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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.
Why??? They're really good at math.
What is the chance to have only indians working for these outsourcing companies?
1 on google?
LOL
For a job you never had? Please, drink bleach and go KYS.
Steaming Pile of Bull's Freshest Shit
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.
"helps government agencies track down terrorists and uncover financial fraud,"
Other ethnic backgrounds not hired Palantir:
- North Korean
- Russians
- Iranians
- Cubans
- Chechens
- Former/current ISIS members
"Asians" may be a tad too broad. Chinese nationals? Hell, yes. I know of quite a few places that do something similar. The problem is that the idiots doing the screening cannot differentiate between a 2nd generation US citizen from Vietnamese or Hong Kong families, and someone who only a little while ago carried a nice red book and quoted the chairman.
What are the other 17 non-Asians? White, black, hispanic, pakistani, japanese, egyptian, etc?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Am I the only one here who thinks this "lawsuit" is pollitically motivated? How in god's name are they going to prove otherwise? Who has the burden of proof here?
Apparently the feds are suing themselves here. Good job liberals, you've created a government so inefficient it passes the buck to itself, recursively.
More likely some state actor is getting desperate to get some people inside.
Other than that this looks pretty normal. Anyone who deals with such placement knows that you get a flood of obviously fake, misleading, and just plain silly applications from certain Asian countries and groups which are not difficult to weed out but make the numbers look exactly as we are seeing here.
Other than that the ratio of actual placements looks pretty normal for someone not living on H1b slaves..
So.. Someone is putting a lot of work into creating this issue.. Which means either political or financial pressure.
Seems like it was less intentional racism, and more exposing the systemic racism of the good ole boy system.
Maybe the recruiter at their agency was Australian. It seems to have been a problem at least once in the past.
If I have a business, and I want to hire 50 white men or 50 black women, it's my choice. I don't care if 10,000 white men and 50 black women apply, if I want to hire only the black women, that's my choice.
A vocal Trump supporter pursuing racially-biased hiring policies? Gee what a surprise.
http://fortune.com/2016/07/21/peter-thiel-gives-full-throated-endorsement-of-donald-trump/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-peter-thiel-supreme-court_us_57d80d57e4b09d7a687f9b03 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-peter-thiel-really-supports-trump-1469226823
do they think the applicants come with a hardware backdoor?
I don't blame any company for excluding Indians, considering their education isn't to the same standards and nobody can understand them.
No excuse for not hiring asians that were educated in first world countries and speak good English.
Mind you, government contractors that work on classified projects are the last home for native-born US citizen engineers these days because government regulations force them to hire us.
For a person that did not get hired? Can then Palantir resue the people it has to pay "lost wages" for gross and willful underperformance on their non-job, possibly by working elsewhere?
I can see hitting Palantir with penalties but I don't see "lost wages" as anything that even makes any sense for a person that was not hired in the first place and never got a letter of acceptance.
Meanwhile, you will see many Silicon Valley job descriptions for low level engineers that require the ability to speak Chinese.
...that government agencies are apolitical?
I read the DoL link: https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf
So they are lumping in people from China, India, Siberia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, the "stans", Japan, etc into one group called "Asians". OK, so they all have ancestors from that continent, if they weren't actually born there. Or are we talking about foreign nationals?
I wonder why they didn't break it out by country. Is it because a large number of the applicants are from a country known for bogus job applications and inflated resumes? Were the rejected applicants submissions from the same staffing agency?
Considering they are in the game of information warfare, I'm not surprised they are excluding Asians. Regardless of what's being said, the US and China are in an information war and the two countries that steal the most information are the US and China. I'm betting the Asians they did hire are Japanese or South Korean.
I don't blame them for discriminating and I wouldn't blame a Chinese company doing the same thing for excluding US allies from their list of potential hires.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Ethnically Asian or foreign nationals from Asia on a H-1B visa? They are not the same thing to a defense contractor that requires its employees to hold a TS/SCI or full scope poly security clearance.
