Are Univs next ? - Palantir Sued Over Alleged Hiring Discrimination

" 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."

That is the reality of many companies. They want a known quantity, that they get from referrals. Otherwise, you’re just a name and a number, and your application gets sucked into the black hole of nowhere. And it sounds as if even if you get called in for an interview at Palantir, the odds are vastly against you getting hired, no matter whom you are. Which seems to entertain my son, who says that they hire the top 1% of engineers, but only pay them in the the middle 50% of the pack.

My question is, why are so many Asians applying for Palantir? That seems like a lopsided number. Are these applicants just throwing their application into the black hole, and this lawsuit is expecting there to be some sort of racial equity out of the pit? You want a job at companies like this, find a sponsor, find someone to refer you.

But the problem seems to be that you need to find a sponsor who looks like you…

“But the problem seems to be that you need to find a sponsor who looks like you…”

So people only have friends that look like them? I find that pretty unlikely. Both my kid’s tech friends come in all shapes, colors and sizes. Even if that was so (which I don’t think it is), not everyone who works at Palantir is Caucasian. I truly doubt that the supervisors are telling their employees to only sponsor people who have the same color skin as them.

I have seen it both ways. If the referring employees are truly interested in getting good co-workers, they will only refer those whom they know to be good at their jobs. Where the hiring process includes a sufficient number of other checks (e.g. technical interviews for technical jobs), it also discourages referring poor candidates.

On the other hand, I have seen the opposite occur, where a higher level employee brings in other employees (with fewer checks on the hiring) and those other employees become widely known as ineffective or worse.

“So people only have friends that look like them?”

That’s a pretty apt description of social networks in the USA, yes. If you are an exception, wonderful, but there’s a ton of data showing how segregated our social lives are.

The Labor Department is suing but other parts of government use Palantir products all the time. FBI, NSA, etc. This lawsuit would cancel these contracts if successful. This stuff is proprietary. Who’s going to take over all these contracts ? Much of this is highly sensitive.

Palantir has had issues with the government even before this recent lawsuit . http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-20/palantir-tells-u-s-army-it-intends-to-sue-over-software-bidding

Maybe there will be dueling lawsuits!

“That’s a pretty apt description of social networks in the USA, yes. If you are an exception, wonderful, but there’s a ton of data showing how segregated our social lives are.”

If you are in the tech world, I doubt that your friends are going to all look like you.

It’s called implicit bias. There is no need to tell anybody anything in order for that to happen. What is actually needed is to remind people to try to set aside their biases and judge the candidates based upon their qualifications.

“The Labor Department is suing but other parts of government use Palantir products all the time. FBI, NSA, etc. This lawsuit would cancel these contracts if successful. This stuff is proprietary. Who’s going to take over all these contracts ? Much of this is highly sensitive.”

Somebody posted a link showing that you did not have US citizenship to work for Palantir. I would think much of their work is quite classified, so it makes me wonder why they would even consider hiring someone of Russian or Chinese heritage, unless they are generations removed, and how can they ask those questions? The Russians and Chinese are hacking us all the time.

I’m sure Palantir restricts the sensitive stuff to those with the appropriate clearances. Those without clearances wouldn’t be working on the sensitive stuff . Also, although Palantir does a lot of work with the government, they also have private companies that they work with. So, not all work would necessarily require someone to have a clearance.

I would imagine so. I’ve read rumors online of some top secret stuff going on there, don’t know how true it is. However, if they do a lot of classified work, I don’t know why they would want to hire foreign nationals, or even someone who isn’t far removed from any country that would be suspect. Kind of limits the work people can do.

“If you are in the tech world, I doubt that your friends are going to all look like you.”

We’re talking about bringing in friends who aren’t already coworkers. Yes, your personal friends and college buddies disproportionately look like you. Your relatives, the people you know from church/temple, your roommates, tend to look like you. I don’t see any evidence that the tech world is immune from these patterns – in fact, as the suit demonstrates, it has filtered out black and Latino people almost completely.

This isn’t my observation, though I’m no different from other Americans on this measure. Here are a couple of the many, many studies addressing the racial, political, and religious homogeneity of our close ties and wider networks.

http://www.prri.org/research/race-religion-political-affiliation-americans-social-networks/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21648251

Well, my kids are white and have Asian friends. One of them has lived with a guy whose family was from Viet Nam-from fraternity years to the present. More of their friends are also white though .

Anything in relation to blacks and Latinos is not unique to Palantir. All the tech firms are dealing with lower numbers of black and Latino employees than they would like.

Given the Plantair does a lot of work for the NSA and other top secret government agencies, I would bet that they have very restrictive employee requirements. I wouldn’t be surprised if employees is not only have to be US citizens but also have to pass multiple security clearances, very similar to what aeronautical engineers have to pass in order to be able to work for Lockheed, Boeing, and any other companies that build military aircraft for the US government.
A lot of the computer science engineers with advanced degrees are not US citizens.
Over 50% of graduate students in the stem areas are not US citizens, so they will be excluded from consideration of employment at companies like Plaintair .

