In the meantime, where is the CIA going to find the people to work in deep cover in those countries or against ISIS? Fair haired, white bread eating All-American kids with no foreign relative or cultural or language expertise? It’s not the good ol’ days when they can hire Yale grads to run operations behind the Iron Curtain.
If you have thousands and thousands of applicants, why bother? I don’t know anything about the specifics of Palantir, however, I have heard they only hire about 2 people out of every 100 that they interview. Not get applications from, interview. So if you get hired there, you are exceptional among engineers, be impressed!
I am just using them as an example, I don’t know whom they hire nor what they work on.
“I still have to disagree with this.”
You can disagree with empirical evidence all you want. No one’s personal experience can disprove measures of how millions of Americans behave. If there’s competing research showing that social segregation is absent or much reduced in some subset of Americans, I’m interested to see it.
I’m aware of the pipeline problems. That’s part of what I mean by filtering. There doesn’t need to be any conscious discrimination in anybody’s mind to achieve the near perfect exclusion of blacks and Hispanics. That said, as has been discussed elsewhere on the board, tons of people who work for tech companies aren’t computer scientists or engineers. Still, the tech industry has a similar problem with diversity in its human resource managers and marketing directors and accountants and graphic designers. So just looking at computer science majors to explain your light-skinned work force can’t be the answer.
From subthread of posts #57, #58, #59, #61:
Thank you for giving a good example of the thought process used by those who justify and practice ethnic profiling and ethnic discrimination in hiring (and analogously for other things, like policing). It shows that we have a long way to go.
A more modern metric wouldn’t be the percentage new hires, it would be whether Asians were under-represented at Palantir - overall.
“Thank you for giving a good example of the thought process used by those who justify and practice ethnic profiling and ethnic discrimination in hiring (and analogously for other things, like policing). It shows that we have a long way to go”
Here you go again. What a reach, but that works for you, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t matter that I am specifically talking about people working on classified projects in repressive regimes where family ties could be an additional risk, let’s just expand it to all hiring practices. Give me a break.
plantir only has 44% of its employees in that field of asian descent. if anything if you want to do bean counting they are over represented to the population (which is not a metric a business should use when hiring,business is not a game or a sociology project). the entire thing is payback for Mr Thiel giving a speech on behalf of donald trump at the convention.the threat is if the feds pull their contract for discrimination plantir has no customers and goes out of business. this case is frivolous and will go no where but it is being used as punishment and payback. it is abuse of power by the current regime. mr thiel is the one who brought down gawker. this battle will be different he can not go after the feds the same way…but the current regime’s end game is not to end some hazy rube goldberg pie in the sky discrimination at plantir it is to punish its founder. this is creepy and sad behavior by the government.
and like the original poster asked are universities next? surely the ivys do not accept Asians in the proportion which they apply …with all kinds of excuses but that is ok? mr thiel probably figured he would face an IRS audit or something along those lines for giving a speech., I doubt he would have figured the EEOC would look at the 2010-2011 application pool and grasp for straws , it actually could mean the destruction of his company, this is not some shake down for them to pay a $1 or $2 million dollar fine.
I don’t understand how the percentage of Asian applicants relates to hiring in this case. Is the government saying that because 75% or 85% of applicants for a position are Asian (or whatever ), that a company should be hiring along those lines? I think I must be missing something here . I do believe Palantir, like most tech firms , has a higher percentage of Asian employees than the percentage represented in the population. I will also be interested to see, if this goes to trial, how the Labor department is coming up with the numbers that are considered qualified. Many people think they are qualified and apply but really are not and are eliminated in initial screens, and it may not be related to discrimination.
“mr thiel probably figured he would face an IRS audit or something along those lines for giving a speech.”
oh, puleeeeze…
talk about assumptions based on nothing more than thin air. 8-|
The ratio of asian:white applicants was 5.7 : 1.
The ratio of asian:white hires was 0.8 : 1.
This means white applicants were hired by more than 7X their representation in the applicant pool.
Either:
- the vast majority of the asian pool was unqualified, or
- there was racial bias, unintentional or intentional, going on.
Consider a hypothetical situation:
In the NBA, if the college applicant pool was 85% black, and the Lakers hired 14 white college players and 11 black college players (i.e. white players were hired by more than 7X their representation in the applicant pool), wouldn’t people be wondering what the heck happened?
Either:
- the vast majority of the black college players was unqualified, or
- there was racial bias (unintentional or intentional) going on.
What percentage blacks are in the US general population is immaterial.
