.

wrong, it doesn't avoid discrimnation, it enforces it. companies are doing stuff like 'must include candidates from <minority race> for open reqs at grade XX or above'

Those companies (I'm having trouble finding any current ones, though there are few notable past examples that have been shot down in court) are doing DEI wrong.

The last two places I've worked (one a university) had DEI goals of hiring the most qualified person for the job, without regard to race, etc. The whole point was to stress the "without regard to" part.

We do collect data and try to correct imbalances by making sure our candidate pools have good coverage (i.e. they aren't discriminatory). But every offer we extend goes to the most qualified candidate, without regard to race, etc., to the very best of our ability.

It's also more comprehensive than just hiring and race.

For example, one goal is that a student in the National Guard with a side job gets the same shot as one unemployed living with their parents. What can you do to help facilitate that without reducing the impact of the program?

There's evidence that spatial reasoning is important for learning Computer Science. There's evidence that men and women can both develop spatial reasoning skills. There's evidence that men in general get more practice than women in this regard, potentially putting women at a disadvantage in the program. What can you do to help level that playing field without weakening the material?

Lastly, coming out against DEI programs whose goal is to hire based solely on merit and not race or other factors... not a good look. So you might want to specify which kind of DEI you're really against.

There are very boring things that have been done in the past to increase diversity, like making sure recruiters actually went to black universities to recruit, instead of... mysteriously skipping them. Technically that cost something, but basically negligible.

The problem cases are after that, when people get upset the numbers didn't change as much as they hoped, and decide to go do fiddle with the hiring process.

The US has spent tax money to enslave and police Black people, exterminate Native Americans, deport Mexicans who were sometimes American citizens, and force Japanese American citizens into internment camps.

Does a government carry any moral responsibility to right its previous wrongs? If so, what sort of policies would that look like?

Trying to apply the same idea of history to something as abstract as a government, as to an individual is impossible.

The current people and their representatives did not do those things, so acting as if you are doing the right thing by implementing policy that advances one group over another is immoral. It's just inventing a fictional justification, no better than dark skin being a mark of sin.

> the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time

Yes, it’s lazy and stupid for the FAA to believe they can fix inequality by biasing hiring practices.

The fundamental problem is that the US has severe wealth inequality, which for historical reasons is correlated with race, and for structural reasons (property taxes fund schools, meaning poor kids get worse education) is made even worse.

All of the “wholistic evaluation” doublespeak and weird qualification exams in the world can’t fix that.

Complex philosophy has a way of devolving almost inevitably into a kind of "four legs good two legs bad" sort of way a la Animal Farm. In the same way dei seems to inevitably devolve into white people bad non-white people good. It doesn't really matter what it was originally. Philosophies that become popular will always devolve into some easy to understand but wrong version of itself. I personally believe this is the single biggest argument in favor of color blindness since it's relatively unambiguous.

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

> I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds... it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own.

That's exactly what providing the grounds means. It's like how the no-fly list provides a convenient way to trap your estranged wife outside the country. You can do a whole lot of racism, call it a DEI initiative and use the right terminology, and no-one bats an eye.

The bar wasn’t lowered at all. What happened was that the FAA stopped giving preferential treatment to a separate group—namely, CTI graduates—by replacing their streamlined path with a flawed biographical screening. Every candidate still has to pass the same rigorous training and certification.

Well, the FAA also leaked the official answers to the biographical screen to black interest groups so that they could teach black applicants to cheat on the screen.

That’s not exactly what happened. The article shows that an FAA employee leaked guidance on answering the biographical questionnaire to members of the NBCFAE. This wasn’t an official FAA policy but a rogue action.

Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective.

> Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective.

According to the post, candidates who weren't capable of passing the training were promoted into management positions instead.

> This was [...] a rogue action aimed at reducing competition, not at giving any specific group an undue advantage.

I'm honestly curious whether you think that sentence means something.

It's hard to defend it as a rogue action, given:

> The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation.

They don't seem to have overlooked what he did either, they just determined that it was okay

That's not an accurate way of describing this.

The biographical screen was not flawed, it was designed to try to pass minority students at higher rates than non minority (for example that question on "your hardest topic" needing to be science). And it did exactly what it was designed to do.

Which had the effect of dramatically reducing the available candidates.

CTI never had preferential treatment, they simply were students who learned the skills needed to pass the actual ability test. That's not preferential treatment, that's exactly what school is meant to do.

You created this account 1hr ago, and are already 3 comments in on this topic. In all your comments you're doing mental gymnastics on a pretty clear-cut case. they have tapes.

Imagine, for a second, having tapes on someone saying "Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for ~~Caucasians~~ <insert minority here>, it wasn’t for, you know, the ~~white~~ <insert minority here> male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”

Would you still argue this the way you are doing? Would this still have been buried? Are you actually trying to argue this isn't a blatant case of racism?!

Let's focus on the article and evidence rather than personal details or dismissive labels. Personal attacks don't add to the discussion and go against HN guidelines for civil and substantive debate.

You are right. My bad. Please disregard the first line.

The tapes thing still holds, tho. They have tapes. Care to comment on those?

I disagree with the actions of the rogue employee who leaked those instructions, that's clearly wrong and illegal, and it's right to call that out. However, I believe there is some misunderstanding because sharing those answers doesn’t mean the FAA lowered the bar. What happened was akin to someone unethically telling people how to cheat to get an interview referral at google- yet the actual subsequent qualification process, the rigorous training and certification, including the AT-SAT remained unchanged. The FAA still demands the same high standards from all candidates once they enter the pool.

What if corporation A wanted to fill their CFO position. They put out an ad, but decided to interview folks only from ethnicity W. They then hired a qualified person from ethnicity W. When challenged about excluding from the process non-ethnicity W folks, they respond "but they still had to be qualified." Are you fine with that?

Respectfully, that's a strawman and not what happened. Realistically the inverse happens more, and we often only interview people from certain backgrounds even though qualified people exist in other walks of life. Just look at the racial and wealth backgrounds of people who eventually become CEOs.

In what context would it ever make sense to preferentially hire a population whose worst high school subject was science and lowest college grades were in history?

Sharing the answers wasn't someone going rogue, it was the whole point.

Ok, let's focus on the article. Directly from it:

> they concluded the following:

> Snow was the one in the recording Reilly obtained. He explained to people how they should answer the biographical questionnaire. He advertised the telephone conference process via text, emphasizing that it was for members only, and saying things like “If you don’t answer that your friends feel you are well respected you can cancel yourself out of this announcement.” He instructed people to mention that they were NBCFAE members, as he explained it, “so the FAA would know […] this applicant is being groomed […] by an […] FAA-approved and recognized association.” Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”14

CTI graduates had a much better rate of actually becoming ATC professionals. So why should the FAA ignore that instead of spin one up at Howard?