Agree, menloparkmom. Lots of companies like that are either looking to hire people that already have clearances or will make a job offer contingent on the applicant being able to get the necessary clearances.

The idea that a first generation American is automatically suspect of being more loyal to the government of the place where his/her parents immigrated from is an idea that led to such un-American actions as Executive Order 9066.

Indeed, even many of the immigrants came to the US at least partially due to dislike of how the governments of their countries of origin were running things.

You have to be very, very careful with laswuits like these, these kind of statistics fall into the old correlation and causality. Looking at the number of applicants for the job, the raw numbers, is idiotic, because these days applying for a job is akin to spam to be honest, because of job boards and reposting, when we advertise a job were get flooded with resumes and we spend a lot of time going through them, and the yield of ‘real’ candidates is small. We ask for someone with X years of experience, and we get a ton of people with 4x, we get people with no experience, we get people applying for a software QA position when their experience is in the pharm industry with product QA…plus you get things like you are looking for green card or citizen, and you get a flood of people needing h1 visa transfer, or worse, we get people applying from places like India and Bangladesh when the ad clearly states where the job is located…

So how many of those 1186 Asian applicants were weeded out before even being considered? And if you look at the pool of people who actually interviewed, how many of them were Asian? If a significant pool of those interviewed were Asian, then that 1186 figure might be bs, if it is raw numbers.

The other thing might be the jobs they are applying for and what the skill set is. One of the problems with Asian employees might be many of them are foreign born and might not have great language skills, which for some jobs may be important (and again, I am not explaining Palantir or what they did or didn’t do), it is often a big barrier when we are hiring for tech positions, where so many of the applicants are foreign born, communications skills are critical and sometimes we have to pass on a talented person because they have a hard time communicating, in other jobs they might be the top candidate. Likewise, if the positions are managerial a different skill set is required then if let’s say this was a coding job.

Keep in mind that the government has the burden of proof here, they have to show, for example, that the X white candidates who were hired were measurably less suitable for the job than Asian candidates who didn’t make the grade, and one of the hardest things in the world is determining who really is the better candidate for the job. A lot of the times discrimination cases are proven by a test, they send in resumes to the company with basically the same background, where some have names ‘obviously’ Asian and others that sound more “American” and they see who gets called back.

Put it this way, what the government might consider equally experienced may not be. Without getting off into a discussion about the merits or non merits of the program, the H1B program, that was supposed to be about getting skills not generally available in the US, now has attached to it “appropriate degree or background”, and in tech I can tell you that doesn’t mean much, many of the H1B candidates I have interviewed could be considered ordinary at best, the schools they went to are basically two year tech school and their work experience was routine…so they could very well say "well, if the candidate was Asian, had a degree, had some experience coding in X, knowledge of Y, the fact they didn’t get hired must mean its discrimination.

As to the merits of this case, that will come out in a court, and the burden is on the government and simple statistics doesn’t prove anything, it is going to come down to who was interviewed and who was hired and how they stand up under scrutiny and it is not an easy thing to prove, because there is no science to hiring, in an entry level position the kid with the 4.0 in Comp sci may not be a good match whereas the kid with a B might be.

I REALLY doubt that Plaintair is even considering hiring ANY applicants contingent upon them getting H1B clearances, which can take MONTHS.

they are growing too fast. So probably a lot of applications from non US citizen Asian applicants are being rejected outright.

I was not referring to non US citizens when I talked about contingent job offers. Yes, even for US citizens the process can take months. One of my kids had an internship after junior year with a company. He did not need a clearance for that. But, there were projects and areas of the building he could not access. When they offered him a permanent job for after graduation, it was contingent on him getting a clearance. If Palantir really wants someone and they are a US citizen, that person could possibly be placed on a non classified project while the clearance was being done.

Palantir also has offices all over the world and can employ people from many different countries. Some US citizens are also in some of their foreign offices. https://www.palantir.com/careers/ Click “All Locations”.

“We’re talking about bringing in friends who aren’t already coworkers. Yes, your personal friends and college buddies disproportionately look like you. Your relatives, the people you know from church/temple, your roommates, tend to look like you. I don’t see any evidence that the tech world is immune from these patterns – in fact, as the suit demonstrates, it has filtered out black and Latino people almost completely”

I still have to disagree with this. There are so many different ethnicities in the tech world, it is not overwhelmingly Caucasian, at all, though for whatever reason, the involvement of black and Latinos is minimal). I look at where my older son went to school (Carnegie Mellon), and the people involved in tech were all over the map. His friends are of all ethnicities, not just his coworkers. It’s a small world in the tech community, and these kids know people all over the place, not just where they work. I look at his facebook page and there’s probably more non-white faces, than white ones. He doesn’t have acquaintances from church (non-religious), his roommates are Asian, and even his family isn’t all white. The tech ladies that he’s been involved with (that I know of) have been Hispanic and Asian.