I have two friends (both Asian) who work at Palantir. They never sensed any kind of discrimination but they were not involved in the hiring process. Just anecdotal, I know.
Palantir is actually suing the Army so there may be other unhappy government insiders in addition to anti-Tramp crowd:
http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2016/06/20/palantir-file-protest-against-us-army-over-dcgs-court/86151092/
http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2016/07/18/army-hold-off-dcgs–award-palantir-lawsuit-plays-out/87261184/
I didn’t read through this thread carefully so my question may have been answered. How does the government know the race/ancestry of applicants. Palantir gets hundreds of thousands of resumes every year. How would you know the race of the applicants not hired.
Will the government claim someone in HR was reading through all the resumes and throwing out the ones with an Asian surname? Will the government claim Palantir’s executive management told all their hiring managers to not hire Asians? Doesn’t there have to be some proof of a concerted effort to discriminate?
The government is going to have to prove their case, they will have to show that the resumes that were rejected represented people who otherwise had at least the base qualifications for the position involved. A lot of it depends on the jobs they were hiring for, if they are the kind of job requiring special skills, unique skills, it will be harder to say it was illegal discrimination. I don’t know much about Palentir, but for example if the position was about regular java programming, they might have a case, but if the requirements were things like natural language interfaces, monte carlo systems, advanced data mining, and the like, the number of people who have the right background will be small.
The problem with the government is they often treat it as if statistics mean something. If these were routine programming or other tech jobs they might have a point, because it is likely a lot of those resumes would be legitimate, but the more specific the job skills are, and the more rare, the likelyhood is a lot of people send resumes who basically don’t have a chance. When you have a high profile company (I don’t know anything about Palentir, let’s say Google), that is considered a ‘hot’ company or is seen as ‘if you work there, you must be the best’, you get a ton of resumes from people who don’t fit the bill. With electronic submission of resumes it is very, very easy to send a resume in, and there are a lot of people out there in IT who don’t read the job requirements, even in my own area that isn’t that specialized. These days it is true whether people are submitting via job boards or via a recruiter/headhunter, we put a job position out there with specific things we are looking for, and get flooded with resumes, and out of 100 resumes maybe 10 or so are even worth pursuing. It is like college applications, I am sure the elite schools get a flood of applications because people say what the hell, same with recruiting in IT…
In the end, it is going to come down to the jobs involved and who was hired and who wasn’t and their backgrounds, if someone with a degree from tech school who was a java programmer was not interviewed for a position requiring skills in natural language interfaces, then that would be legal, if a person had a backround in that area, an advanced degree, and wasn’t even interviewed, then that would be a problem. If the area required someone with strong communications skills and their language skills in English were shaky, that could be a legitimate reason to not hire them, if the position didn’t require strong language skills, that would be illegal. I am always dubious of statistics as proof of anything, someone has to show me the cause as well as the correlation before I’ll buy it. And having seen how many crap resumes I get and who and why they come in, it wouldn’t surprise me if they find that a lot of those who got rejected shouldn’t have been applying in the first place, if the government was using raw numbers to prove something, it gives me reason to pause and think it might not be illegal discrimination, but rather a bureaucrat playing the numbers game.
Palantir actually has been pretty hot in certain circles in engineering and CS and competes for top talent. https://www.quora.com/why-is-Palantir-the-hot-startup-in-the-Valley
This case was settled a few weeks ago. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/25/palantir-settles-asian-hiring-discrimination-lawsuit/100900496/