I’m in two of those groups and I feel like they ignore me and take me for granted.

It's a myth that the bar is lowered for DEI hires.

It isn't possible for you to know this.

You should RTFA before making such an obviously disprovable assertion.

And you are backing this claim up with what exactly?

There are methods of practicing DEI that don't lower the bar. There are methods of DEI that do lower the bar. There's no single answer to that question, it depends on how DEI is implemented in that particular case.

You should listen to what Harj, a YC partner and former CEO of TripleByte an objective software engineer competency test for hiring, has to say about what many companies were trying to do in lowering the bar. He only admitted companies were doing this in the past week.

https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560

As someone who works in software, companies in general are not great at selecting software talent. The idea that there is some movable bar by which applicants are selected is clearly silly.

> it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future

"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.

The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:

> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any points.

The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.

To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.

Is it absurd?

The choices for both were Science, Math, English, History/Social Sciences and Physical Education, plus did not attend college for the second.

Math is highly predictive of ATC performance. English is a key requirement due the communication-heavy role. Physical Education is linked to confidence which is a strong predictor of graduation rates.

That leaves History/Social Sciences and Science as oddballs. If you did poorly in Science or History/Social Sciences in high school, that likely didn't change in college, so you would have gotten at least 15 points by answering it the same way for both questions.

I'm not sure there was an expectation that someone would get them both right. Rather having different answers get 15 points ensures people answering both the same way didn't which likely would make the test a bit too easy to pass.

This test just looks like a big five personality test mixed with some socioeconomic and academic questions.

Do you think that makes someone 5 times more likely to be a good ATC than having served as an ATC in the military, which would get you 3 points?

Or infinitely better than being an active ATC, which earned 0?

Is that the only question that an active military ATC would very likely get points for?

I don't think you can take questions in isolation. Active military ATC would likely pick up full or close to full points on several other questions like recent unemployment (#26), expressing views (#27), formal training (#30), formal suggestions (#36), knowledge of job (#46) and probably coursework (#54).

For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.

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

Unfortunately this dystopia level nonsense has infected a lot lately and I'm glad it's finally getting some sunshine applied to it.

I learned about the opportunity to apply for an Air Traffic Control Specialist (ATCS) job through:

A. A PUBLIC NOTICE OR MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT +5 B. A FRIEND OR RELATIVE 0 C. COLLEGE RECRUITMENT +3 D. WORKING IN SOME OTHER CAPACITY FOR THE AGENCY +3 E. SOME OTHER WAY 0

Wow … I get points for this. No surprise, that this is going south. I m shocked.

Congress stopped it 9 years ago.

they scheduled the trial for 2026. Congress hasn't stopped or done anything since.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.

Congress stopped it 9 years ago

It turns out you can’t be an ATC unless your worst subject is science. It’s the only question which awards points.

I think you misread something, because that's not true.

"It's the only answer for that question which provides points*" Is what I meant.

https://i.imgur.com/2hRa1eQ.png

It's the first question that provides points, not the only one.

It clearly states that if you choose anything other than science for that question, you get zero points. It's literally in the quiz and captured in a screen shot. How is this controversial or confusing at all?

Yes. You get 0 points for that one question. There are 27 other questions which you can get points from.

https://imgur.com/a/Zh8uS88

Insufficient information to say whether this is literally true, but if you don't answer "science" you lose 15 points, which is at least a very serious blow to your chances of passing.

NB they still administered a cognitive test to candidates that passed (blegh) the biographical assessment

After lowering the standards so that 95% of people who took the test would pass.

They lowered the threshold from 60% pass rate to 95% but then highly prioritized hiring the people who scored at the same 60% pass rate level (88% of offers from that level).

This is not the FAA's air traffic controller test. This is the biographical assessment. The air traffic controller test is called the ATSA (formerly AT-SAT) for Air Traffic Skills Assessment (Test).

This gives examples of the test format and questions:

https://pointsixtyfive.com/xenforo/threads/atsa-compilation....

I don't have a problem with hiring qualified people instead of meeting quotas but the fact that the ones pushing this are them selves the most unqualified people is just beyond me.

That’s because it isn’t actually about qualification. It’s actually about a lack of accountability. Trump wants everyone to be able to hire their friends just like he does, optics be damned. I think a lot of people actually agree with this at a visceral level.

Left leaning people are more concerned with power controlled by nepotism and “unfair” connections. To me that is a kind of sour grapes view fueled by too many participation trophies.

A government full of cronies sucks but we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point. A meritocratic/technocratic government sounds like a dystopian novel.

In your view, is that how all businesses should be run as well? Hiring your least qualified friends? Surely, cronyism exists in corporate America, but I'd venture a guess that a company run in this way would fail almost immediately. No, this style of management and hiring is more like that of a crime boss - and it's not about friendships - it's about LOYALTY.

They don't "fail" as such. They burn through the money, spread it around, and then declare bankruptcy while everyone involved is somehow wealthier. It's kleptocracy.

This is kinda becoming a thing with VC based startups. But beyond that, where does the money come from?

Most of Trump's money always came from investors that bought in his enterprises.

>A government full of cronies sucks...

>A meritocratic...government sounds like a dystopian novel.

So nepotism + networking = bad, but meritocracy also = bad...?

>...we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point.

OR you reduce the risk vector and limit the size & scope of government. Most people agree with your earlier premises, so why would I support adding powers to a structure where folks I strongly disagree with will lead that structure ~50% of the time?

> So nepotism + networking = bad, but meritocracy also = bad...?

The downsides of meritocracy invalidate the almost idolatrous worship of the idea seen in the tech field.

Tolstoy wrote “It is principally through this false idea of inequality, and the intoxication of power and of servility resulting from it, that men associated in a state organization are enabled to commit acts opposed to their conscience without the least scruple or remorse.”[1]

See also:

Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit : What’s Become of the Common Good?. [S.l.]: Penguin Books, 2021.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. https://archive.org/details/moralmanimmorals00nieb_0.

[1] Tolstoy, Leo,. 1894. “‘The kingdom of God is within you’ Christianity not as a mystic religion but as a new theory of life;” New York: Cassell Pub. Co. /z-wcorg/. 1894. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/3859761.html.

Biggest issue with Democrats is learning that "People are born with different abilities."

