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US Department of Labor Is Suing Peter Thiel's Startup 'Palantir' For Discriminating Against Asians (reuters.com)
Palantir Technologies is a secretive start-up in Silicon Valley that specializes in big data analysis. It was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings, and is backed by the FBI and CIA as it "helps government agencies track down terrorists and uncover financial fraud," according to Reuters. Today, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that it discriminated against Asian job applicants. Reuters reports: The lawsuit alleges Palantir routinely eliminated Asian applicants in the resume screening and telephone interview phases, even when they were as qualified as white applicants. In one example cited by the Labor Department, Palantir reviewed a pool of more than 130 qualified applicants for the role of engineering intern. About 73 percent of those who applied were Asian. The lawsuit, which covers Palantir's conduct between January 2010 and the present, said the company hired 17 non-Asian applicants and four Asians. "The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion," said the lawsuit, which was filed with the department's Office of Administrative Law Judges. The majority of Palantir's hires as engineering interns, as well as two other engineering positions, "came from an employee referral system that disproportionately excluded Asians," the lawsuit said. Palantir denied the allegations in a statement and said it intends to "vigorously defend" against them. The lawsuit seeks relief for persons affected, including lost wages.
Statistically, the vast majority of Chinese spies engaged in corporate espionage and trade secret acquisition are asian.
If we assume that all races of people are equally good at basketball, how can it be explained that 74.4% of basketball players are African American but African Americans only make up 13.2% of the population? The chances that there is no discrimination is way lower than 1 in a billion.
I've actually done interviews for I.T positions and talked to many asian applicants and the issue has nothing to do with qualifications. There are actually two issues that make employing asians problomatic, 1 is language skills and the ability to communicate with a predominantly European team. The second issue is "wrote only skills", I don't know why but schools in asian nations are allowing students to get qualifications based on book sense not the ability to work through a complex problem that may need a left of field answer. If you want an engineer to go by the book asians are great, if you want someone who is going to lay fresh ideas down and be asian then good luck with that.
...that government agencies are apolitical?
The ability to speak Chinese (you probably mean Mandarin) is not limited to a race any more than the ability to speak English is. If a Chinese national can learn English you can also learn Mandarin.
Thus, this is not racial discrimination, as would be, for example not hiring Asians.
Advertise a job in Silicon Valley and you will get lots of applications from ethnically Asian people who are local and either have green cards or are citizens. There is no reason to assume that this issue is in any way related to foreign applicants (who can be legitimately discriminated against).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If you hire in proportion to how many applicants of each race you get, you are sued for racial discrimination because the racial makeup of your employees doesn't match the general population.
If you hire in proportion to the racial makeup of the general population, you are sued for racial discrimination because you didn't hire in proportion to how many applicants of each race you got.
Step 1: Establish laws where people are guilty no matter what they do.
Step 2: Those in power decide which people/companies are undesirable.
Step 3: Sue them and only them for violating those laws.
Big Brother would be proud.
The IRS commissioner has admitted under oath that his agency targeted the Tea Party (a point he confirmed to congress under oath again last week)
Several Tea Party people caught up in the IRS actions suddenly found their small businesses getting visited for the first time ever by the ATF, EPA and FBI in rapid succession for "audits" and "safety checks" right after getting entangled in the IRS scandal and complaining to congress.
I'm not personally involved in any of it, but when this stuff happens there's a funny old quote (in several variations) that probably applies: "just because you're paranoid, that does not meant they aren't out to get you"
It's interesting that shortly after he publicly opposed Obama's chosen replacement and exposed the big lie that Republicans HATE gay people (as opposed to disgreeing with the political agendas of SOME gay people), the Obama administration has accidentally gone after his company. Yup. It's just a pure coincidence. If the Bush IRS had gone after a large bunch of groups everybody suspected opposed him, and a bunch of those groups were suddenly descended upon by other Bush admin agencies, and then one of the high-profile Obama supporters was attacked by a Bush department after the 2008 DNC convention, would the left all be upset or would they blow it off as just a coincidence?
Are the lefties who scoff at this aware that their candidate, Hillary Clinton, has for decades insisted that all her opponents are part of a "vast right wing conspiracy"????
> I don't know why but schools in asian nations are allowing students to get qualifications based on book sense not the ability to work through a complex problem that may need a left of field answer.
According to the people I work with who aren't from the US, that's a significant cultural difference. Most cultures value more knowing and following the rules and procedures, being an efficient part of the team. And that's good - Japan achieves consistently high quality partly because the workers consistently follow the specified procedure.