"If I have an apartment building, and I want to rent to 50 white men or 50 black women, it's my choice. I don't care if 10,000 white men and 50 black women apply, if I want to rent only to the black women, that's my choice."
Does that work? No. You live in a society, you play by its rules. This society (the United States) has collectively decided through its laws, that certain transactions between people have a significant imbalance of power from one party to the other, AND that there has been such massive ongoing, systemic, and unjust discrimination in these transactions that the government has both the legal right and the moral right to step in and make rules to address the unfairness. Renting a place to live is one of these areas. Hiring people for work is another. This is why we have the category of 'protected classes' of individuals, that the government specifically targets as groups of people needing a corrective action from the government so they can have a fair shot in these areas. Don't like it: fucking go some place else. (Or lobby and vote against such policies, but obviously I hope and pray you fail dismally).
So they hired 4 Asians, and 17 Non-Asians, and the Labor Department calls that "1 in a billion chance"? Well, what if the pool of 17 Non-Asians was made up of 5 White, 4 African, 4 Latino, and 4 European? That would seem to me to be WELL ROUNDED!
...right after Thiel was revealed to be a Trump supporter.
Almost as if the Obama Administration wanted to punish him for expressing non-liberal thoughts...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Thiel spoke at the Republican convention, so now he is getting the Tea Party treatment. And this is why Trump needs to fire 98% of the federal government.
Discrimination is a trap. There is no way to hire more than one person without exposing yourself to charges of discrimination. If he doesn't hire enough Orientals, he's discriminating against them. If he does hire them at the rate they "deserve", he is necessarily discriminating against whites (and no one cares), hispanics and blacks. Note that California colleges all discriminate against orientals, and the courts say it is fine when they do it. If they didn't, there would hardly be anyone else enrolled there.
This melodrama villain monologue sums it up:
See that "Preview" button?
Universities in America discriminate against Asians in exactly the same way. Literally exactly the same way. Asians are admitted at a much lower rate than of which they apply.
they couldn't pronounce the company name, "Parantiw"
(Sowy, couldn't wesist, -Bawwy Kwipke)
"Asians" is broad.. Ganges valley, or Yangtse valley? In one case you may land with "contractors" posting basic how-to questions on public forums and including complete sections of sensitive code, server configs, urls, passwords, etc - or in the other case, regular mirrors of all your IP buggering off to a certain country we all know from their Made In labels. Broad brush, I know, but the statistics are stacked and backed by experience. Given the sensitive areas Palantir are working in, best practice is hire the best people (including security profile). Racial quotas are a bad, bad, bad idea.
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.
This is the only reason that he's being sued. This lawsuit is without merit since Palantir hired more Asians than the proportion of Asians in the US population would require. Obama and the Clinton globalists are a bunch of assholes.
Harvard has a quota to stop too many Asians being accepted!!!! Even if they have top marks higher than white or black candidates. It's as illegal as hell, so why isn't the government leaning on Harvard to get rid of a racist quota? Funny how liberals are so selective about whose rights they choose to protect!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-asians-enrollment-harvard-colleges-perspec-0524-20150522-column.html
http://observer.com/2015/06/asian-americans-are-indeed-getting-screwed-by-harvard-but-not-how-they-think/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2015/06/01/college-counselors-advise-some-asian-students-appear-less-asian/
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/do-diversity-initiatives-indirectly-discriminate-against-asian-americans/
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21635027-does-university-impose-silent-quotas-against-asian-americans-harvard-under-fire
Having brand name universities sucks anyway. Lets face it: Most colleges can providing you a perfectly awesome training in your field. People choose those colleges not because of what they teach, but because having Havard or Yale on your resume gets it to the top of the pile. Prestige opening doors is the only reason.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html?_r=2
This company works with TLAs so they are obviously working hard to hire ppl that are NOT SPIES. Yet, we have 2 main types of Spies to be concerned about: Russian and Chinese. Chinese and Indian account for the vast majority of the Asian ppl. Obviously, the CHinese are going to be looked over hard. So, that leaves the Indians. And oddly, within India's military, they are VERY close to Russia. Much closer to Russia than to the west. As such, Indians are going to be looked at as well.