Biggest issue with Republicans is learning that "People are born with different abilities."

Thank you for your analysis. It is both penetrating and diffuse.

Sour grapes rather than valuing fairness?

Elementary school kids are huge on fairness and injustice. It seems like it's built in to facilitate group social dynamics in great apes. It takes a lot of sophistication to be able to frame valuing fairness as a character flaw.

elementary kids are also some of the most violent people per capita.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3283570/

Downvote if you like, but kids' community values are typically enforced with antisocial behavior

Well then it demonstrates their sincerity I suppose.

I'm not sure about most unqualified but I will say that it's people the bubble who are most impacted by these policies.

The elite are getting hired no matter what. It's the average person who was just barely above the bar that gets bumped to make room for a quota based hire that really feels the impact.

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name.

It should never, ever be about hard quotas.

It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

> It should never, ever be about hard quotas.

And yet, it is.

The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category.

A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?

Ish. Yes, if everyone in your company (of a significant size) is the same, then that is a fail.

However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics.

And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?

I'll counter this with my experience.

I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure they could post their job openings to affinity outlets frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places of origin, and racial communities.

It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college graduates".

Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.

Honestly, quotas would probably have been better than what was done here. Inventing a test (or 'questionnaire' as it was called here) where the goal was to filter out almost everyone who did not have the answer key, then only giving that answer key to the preferred race is just such a terrible way to do it.

“Such a terrible way to do it” is a huge understatement.

It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that’s no hyperbole.

its actually a personality test, that ideally should be designed to be well-suited to filter out personality types that tend to be successful at the job.

The scandal was coaching people how to pass the personality test. That's just a waste. You end up getting people who are a bad fit for the job, and will ultimately not be successful long-term

For instance, I will ace any aptitude test at 99.9%+ percentile easily (I always do at any standardized test, SAT, GRE, MCAT etc). Yet I would be a terrible terrible fit for ATC. The level of detail-orientedness it needs day to day for me would be a challenge. I can do it for short periods of time of absolute concentration, but my god, there is no way I would last at the job long-term. Training me would have been a waste of scarce resources. But I know several people that such tasks energize them and may not score as high on the aptitude test, but would be a better fit for that job long-term

If done well, including personality test could have been a good way to produce better outcomes, and increase the early part of the pipelines by opening it up to more people than just CTI grads.

Personality tests being useful makes sense, but personality tests where candidates are sparse and the training/hiring bottleneck has already been passed by candidates is terrible.

Also, I have a very hard time believing these "correct" answers are representative of the already hired candidates. Worst subject in school was science, worst in college was history, and participated in four or more high school sports, but no correlation on whether they believe it is important to be fast or accurate in their work? Applied to five or six jobs in the last three years? Is bothered "more than most" by criticism from others? [1] I almost find it easier to believe that they were blatantly playing into negative stereotypes of certain minority demographics than that this survey was fit to describe already hired ATCs.

[1] https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

The switchup of 'worst' subject in high school to college seems so striking to me. At best, I could see it coming from an over-fitting of data. At worst, it was a test designed intentionally to fail anyone without the answer key. Not even 'playing in to stereotypes', but 'what combination of answers did no one choose, so we can block everyone?'

"This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name."

I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.

The "Women in Engineering" group where I worked was instrumental in retaining multiple good engineers who would've definitely left otherwise after some gendered issues (asked out by coworkers, asked whether they were an engineer in meetings, etc). I was a mentor for early career engineers and I had a woman talking about leaving but the woman in engineering group at work helped her immensely and she's a top performer.

Systems affect different people differently (which is blindingly obvious but bears repeating) so if you want a meritocracy based on actual ability you need to do your best to nurture all people with ability, which isn't a one size fits all approach. I knew multiple people who absolutely kicked ass that benefitted from targeted programs (and from their success we've all benefited from these programs), there's just also a lot of dumb shit out there for DEI, too.

this is what at the core of DEI. Correct!

Far too many people believe in the myth of pure meritocracy. Instead, what most people really see as meritocracy is actually just something reinforces built-in un-meritocratic advantages.

For real meritocracy, the best approach is to nurture all people with ability, not just device some "test" of meritocracy and demand that fidelity to that test result is the answer.

Blind auditions in orchestras, efforts to get women into sciences are all great examples.

You expand your pipeline into places where you were not previously looking. Go recruit at a historically black college, or a Women Who Code convention. You don’t need to lower standards.

The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.

For those that did, good.

They didn't seem to have good publicists...

As the article itself describes, programs that expose kids to fields they might otherwise not have a chance to interact with. A field trip for kids that focuses on creating more people in the future who are interested in the field from more diverse background.

Require diversity in the interview pool, not when making hiring decisions.

e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.

How long does the checklist need to be? Can I check three boxes if I an interview a gay black jew or do I only get one?

Another example is to make your recruiting contextual. How would you rate two candidate - one that grew up dirt poor and when to the worst public schools but gets 90% on your test, vs one that went to the best private schools and got 95%?

You can also do things to remove stereotypes about your industry - "I'm not going to work in industry X because it's all posh people."

Complaints about controller shortages and 6-day weeks being the norm and whatnot go back into the 00s.

Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and onboarding pipeline in the first place?

The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is egregious.

Do you honestly believe that hiring rate is determined by DEI departments and not budgets?

Do you really, honestly believe that the FAA was using these practices to hire less people and not just hire the people they want to hire in the limited positions?

Why would they go to such absurd lengths when they could just say "we can't hire more people because we can't afford it"...

America should help its poor and underprivileged groups through stuff like progressive taxation, better social service, and extra resources for schools in poor areas. It’s not perfect, but kind of works. It helps people to achieve better educational outcomes already in their childhood.

Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.

Well as they say, it's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Te former I believe strongly, no doubt. They latter? EH

> better social service

we should just drop means testing of services

> extra resources for schools in poor areas

more funding != better outcomes. Parental involvement is what drives outcomes. If you don't have parents around, nothing matters.

Extra resources for schools = free breakfast, lunch, afterschool activities = kids cost less money = parents can work less demanding/normal hour jobs = more parental involvement.

That’s a lot of logic, but resources for schools is a lot more than free food, better books, etc. schools are one of the best ways to distribute community resources. The alternative (read: kids who got expelled from normal schools) near me hosts adult job fairs, has family counseling, etc.

Agree with all that in theory. I don't know of a good implementation of it.

There are loads of successful implementations! Just look outside of the US to Nordic countries or, say, Japan or Korea. The US does a lot of things pretty badly.

