Labor Department says data-mining firm has shown bias against Asian job applicants since at least 2010.
Palantir Technologies has discriminated systematically against Asian job applicants since at least January 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor said in a lawsuit filed Monday.
The Palo Alto, Calif., data-mining firm is one of the world’s most valuable private companies, best known for helping the U.S. track down Osama bin Laden. It has been been party to more than $340 million in federal contracts since January 2010, according to the complaint, and counts the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Army among its clients.
“Federal contractors have an obligation to ensure that their hiring practices and policies are free of all forms of discrimination,” Patricia Shiu, director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program, said in a statement.
Palantir denied the allegations and said it would defend itself.
By the standard the Justice Department used, all of the Ivy leagues and most ‘elite’ universities are equally guilty of discrimination since they don’t admit Asians as the same rate that they apply. Why aren’t they being sued by the Justice Department?
Ahh, dealing with the ideologues that work at the OFCCP. They have been the source of nothing but stupid HR practices since their founding. They are a stellar example of executive branch overreach if there ever was one.
If you’re a hiring manager and you’ve ever had to do with the following, you can blame these blinkered fools:
you want to bring a stellar employee back to your company after a short absence and "you must do a full loop for process sake" anyway.
you want to transfer an employee from one of your teams to another to deal with a staff imbalance due to attrition. Can you just transfer them? Nope, you must post a job, lit it sit for five days, and then summarily fill it with the transfer.
you find a fitting candidate but he's not quite ready for the title you opened. Can you just make an offer for the title below the one that's open? Nope, because you now need to consider all the previous candidates for this lower title.
you have a hiring test (in our case, a coding test) that you've made and you realize after several candidates go through it could be significantly effective with some minor simplifications so you request the change. Nope, it's unfair to the previous candidates.
I could go on but you get the idea. I feel sorry for HR in all this as this nonsense probably makes them crazy too.
As far as this case goes, “verbal presence” is probably what gets them in trouble as I’d guess it’s a subjective judgment for articulate and charismatic. Both of which are often important traits in employees but make it harder to use statistics to prove disparate impacts.
NBA players are also predominantly one race, but the NBA drafting pool is also predominantly the same one race.
There were more than 5X the number of asian to white candidates, but Palantir ended up with more white hires. Even racially biased college admissions isn’t this lopsided.
Haven’t seen any of that. Perhaps you work in a very bureaucratic employer, or one where HR sees nepotism and corruption in every hiring decision and make burdensome policies in response?
I honestly don’t know where the over-bearing policies come from. Given I’ve only ever once seen what I consider pure nepotism (even then; the nephew had a CS degree and was well regarded after his internship), I doubt that’s the case. Likewise, given our most fertile candidate pool comes from employee referrals, I suspect the “corruption” is really more of an effective initial filter than it is a setup.
Regarding Palantir, I find the statistics above interesting, totally believable, and ultimately meaningless. One, if they got 1160 qualified resumes for 25 positions, it’s unlikely that they interviewed all of them. Putting myself in their shoes, if I hired 25 positions over, say, a two year period, I expect 2/3 to 3/4 of them to come from either referrals or internship conversions. Likewise, I’d bet the non-native Asian applicants (which almost assuredly includes south asians as well as the south-east asians) are much more variable in quaiity than the native resumes are. Furthermore, based on my experience, I’d bet $$$ to donuts that the women get hired at a rate 3-4X their application rate. Why? On average, they interview better than men as they’re more verbally adept and there’s probably also a survivorship bias.
As an aside, why would they even bother with a company who filled a measly 25 positions? Are they at the bottom of the barrel or did Peter Thiel make it onto one of the ideologues radar? Again, the smart money on this one is a faceless attorney with an axe to grind.
Peter Thiel is a billionaire that plays hardball. The government’s employees had better be very sure of their case otherwise it could end badly for them.
After Nick Denton attacked him using his Gawker website, Peter Thiel bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker, forcing both Gawker and Nick Denton into bankruptcy.
If the government loses its case against Peter Thiel, I wouldn’t put it past him to publicly humiliate those government employees to the point where they quit their jobs.
While the Palantir employee referral hiring practice may not have been deleliberately discriminatory, it ended up being discriminatory by disparate impact-- and the impact was really EXTREME.
I wonder if college admissions legacy preference could also be sued for disparate impact?
prime merdian that is Rube Goldberg logic. mr thiel is being punished for his politics.
as far as Asians being discriminated against at ivy schools (and several other highly competitive schools) the current administration and academia are super intertwined they need not fear a government lead lawsuit.also I would not trivialize what is happening to Asian students attempting to get in to those schools.
on a side note I wish highly competitive Asian American students as well as all others expanded their net to include many other awesome schools they never thought of and perhaps shun the ivy schools by not even applying. but that is an entire other subject.
What does “survivorship bias” refer to? It seems Asian girls have a higher success rate at highly competitive colleges as well. Are the two biases related?
I wonder if this will come back to bite the government. Since Palantir does contract work for the federal government, it must follow a maze of hiring rules for them to be eligible to compete for these contracts. I would laugh if they show in court that following the government hiring rules for a slew of federal government goals forced them to discriminate to ensure compliance with government contracting rules.
What does “survivorship bias” refer to? It seems Asian girls have a higher success rate at highly competitive colleges as well. Are the two biases related?
{/quote]
Not really. A cut from wikipedia:
Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways.
In my experience, we’ll hire female candidates for developer jobs at 2-3X the rate of male candidates (Note; this isn’t to say we have many females; it just means that if they apply and are interviewed, we almost always make them an offer). Survivorship bias comes into play as it’s possible the winnowing that appears to occur in high school and college means the women that are left are really well-suited to work in the field and, on average, will be stronger candidates than males. Was that clarification helpful?