Not sure the NBA is the best example. The number of athletes that are even remotely qualified to even be considered for the NBA is very small. In tech, you have people throwing out applications to places like Google left and right, some not that talented but figure they’ll give it a shot. They get something like 2,000,000 applicants a year and have to have some initial screens or they would not be doing a whole lot more than wading through all these applications.
menlopark it has happened again and again and again. but me thinks you know that. in this case . mr thiel’s company was targeted by the eeoc as pay back.I guess for some people this type of abuse is an inconvenient truth. just like the armed raid on gibson guitars (talk about abuse) the irs or DoJ is more commonly used but other branches are sometimes called upon. in the case of Gibson it was U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
prime merdian great point!-- it shows that the root of discrimination against non black players in both the nfl and nba occurs at the college level. and that colleges are not recruiting enough non black players who fill the pool of future nfl and nba players. excellent point. I have zero interest in sports and never gave it much thought but after thinking about it you pointed to the culprit in discrimination against non blacks in the nfl and nba …it is college recruiting of high school players. let’s hope this gets fixed. I do learn new things all the time on CC.
“In the NBA, if the college applicant pool was 85% black, and the Lakers hired 14 white college players and 11 black college players (i.e. white players were hired by more than 7X their representation in the applicant pool), wouldn’t people be wondering what the heck happened?”
The best players that get to the NBA often are identified early on (participate in things like the Nike Elite program in high school). The best players that go to college, often go to top programs and many of those move to the NBA before graduation.
sevrmom so you are saying the problem starts even earlier … in high school. and high schools and programs like nike elite need to do a better job recruiting more non black players. anyone can be good at sports if given the chance and if they are never given a chance they can not push ahead . the issue with the nba and nfl starts in high school or even earlier. I personally dislike sports but all high school teams should be required to take anyone who tries out for the team. if 250 kids try out they should all get a slot. you should not exclude people from sports team just because they are not “good” now. some will become really good and all of them if they try hard enough can be as good as any other player…if you do take all people who want to play on the team they can not progress and if they want to have a future in professional sports no high school or college should deny them that future… after it is fixed at the middle school/high school and college level if the NBA and NFL to do not make a positive movement towards diversity they need to be ordered by the eeoc to fix the problem and a judge should oversee who gets drafted by the NBA and NFL until the problem is rectified.
Seeming sarcasm aside by some, I’m not sure what the answer is. You will have people in tech, from whatever background, that are top hires and it can be obvious early on. Those could be courted, some don’t necessarily even need to have gone to college. Companies like Google ( and Palantir) are getting applications from all over. They can be choosy and want the best they can find. They actively go after talent. I understand that Palantir has government contracts and so the government can assert themselves into this. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
not sarcastic just a better appreciation of the sports diversity issue thanks to prime merdian. my understanding is that the CIA approached Mr Thiel and friends and helped with funding them. mr thiel should have declined. two very different outcomes depending on the next election.(100% correlation ) he can not outlast having no money coming in from the feds (his largest customer is the government as well as his investor) so waiting 6,7 or 8 years to make it’s way to the supreme court is not an option. otherwise I would recommend the Hooters approach to the EEOC which was crafty and embarrassed the EEOC. he is in a bad spot for this one, message sent…he is super smart and so are his partners so message understood no doubt.
a flashback to hooters in the 1990’s vs the eeoc
http://www.jimbovard.com/Bovard_Wall_Street_Journal_1995_EEOC_War_on_Hooters.htm
Well, the discussions should not get too political.
I agree but to some degree, employment has become a sociology project. Used to be, and still is, the legal theory was discrimination was occurring if ethnicities were under represented:
That’s New York. True, the NBA seems to skate but Chicago, along with numerous others, has had the same complaints made.
It just seems a remarkable shift, the claim now that hiring percentages prove bias and demand remedy.
If anything, it proves lawyers can both have their cake and eat it too… while getting paid for doing both.
And how is the Labor Department going after this when Palantir has plenty of Asian employees. And what do they think the remedy should be because somebody didn’t get through an initial screen? It’s a slippery slope. One of my kids ( white) has been through screens with tech firms. Google recruiters have approached him twice( he did not initiate contact). First time, he did not make it past initial phone interview. Second time, he got through three levels, flown up for grueling all day interview. Did not get an offer, was told they liked him but a hiring decision needed to be unanimous, but was told they would keep him in mind. Every company will look for best fit (like most colleges) He moved on and that is what most people do. White guys and Asian guys are overrepresented in tech. Women , African Americans and Latinos less so in tech, and that seems to be where the diversity efforts by companies like Google have focused and seems to make perfect sense to bring in a more diverse group of people into it.