Sure, yes, I had meant in the US. I know it's possible, we just tend to make these things impossible via incompetent implementation.

I agree that free healthy food for all kids is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have very little trust in US school administrators and school districts to provide healthy meals which nourish children instead of food industry espoused slop which sets them up with an unhealthy eating habits for life.

Here's a comparison of school meals in Korea vs. the US. There are similar comparisons with Japan, France, and Germany. Somehow the US is uniquely unable to feed kids healthy food. I blame political corruption and food industry marketing.

https://www.allkpop.com/buzz/2024/04/what-are-they-feeding-t...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/how-french-s...

Same, that'd be my worry. I'd rather have my state or municipality implement this than choose some terrible Sysco style vendor and just feed them slop

For low income kids, healthy v not doesn’t matter when the alternative is not eating. Ideally yes we provide healthier food, but that shouldn’t stop us from providing free meals even if they’re not amazing.

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.

So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?

For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution.

Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.

> Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.

But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.

The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.

>There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice.

Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.

This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.

Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.

So no colleges and universities on resumes?

You could share data on the college, like the median SAT score of admits or the admissions rate.

And I'm not entirely sure that omitting colleges entirely would be such a bad idea. Colleges apply selective admission criteria all the time, for athletes and legacy admits. Skills based screening would probably work better.

Well, then you have to account for certain jobs and hobbies being coded, as well as word choices in the personal statement. Once you blank all that out, though, we should be good to go.

Everything is easy until you account for the real world.

A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the application process will immediately be outed for having a disability. The same applies for people who speak different languages.

Beyond that, the application is only one place in which discrimination occurs.

- It also happens during interviews which are much harder to anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that, while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent capable people from becoming qualified.

Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous resume will fix everything.

IT's not so simple. Eventually there will be an interview and the person scoring the interview may have some bias.

And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.

This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as pulling from a larger pool.

It just shows how much propaganda there is around DEI, you're saying we should get rid of DEI and replace it with the things DEI was trying to do. It really has become the new critical race theory.

It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "make them more diverse": https://archive.is/iH2uh

In both those examples, why are you not giving the benefit of the doubt to the failed attempts?

If GitHub attempted to anonymize applications and resulted in a biased selection, can that not be a result of them failing to eliminate the bias they set out to?

Same with the blind auditions for orchestras, if they found that they weren't actually eliminating bias with the stated methods, why is it bad that they're not doing it anymore?

The question is whether or not the results are biased. Maybe the best musicians tend to be male? It is hard to argue bias in a blind musical audition.

And it's hard to argue that your method you "thought" would eliminate bias actually does eliminate the bias you set out to eliminate.

The only way to do that is compare results with expectations, no?

If you don't know anything about the other person and are selecting blindly, there's no bias by definition, so that particular selection is not biased regardless of what it looks like.

If the resulting distribution is not what you expected it to be, then there are two simple explanations: either your model was wrong, or the bias that causes the deviation is happening on an earlier stage in the process.

At the same time, if going from non-blind to blind changes the result, it means that there was bias that had been eliminated. The second article pretty much openly admits it and then demands that it be reinstated to produce the numbers that they would like to see.

The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.

Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence?

A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...

I read your post three times and I still can’t parse it. If you’re asking which Progressives are making the arguments I described, go see Ibram Kendi among others. I am not caricaturing their position. This is what they believe.

Blind hiring in practice that reduces diversity. [1]

Draw from that what conclusions you may.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the workforce.

My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are:

- Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool

- Don't collect demographic data on applications

- Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee

- The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped

- Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result

- If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting

The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision.

Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.

notice how these solution requires a dedication to diversity throughout the process from candidate sourcing to interviewing and all the way through, and not some simple cut and paste answers.

The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.

> Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result

> If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting

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

A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline.

I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.

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

I think it is damaging when hiring outcomes are skewed as well as it undermines the credibility of those who got hired under easier conditions fabricated by the company.

I too agree with the grandparent post that we should try to be scrubbing PII from applications as much as possible. I do code interviews at BIGCO and for some reason recruiting sends me the applicants resume which is totally irrelevant to the code interview and offers more opportunities for biases to slip in (i.e this person went to MIT vs this person went to no name community college).

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

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

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

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

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

If the job in question is 95% one gender it does not at all show a deficiency in attracting candidates. 87% of pharmeceutical technicans are women (in the uk) as per: https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...

If I'm interviewing for pharmaceutical technicians, and my goals is to give all candidates equal opportunity for employment, why would I expect something vastly different from 87% women? If the candidate pool for pharmaceutical technicians was somehow 50/50, then it'd indicate a severe deficiency in attracting female candidates on account of the massive underrepresentation relative to the workforce of pharmaceutical technicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you have a slightly more than 50% women in data science, a field that's 15-20% women [1]. Likewise, software development is ~20% women. But your frontend and backend roles have 50/50 men and women. You're achieving results representative of the general population but you're obtaining a very large overrepresentation of women relative to their representation in the workforce. We're talking overrepresentation by a factor of four or five.

All of the fields you listed ~80% male. This isn't like a hospital that's equally comprised of urologists and OB/GYNs. It's like a hospital exclusively comprised of urologists, but somehow hires 50% women.

> I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen.

Discrepancy is a relative statement. What is the gender breakdown of the candidates you've interviewed? Remember, if the software developers you're interviewing are 50/50 men and women, that is representative of the general population but it's a 4x overrepresentation of women relative to their representation in the field. If by "no discrepancy" you mean "no discrepancy relative to the general population" it sure sounds like female applicants have a much better shot at getting interviewed. If you're seeing 50 / 50 male and female interviewees in a field that's 80% male, you really ought to question whether recruiters are using gender as a factor in deciding which applicants to advance to interviews.

Is your company's goal to achieve representation equitable with respect to the general population, even if it means applicants from one gender are significantly disadvantaged in interviewing? Or is it to give equal employment opportunities to candidates, regardless of their gender? It sure sounds like your company is pursuing the former. I would highly suggest pushing for more transparency in the application to interview pipline if you care about gender equality.

1. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/women-in-computer-data-scie...

> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that.

Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way.

Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.

They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate.

Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.

> There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application.

For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?

I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.

Let's say you have a completely random data set. You generate a bunch of random variables x1 through xn and a random dependent variable y. Then you poke around and see whether any of the x variables look like they might predict y, so you pick those variables and try to build a model on them. What you end up with is a model where, according to the standard tests of statistical significance, some of the xs predict the y, even though all the data is completely random.