The US is different in the degree to which we value "outside the box thinking" or what you call "out of left field" answers, coming up with your own way of doing things. On the other hand, many of my American colleagues lack the book knowledge. For example, database adminstrators with little knowledge of, and no respect for, the basic normalization rules. Flying by the seat of your pants, thinking outside the box can be very good, and it can be very bad. If you're trying to come up with a revolutionary new design for a mach 6 jet, you'll need to think outside the box. When manufacturing the turbine blades inside the jet's engine, you need to know the book knowledge cold and follow the correct procedures precisely.
It's no coincidence that people in the US have invented so many things, while Japan and other nations beat us mightily at building higher quality cars, electronics, and other items. Some American goes off and invents the transistor, then the integrated circuit, by trying some wild idea. Then Asian people build millions of ICs that work right, pretty damn consistently.
Again, it's a cultural thing. Obviously nothing about being American is genetic - we're a genetic soup, but we have our own culture. Less so now than 40, 60, or 100 years ago.
The department of labor found a statistical anomaly, and decided to try to nail Thiel for supporting Trump.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
While I do not agree with the request that people off themselves, this is essentially what I came to say.
Lost wages for a job you didn't get is like lost profit for a sale that never happened. Should Walmart sue everyone that decided to shop their weekly groceries somewhere else?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I suggest you look up the "the Toyota way" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way) to get a few misconceptions cleared up and find out where that consistency comes from.
You have to write the book first to be able to go "by the book", and it needs correction from time to time.
An attitude of stasis has you selling buggy whips in the automobile age.
Although it's now something associated with Asia that cultural thing was a continuation of the ideas of Henry Ford and others.
What we see far too much of now as "the American way" is instead to ideas of trust fund babies like Edsel Ford who were happy to coast along and relied on people below them to make ad-hoc changes.
Our manufacturing culture used to look like the Toyota way, now instead it looks like a bunch of drunken roaming bandits looking for someone who has actually got something to work to steal from.
All that said, recent Asian graduates don't really know about that either - I'm just clearing up the idea that "just going by the book" is where the success of those Asian companies came from. They get things to work well, write the book, then go by it until it's time to change it - just like some successful places in the west have done.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/obam...
Obama Admin Sues CIA-funded Counter-espionaged Firm Palantir for Only Hiring 44% Asians
- Palantir partner Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover both the Ghostnet and the Shadow Network. The Ghostnet was a China-based cyber espionage network targeting 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including the Dalai Lama’s office, a NATO computer and embassies. The Shadow Network was also a China-based espionage operation that hacked into the Indian security and defense apparatus. Cyber spies stole documents related to Indian security, embassies abroad, and NATO troop activity in Afghanistan.
So, maybe, the reason Palantir gets 85% of its job applications for software engineer from Asians but only hires 44% Asian has something to do with, I don’t know, Chinese espionage?
. . . hint: most are Federal "three-letter-agancies". Which means, to get hired, you not only need the skills, but the ability to obtain a high-level security clearance.
That means, first, US Citizenship, and preferably by birth, just because of the logistics of a clearance investigation. Secondly, the more ties of blood one has to people in non-US countries, the harder it is to get the required clearance. . . .and third, depending on background and origin of those blood ties, some nations (China comes to mind) are far more problematic than others. . .
Am I the only one who read "Asian" as a politically correct version of "Indian" in this story?
Anyone who does hiring in IT can tell you about the massive amount of "qualified" Indian candidates with 25 certifications who somehow can't answer basic questions. I am not surprised by those numbers.
lucm, indeed.
While you certainly shouldn't expect companies to hire unqualified people (and if they can demonstrate that's the reason, they're in the clear), you can't simply say "Companies should have the right to pick whoever they want whatever method they please" because that's going to equate to "(Ethnic/Protected Group) Need Not Apply" in many cases. Will they outright say that? No, probably not - but you can be sure that some people will, and it's going to disproportionately hurt vulnerable groups.
Don't forget, too, that Equal Employment Opportunity impacts more than just racial/ethnic minorities. If nothing else, age discrimination is something that everyone in tech is going to face at some point, and it can get pretty pervasive, not the least of which because older workers tend to have higher salary expectations.
And how do you determine that someone is discriminating? It can be very hard to prove that in the case of deciding between two equally qualified applicants that discrimination was the deciding factor. That said, when you have a repeated and consistent pattern, there's probably something going on there. At the very least, it's the job of the Department of Labor to go after those cases, let the company defend itself, and let the Courts determine the facts.