And dept. of Labor is saying that we must hire ppl of which a known quantity is going to be spies.
I have dealt with 1-2 spies already and both were Chinese. I would hate to have Dept. of Labor be able to control a company that deals with national security to this degree.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'll bet they have fewer employees over 40 than they have Asians.
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.
n/c
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."
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.
Assuming the 4 asian applicants and the 17 non-asian were all equally competent, I get a cumulative binomial distribution probability of choosing 4 asians out of the 21 applicants as 0.0036, which is more than one in 300. Where do they get this "approximately one in a billion" statement?
But I'm not Asian. I just didn't make the final cut. Nice people though. I did get a nice T-shirt :)
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
Uh, if they were really discriminating against Asians, NONE would have been hired.
I can't stand Thiel,but this is EXACTLY what is happening all over Silicon Valley, in REVERSE - wit hmany Asian H1Bs getting jobs that ace out more qualified American workers.
Unless it is in Asia, why are we even having this discussion here? Has the world gone to a bunch of idiots and pussies in the last few years? Lets go to companies in Asia and Africa and ask them why they are not hiring a significant portion of white people, including menial tasks. Racism?
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?
Let's do look at the Toyota Way, which is organized into four sections.
Section 2 is "The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results".
Within that, we have principles 5, 6, and 8:
Build a culture ... to get quality right the first time. ... ...
Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation
Use only reliable, thoroughly tested
Do ya think maybe they try to follow the same process consistently? Or is it a cowboy culture where everyone does their own thing?
> I'm just clearing up the idea that "just going by the book"
It's not -just- going by the book. According to Toyota, there are four overarching ideas, and the second of those four ideas is "going by by the book", consistently following the "correct" process, not whichever way *you* like to do it.
Yes, another benefit of the War on Terror: While I'm all for punishing bad employers, where's the lawsuit against employers discriminating against US citizens. There are businesses that teach employers how to do it, so it's not a small problem.
So US Labor is really complaining that Thiel didn't hire people according to a roll of the dice: Can one say politically-motivated harassment? Silicon Valley and Hollywood are famous for employing mostly white people; why aren't there lawsuits against those employers?
...white person...
What is the problem here? Why don't these 'Asians' want to live in their own countries, free from 'racist' whites? Simple question.
What the parent said. In my experience, there are two stereotypical problems with people from Asian cultures (as opposed to Americans or Europeans of Asian ethnicity - important distinction). Individuals vary, of course, but Asian workers tend to have two problems, from an American/European perspective:
- Too much respect for authority. They do exactly what they are told, nothing less but also nothing more. You must instruct them on every step of their task, or they stop and wait, providing no initiative or imagination of their own. I consulted briefly with an Asian programming shop, where the boss spent his entire day walking from desk to desk, issuing detailed instructions, all the way down to the level of "put that CD back in its case". Workers used to this are a lousy fit in an European or American work culture.
- Crappy education. While there are good institutions, there are a lot of bad ones. Example: I taught a beginning Java course last year to international students. One of these students has a bachelor's degree in computer science from an Asian university. Another has certificates of graduation from 9 months of Java programming courses. Both of these students failed my "intro to programming" course. TFA claims that the Asian applicants had the same qualifications - that's something you have to take with a *very* large grain of salt.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
and almost as incompetent as Trump
"The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion,"
The likelihood is actually zero, because nobody just selects random resumes out of a pile and hires them with no screening.
. . . 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. . .
it looks like a bunch of drunken roaming bandits looking for someone who has actually got something to work to steal from.
Are you talking about Bender?
Say the government wins or Palantir settles. Who gets the money? The aforementioned harmed Asians? Highly doubtful. The government has become an extortion racket.