This is a much more likely explanation for why the answer weights on the biographical assessment were so weird than some conspiracy between the contractors who developed the test, the FAA staff, and the black employee organization.

They had a dataset that was very skewed because historically there have been very few black controllers, and so was very prone to overfitting. The FAA asked the contractor to use that dataset to build a test that would serve as a rough filter, screen in good candidates, and not show a disparate impact. The contractor delivered a test that fulfilled those criteria (at least in the technical sense that it passed statistical validation). Whether or not the test actually made any sense was not their department.

I agree that it seems likely that the weird questions and their weighting came from over-fitting as you describe. The cheating allegation though, from my reading, is that the "correct" answers were leaked and then disseminated by the leakee(s). (And that this was particularly impactful because it was unlikely that you would pass the overfit test otherwise.)

When I read the IG report and saw what the guy actually said (and that his list of secret buzzwords actually turned out to be a photocopy from a resume writing book) it was pretty clear that he was bullshitting and claiming that he had inside information about the process that he didn't actually have.

The investigation says the screenshots he talked about were for USA Jobs too, not the nonsense biographical test. Seems like it ought to be pretty easy to just check if NBCFAE members passed the that test at an unusually high rate.

> I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.

The answers to the biographical questionnaire - which screened out 90% of applicants - were leaked to ethnic affinity groups. If a select group of being being provided with the correct answers isn't cheating, I don't know what is.

No, that's not what happened. The guy from the black affinity group CLAIMED that he knew the answers. But he's a completely unreliable source who was pretending to know things that he didn't actually know. He also claimed to have a list of magic buzzwords that would get your application moved to the top of the pile, but if you look at the list of magic buzzwords that he provided, it was just a list of dozens of generic action verbs like "make", "manage", "organize", "analyze", etc. from a resume writing book. I'm sure it's the same thing with the biographical assessment. He was just telling people what he THOUGHT were the right answers.

> As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

> “I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2

From the first article on The scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

> After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released, Snow took it a step further. As Fox Business reported (related in Rojas v. FAA), he sent voice-mail messages to NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was "about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question."

You can take the bigraphical questionnaire and see the question weightings here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that this was just "buzzwords".

I've read it. I've seen all the weightings. My point is that after reading the IG report, I think it's most likely that when he made the following statement he was exaggerating and claiming that he knew the right answers when he didn't:

> I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase

Do you have the list of answers Snow told candidates to pick? It'd be simple to cross reference those with the biographical questionnaire weightings?

To my knowledge that was not recorded anywhere. However there are interviews with participants on the call: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG...

One of the reasons why I think he was bullshitting was that according to the testimony, he said to answer the question about how many sports you played in high school honestly, but that wast the wrong information because that one of the questions where some answers would give you more points than others. The other reason is that it's just painfully obvious from the testimony that this guy was not reliable - he took a generic resume writing guide that he had been given years ago and passed it off as inside information.

> he said to answer the question about how many sports you played in high school honestly, but that was one of the questions where some answers would give you more points than others.

That's exactly what is alleged: Snow told applicants which answers were worth the most points. This is what Snow himself claimed, too.

And the FAA's internal investigation did have witnesses say that they were instructed on how to respond to the Biographical Assessment:

> One witness said during the call, participants told they were looking at questions on the BA test but did not know what to enter on the test. According to this witness, [redacted] responded with information that should be entered on the BA test.

If the voicemails are recorded anywhere, that will put this question to rest.

Right, my point is that instead of providing the answer that would get the applicant the most points, he told them to answer honestly. That doesn't make sense if his goal was to cheat.

You don't need a perfect score, you just need enough points to pass. There's no reason to cheat on every question, just enough of them

What do you think the point of such a questionnaire was?

Why would you want to filter for applicants who report that their worst high school subject was science and their lowest college grades were in history?

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

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

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

> I think was just an overfit model producing nonsensical results. That kind of statistically-significant-but-nonsensical parameter is exactly what Freedman's Paradox describes.

You just completely made this up. There isn't even evidence that a "model" exists or was fitted to.

> I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.

Buddy if someone tells you the answers to a multiple choice exam and you use them, then you've deliberately cheated. That's all there is to it.

Have you looked at the info on the test here https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/? (copied from another post)

To pass the test you have to click A on all 62 questions apart from question 16 where you have to click D to say your lowest grade in school was in history. The thing's a complete travesty.

Did you get a different question/answer than I did? For me it showed science as the only correct answer awarding 15 points.

it's science for school and history for college

You don't have to do that to pass the test. The max score possible is 179. One can pass the test without answering either of the worst subject questions "correctly."

Also answering answer A to 23 (>20 hours/week paid employment last year of college) would logically conflict with answering A to 56 (Did not attend college).

This is a great read - thanks for sharing. This provides valuable context to this whole situation that I was wholly unaware of.

I saw this posted on the aviation subreddit and after gaining a few dozen comments, it seems to have been deleted. Strange times since it is seems this is very relevant there. I'm glad an article like this can exist here.

I look at stories like this and a key moment of failure that is obvious to anyone that has ever deployed code is don't make a change and roll it out to 100% of all devices/servers immediately. Feels like there is just some basic things missing from folks brains that gradual release and validation of the impacted cohort isn't a built in instinct for us.

yeah, they should have absolutely piloted this approach, look at the results, re-avaluated or fixed things, try again, before making it the absolute new policy

> Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”

Wow.

> In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work she’s passionate about—not lowering the bar, but inspiring more people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to reach it

Discrimination by race, gender and sexual orientation (aka DEI, jokingly disabbreviated as "didn't earn it") always results in lowering the bar. No exceptions. Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. What's ironic is this is setting minorities back decades. In 2000 nobody cared what color you were or whether you had a penis. In 2025 the assumption is that a minority is a "DEI hire" unless proven otherwise. And bah gawd there are real exemplars out there to support that narrative.

The one positive "DEI" thing you can do without lowering the bar is to widen the net: look harder for qualified candidates in places where you didn't look before.

> Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall.

False dichotomy. It's possible that in some situations DEI could replace cronyism and produce better hires. I have no idea how often that actually happens, but I know that cronyism happens a lot.

DEI is simply a framework. Like Agile, it can be well implemented if the person implementing it understands the problems it is trying to address, along with its limitations.

And just like Agile, it can be poorly implemented when the person implementing it does not understand its purpose, or hates the framework and cynically implements it under protest.

In both cases, the poor implementations should not justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but so it goes.

Are people still using Agile?

Yes.

Are people not?

There's a very high amount of political topics lately, and it's very uninteresting to non-US readers. Please stop.

Nobody is forcing you to read this or comment. Go find a local news website if you're so displeased with the US content.

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

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

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

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

I'm sorry someone put a gun to your head and forced you to read HN today.

Thanks for your insightful contribution. And for proving my point.

Sure not every needs it but this is US page so it is more likely to discuss US related things here.

As someone who is not from English speaking country, I get that you may expect forum in English language to be neutral / international, but usually (as with any other language) it is not.

It is a US based website, mostly about US tech companies. You may find it uninteresting but it has large impacts on these companies so would not be out of place here.

I see absolutely zero comments in this thread about how it affects tech companies. Please elaborate.

America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840

"Diversity hiring goals" is the pretty new propaganda word for ugly old racism.

Yeah, wanting to increase diversity sure is, uh- wait...

"Wanting to increase diversity" means "fetishization of racial identity at the cost of other human traits".

Yeah, sounds racist to me.

One of the reasons that these attempts to increase diversity are such a mess is because it is illegal to have a straightforward quota.

If these agencies could just have a policy like "Group X is %Y of the population. This agency must hire at least %Y/2 from group X", there would be no need to have these sneaky roundabout methods of increasing equity.

Some important points that this article glosses over.

The FAA Academy where all flight controllers are trained is way over-subscribed. Recruiting policies aside, I can find no evidence that the FAA wasn't training as many controllers as it could through its academy. This fact remained true through the Trump 1 administration into the Biden admin, except for COVID. The pandemic was understandably a huge disruption, as were government shutdowns.

We can know this from the FAA Controller Staffing reports from 2019 (Trump 1 before the pandemic but after Obama) and 2024 (Biden). The 2024 report has been scrubbed from the FAA website when I last checked, but is available through the wayback machine:

2019: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241225184848/https://www.faa.g...

There appears to be no urgency in Trump 1 about this issue in the report. Things changed in 2023 when an external safety report revealed the staffing problem and suggested improvements.

https://www.faa.gov/NAS_safety_review_team_report.pdf

As a result, hiring almost doubled between 2010 and 2024, with 1800 controllers hired in the last year. More importantly, the FAA followed the report recommendation to use CTI schools as additional academies:

https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/10/amid-hiring-surge-...

It seems like the Biden administration took real action to address a problem that had been unfortunately present and unacknowledged for many years.

See a chatgpt analysis comparing the two reports here: https://chatgpt.com/share/679eb87f-c4fc-800a-a883-3b7f79e06d...

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

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

It does not need to be addressed like this

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

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

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

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

This story is a story of doing it catastrophically wrong

My brother in law is a pilot, and has colleagues who were impacted by this. What surprised me is that he blames Obama for this. I typically ignore his blame of Obama as some racist tirade, but this seems to point to Obama pushing these changes?

Trace is on here, though not very active (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains)

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations).

A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago who’d left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out.

I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.

> It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways

That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it.

The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups.

That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota.

And you have to call Asians "white".

You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by equating DEI to “hiring quotas.” That’s a lazy and stupid approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is, unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across society to achieve it.

In theory sure, in practice DEI = hiring quotas.

The definition you want DEI to have: Extra training for DEI students, does not exist in the real world. And if it did no one is complaining about it.

> That’s a lazy and stupid approach

Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.

To avoid repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302

> Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.

No, the reason has been the refusal of people in positions of power to engage thoughtfully with the genuine criticism.

It is kind of inevitable when you think of it. Regardless of how one implements DEI, its success is still going to be measured by looking at the demographic breakdown. So even if the implementation isn't literally quotas, the metric is - and once you have the metric, everything else is optimized around that. If quotas cannot be used directly, then other mechanisms will be introduced that amount to the same thing in practice (as with Harvard character assessment etc).

You're imagining that there's ever been a meaning of DEI other than quotas, but there hasn't. That's the way it began and the only thing it's ever done or wanted.

Then maybe you should see how it’s done in other countries and companies. I’ve worked on hiring and we’ve never once lowered our standards just to get in a black candidate. What I’ve seen done is conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants, changing language to increase applications from women, blind reviews where you can’t see the name or details of the applicant (to minimise subconscious bias).

All of these actually happen and, to a greater or lesser extent, do help without discriminating against white applicants. How do I know? I ended up only hiring two white men in that particular round!

>conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants

Which involved doingwhat exactly?

In our case, the recruitment team started by only headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that pool, they would headhunt any candidate.

Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.

So you started out your hiring practices focused solely on one race...and you don't think it's racist?

Weird how I knew performative outrage would be the response, just as night follows day.

It's not performative outrage, it's a statement of fact. You didn't merely widen the net, you spearfished candidates of the right race and ignored those of the wrong ones. Regardless of your intentions, how is that not racist?

> Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.

Try again.

> In our case, the recruitment team started by only headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that pool, they would headhunt any candidate.

"Target candidate" = those in minority groups, yes?

Before answering your question, I quickly checked your history to confirm my suspicion that you don't give a fuck about racism unless it's against white people and found this gem:

> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.

Your outrage against our hiring practice is 100% performative. So no, I'm not going to engage with you any further.

What do you expect the approach to be when your goal is to go out into the world and find qualified people in demographics you aren't getting naturally in your applicant pool? If you want to hire women software engineers you solicit applicants from "women in tech" events and groups.

The belief, whether you agree with it or not, is that diverse teams produce better results. If your natural applicant pool is all dudes then your job as a headhunter is to find a woman who you think can beat them on merit.

The other way you do it is you hire them on as juniors where everyone's resumes might as well be written on toilet paper and "most qualified applicant" is a bit of a joke and train them up.

Are the the two sources of resumes really treated the same?

If I'm contacted by a recruiter and encouraged to apply for a position, I would expect to at least get a phone screening if not a full interview. Are you really reaching out to minority candidates individually only to sometimes send back a message that you have decided not to proceed with them a few days later? I think that would leave a bad taste in my mouth and make me less inclined to apply or encourage anyone else to apply with your company.

Yes, I rejected a number of CVs/screening calls that didn’t fit the criteria. In practice, this was a small number because our recruiter tried to pre-screen before reaching out. She was good at her job and she didn’t want to waste mine or the candidate’s time on a poor fit that could be seen quickly.

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

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

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

That’s a very strange reading of what I said. I need to remind you that the vast majority of applicants were white men. This headhunting merely added more minority (from a European perspective) candidates into our pipeline.

I was going to be their manager, so yes, I knew the process.

Except that’s what it becomes in practice. As soon as you inject race into these decisions, it becomes de facto racial quotas and preferences: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

It took like five minutes for Biden to start deploying SBA loans whites weren’t eligible for and for NASDAQ to create diversity quotas for boards. Racial gerrymandering is always the ultimate goal of this stuff.

> there isn't another legal way to do it

The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.

This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in poverty that there is a path to success for them.

The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.

> The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.

Except that that won't actually improve hiring outcomes, if by "improve hiring outcomes" you mean "hire more individuals from historically marginalized groups".

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

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

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

> that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways

This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about. It's become increasingly difficult to find out what actually happened once it's been filtered through media, social media, activists, and algorithmic propaganda.

What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?

> slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.

Again, something a lot of people are lying or selectively reporting about. Which is why it's become toxic in the first place. You could occasionally see the same people who were complaining about Rotherham not being investigated complain when other allegations of sexual assault were being investigated ("cancel culture"). Or not investigated, such as the Met police rapist.

Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.

It’s absolutely not being over reported. In the last four years, we have had the Supreme Court smack down Harvard for blatantly discriminating against whites and Asians (granting admission to black and Hispanic applicants with similar academic credentials at 3-10x the rate). A federal court smacked down Biden for racially discriminating in granting SBA loans. Another federal court smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas for board seats.

Just personally, in the last four years:

1) The acting Dean at my law school held a struggle session where white people declared they were “white supremacists”

2) My kids’ school adopted racially segregated affinity groups. My daughter was invited to go to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess half south Asian = quarter black in the DEI hierarchy). Following that lead, a kid tried to kick my daughter out of a group chat for her circle of friends by making it black-kids only.

3) I’ve had coworkers ask if I count as “diverse” for purposes of a client contract and have had to perform diversity jigs during client meetings.

I’m not even going to list all the alienating behaviors from overly empathetic but deeply ignorant white people—the likes of which I never encountered living in a nearly all white town in the 1990s.

In the UK Black was an umbrella term that included South Asians. In the US pre 1965 era Bengalis especially tended to integrate into the black community (cf. Vivek Bald’s book). My Punjabi great grandfather married a light skinned mixed-race woman in the 1920s.

> This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about

For the avoidance of doubt, I 100% agree that right-wing media is telling a lot of outright lies and you pointed out some good examples. However, I have seen left-leaning criticise tokenism in companies' DEI efforts. Philosophy Tube and Unlearning Economics are 2 examples off the top of my head.

> Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.

I disagree with this because I feel it misrepresents the riots this summer as a genuine expression of rage. It was not. It was organised violence by hardcore Nazis and football hooligans bussed in from Stoke to smash up a job centre in Sunderland and attempt to murder women and children.

> What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?

DEI is actual racism.

> I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters.

You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully. They just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.

I don't think critical thinking and thoughtfulness from the left, or lack thereof, is the issue here.

I think the issue is simple, rhetoric beats nuance, every time. Rhetoric is the rock to nuance's scissors. We need to find the paper.

The paper "is pedantic" and rejected by everyone except "pedants".

> You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully. They just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.

I don't disagree with you, however I singled out the USA because, over the period of this article, both Obama and Biden were both president. Ultimately, the people arguing against my point can point to kernels of truth and of things that did happen. While I disagree with their diagnosis, I can't point to the fact that the issues were recognised and attempts made to address them. And, ultimately, Trump did win the presidential election partially off the back of this!

Is your friend interested perhaps in getting back in at the intersection of EMS and software engineering? She is welcome to contact me at my HN handle at gmail or my LinkedIn from the who wants to be hired post. We might have an opportunity for her she might find agreeable.

Unfortunately not. She soured on the profession quite badly quite a while ago and she's never expressed a desire to go back.

> the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out

70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this. This began 20 years ago and has gotten increasingly worse.

It has nothing to do with your topic.

>> the laziest and stupidest possible ways

> 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.

You're not disputing my core point.

> left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny

Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?

You’re exhibiting all the behaviours that push women out of Software Engineering right in this post.

Got it, millennia old "listen to the other side" principle pushes women out of software engineering. Such a pity.

Love how everyone is projecting their bigotry onto this lol.

i will prefer driving to taking flights for the coming years

for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.

> The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation

Ah yes, we carefully investigated ourselves and we have not found anything wrong. Thank you for your concern.

> Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”

It's like we're talking about a talent show not air traffic controllers.

I mean, shit, this just fuels Trump and his supporters' rhetoric and validates all the rambling and craziness involved around this topic.

Who needs enemies when you got friends doing this kind of stuff and shooting everyone in the foot. It's like Biden pardoning his son after talking about corruption and nepotism.

Or all the people that you assumed were racist are really just upset about these racist policies.

You’re upset that reality aligns with the rhetoric? Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?

> Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?

Yeah, fair enough

I really need a ChatGPT summary of this article

Qualified applicants were discriminated against explicitly because of DEI initiatives.

From what I'm seeing, this program started in 2014 and was killed in 2016.

Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's culture-war narrative.

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

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

wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues

> wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues

I don't agree. You're reacting to a one-sided, very partial critique of a policy change that no longer benefitted a specific group and the only tradeoff was a hypothetical and subjective drop of the hiring bar. This complain can also be equally dismissed as members of the privileged group complaining over the loss of privilege.

The article is very blunt in the way their framed the problem: the in-group felt entitled to a job they felt was assured to them, but once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.

To make matters worse, this blend of easily arguable nitpicking is being used to kill any action or initiative that jeopardizes the best interests of privileged groups.

Also, it should be stressed that this pitchfork drive against discriminate hiring practices is heard because these privileged groups believe their loss of privilege is a major injustice. In the meantime, society as a whole seemed to have muted any concern voiced by any persecuted and underprivileged group for not even having the chance of having a shot at these opportunities. Where's the outrage there?

The undisputed facts at hand are:

* The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants.

* The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

* Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission.

This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.

> I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are:

This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.

[flagged]

Is "eliminated the privilege of" some kind of dogwhistle for being racist against white people? You're intentionally using circuitous language but that appears to be the message. People are individual human beings, discrimination on the basis of skin color is evil. Not sure why this is so hard to understand for some people.

> You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated

Man, you are now losing audiences that are sympathetic to your position. Are you accusing Manuel_D of edit-sniping you? Or are you claiming that the comment as it is currently written omits the above fact?

For transparency, yes, I did remove that first sentence a few minutes after posting (but before the reply was posted). I felt it was too harsh in tone. I don't remember changing "biological" to "bigraphical"

> equal footing

So, the candidates who were not members of some racially based association also got access to the answers to the first test?

> once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.

It wasn’t on equal footing, so your entire post is based on either a misunderstanding or you’re just blatantly trolling in which case well done, I totally bit.

I can't comment on DEI, I'm not qualified there. I can comment on software eng culture the past twenty years, however.

My take is we, collectively, pride ourselves on staying up-to-date with the latest and best practices. However, that staying up to date tends to be a rather shallow understanding at best. It's as if we read a short summary of the best practice, then cargo cult it everywhere, fully convinced that we're right because it is the current best practice.

The psychological intent is to outsource accountability and responsibility to these best practices. I'd argue that goal isn't always consciously undertaken. I'm not asserting malevolence, but more a reluctance to dig into the firehose of industrial knowledge that gets spewed at us 24/7.

I suspect this is not just confined to software dev. It's a sort of anti-intellectualism, ultimately. And it's hard to cast it as that, because I don't think we should tell people they're wrong for triaging emotional energy. But it also isn't right that we're okay with people generally checking out as much as possible.

yea, i agree — it’s definitely not just a software thing. good intentions don’t always translate into good execution.

i wonder if/when AGI becomes real, could it help with writing better policies/laws since it would have a broader understanding of issues and (hopefully) no bias so it would be able to predict outcomes we can't

I don’t think a test with R^2 of 0.27 should be used to completely reject candidates. It should have weighting proportional to its explanatory power.

Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was clearly being overused.

Exactly what do the liberals (the author) want to happen? He seems to still believe that "lowering the bar" is the right and good thing to do moving forward?

The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the process. However, the reality is nuanced. Although the new process may have altered who got to start the journey, every candidate still had to pass the FAA’s rigorous and extremely selective training and certification— which remain the true measure of an air traffic controller’s capability. In an ideal world, we could put everyone through this process to see who passes.

Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control, such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the qualification bar.

This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool, and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it doesn’t translate to less competent controllers.

A very well-written and persuasive critique, thank you for it.

(And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)

It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their race.

if people who have been historically quantifiably discriminated against and disqualified based on that discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?

By helping to make them qualified to pass the tests.

How, exactly? Perhaps by encouraging schools to accept more people from those groups?

more isnt the problem. or its not the first problem.

>predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.

Thats not '3% of the applicants are black'. It's '3% of black applicants pass the test'

Starting there alone would yield meaningful results - at the end of the day, you gotta pass the test. Changing the test so more people pass is illogical and dangerous.

Okay, but... HOW do you enable more black people to pass the test?

You offer more and better training for everyone. It's not the job of the organization itself to enable their success - just offer a fair test. Others, like the organization mentioned in this article, can and should focus on specific constituent representation. However, the goal of getting more of a specific group into an organization is NOT more important than the safety and efficacy of the organization.

But but but I was told that DEI lowered standards

How many people (in absolute and relative terms) from each cohort passed/failed the training program and how long did they take to do so? Did the numbers change with the two policy changes described in the article?

If there was no change (or an increase) in the absolute numbers of passing graduates, that would support what you're saying. If there was a drop in the absolute numbers, it implies that there's at the very least fewer competent controllers. (And changes in the relative numbers tell us about whether the efficiency of the program changed.)

Given the litigation and FOIA requests around this, it seems like this data should be floating around, and should be fairly conclusive for one side.

> This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway

It seems like you are mincing words, similar to my previous company that wanted to hire more women. They started attending the women-only hiring convention and we could only interview from those candidates (HR filtered out the rest). So while we hired the best candidates we could, on average they weren't that great, they just passed a minimum bar.

the average engineer is not 10x.

Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully automated ATC model.

Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.

> Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.

This. Commercial jets have had full auto taxi, take off, fly, land capability for a long time at supported airports. A human is still in the loop for parts of it due to the potential for something to deviate from nominal in a novel way at almost any time.

A human is in the loop for all parts. Every essential step is done by humans (flap/gear control, throttle up for takeoff). The airplane doesn't make decisions, rather it does what the humans tell it to. Autopilot is not automation.

> Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation.

Everything is easy when you don't know about it.

> a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people.

Just to be clear: you think that air traffic control is fully automatable?

You think that ATC could be automated with the tools we have today?! I knew I'd get some wild takes in the comments but this one is absolutely next level. And I'm an AI maximalist!!

Yeah my biggest concern with any kind of automation is handling and recognizing edge cases. There are already manual systems like flight levels and patterns for traffic management. But what happens if one plane starts deviating because of something unexpected? Then you have to respond to a specific situation and the reason for deviating matters quite a lot. Think about all the ways your car can break down.

Everything is heavily automated right now up to and including autopilot landings. The people are in the loop to cover the gaps where automation doesn't exist or when it fails. Everything is so tightly scheduled at airports now that any kind of failure in automation would pretty rapidly lead to catastrophic outcomes if humans weren't constantly involved in decision making. Even if you just had humans on "stand by" it would take to long to get them up to speed on the context if things went sideways.

Sort of. There’s like 5 conditions of automation commercial planes can be in. The automation mostly functions to make the pilots workload manageable, not to make their workload non existent. Commercial flights used to have a crew of 3, captain, first officer and flight engineer. The automation has reduced the workload to eliminate the flight engineer role and make flights operable by 2 people.

There's a lot of automation, but it's the same situation with "self driving" cars. Until you get to nearly 100% trustworthy full automation, you need people actively making decisions constantly, so automation is mostly in the form of assists rather than full automation.

Flights are operable by 1 person, and this is in fact the normal state of affairs in general aviation. The second person on commercial aircraft is there mostly for redundancy, although obviously having another pair of hands makes things easier.

Redundancy is definitely part of it, but 2 people also make things much much easier and reduce accident likelihood when unexpected things start happening and the workload increases. Lets say there is some severe mechanical issue, you want someone to run through a checklist to address the mechanical issue and fly the plane which is likely now out of autopilot, and another to find alternate places to land, etc.

We have an automated system to prevent mid-air collisions, it's called TCAS, Traffic collision avoidance system. For safety reasons, it is inhibited at 1000 feet AGL or below, to prevent dangerous descents into terrain.

How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into account, if it even thought about that edge case.

They are, this is supposedly part of the "Nexgen" air traffic system. I think eventually airlines will be forced into greater automation. When a possible collision scenario arises, the plane will take over and evade on it's own. Airplanes will increasingly become automated and pilots wait for emergencies.

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