Fucking gooks, always causing problems
"The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion,"
The problem with this statement is that no company bases its hiring process on *chance*.
So what if 73% of the 130 applicants were Asian? That leaves 27% of applicants that were not. Simply "being qualified" doesn't ensure you the job, especially one connected to government agencies. From 2010 to present, they hired 17 "non-Asian" and four Asian employees? What their hiring been like? Is this just at the Palo Alto HQ, or across the company's 13 other offices across the US and the globe?
br/? There is so much of this story that we're not getting. Honestly, unless they have an insider that blows the whistle on clearly discriminatory practices, I don't see much of a case.
4 out of 21 hired were asians.
That's almost 20%, sounds pretty damn good to me.
What are the qualifications of the 17 non-asians that were hired vs. the asians that weren't, and what sort of demands did they press in the job negotiations?
So sick of this stupid cry of "racism" and "discrimination" where there is none....
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.
All Chinese are Asians? No shit, Sherlock, but (1) Not all Asians are Chinese.
Statistically, it's as close as makes any difference.
The billion+ people in India might dispute that statement.
The funny thing is that an American wrote "the book", W. Edward Demming that the Japanese companies used to out compete us.
There is a definite advantage to the model, which makes small incremental changes that consistently improve the process.
However, it does not tend to produce memorable products.
I doubt the hight point of Japanese car innovation, the Toyota Camry, will be gracing future Concours d'Elegance Auto shows.
The Camry is the perfect blend of the vibrancy of beige and the intensity of gray all rolled into a family sedan.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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
Not only less so than 46, 60, or 100 years ago but diminishing rapidly. Culturally my grandfather would probably not have recognized the US and my dad might not have. There are numerous times I hardly recognize the place. With regards to the topic, it's just the usual blame the white guy. I've seen *far* too many cases of all Asian companies to give much weight to this. When they get some pressure to change then I'll take this complaint seriously. Until then it fits in the bucket of "it's only wrong when a white male does it".
Basketball is hardly a complex game. It's a tiny court with few guys and ball through a net. That's the hardest part of it but with practice it's easy.
Sounds like the assessment of a nerd who grasps the basic concept of the game and falsely presumes the remainder of the game is just a trivial extrapolation. If it is so "easy with practice" why aren't you making millions playing in the NBA?
Ok..that clears up some of my confusion.
When I hear Asian, I think of Oriental type folks (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc)....and I was wondering why they were having problems with them, as that they are often some of the more brilliant folks I've worked with.....
But yes, with the Indians (dot)....I find they they indeed are of the model where they are generally ok following rote procedures, etc, but they do not seem to have much imagination on solving new problems or coming up with innovative ways to do things at the job.
And I know my ears are getting older, but man, I just can NOT understand some of them when they try to speak English. Not only is the accent so thick, but so often them speak so softly that they are almost mumbling, especially on teleconferences.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Obama uses the government to kill dissent. Suit is without merit, but a partisan judge appointed by the regime will find him guilty, and fine him trillions
A lot of time it's about the person and how well they'll fit in with the current team.
Ability is important but the ability to get along with the team in place is sometimes more important. Skills can be learned
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
On the other hand, sometimes this works in reverse. I've had people who don't think much of workers from their own race, as they come with a lot of baggage and bad history. It's kind of odd to think that you'd have a Chinese manager who doesn't hire Chinese, or an Indian manager who doesn't like Indian workers, but it definitely can happen.
In most places where I've seen people of a given origin clustered, it's often a communication thing where side-conversations are often in a non-english language that they all share. This effectively excludes people from other languages/cultures, which I suppose some could find frustrating. Never bothered me though as generally such conversations are not work-related.
East european recent immigrants as in the other spy network, the one for Putin.
A friend of mine who works at capital one was reviewing resumes and found that out of 10 resumes she received from some 1st generation Asian-American applicants...
10 were fake.
She had a way of checking them out: she had contacts from linked in at nearly every company (including me) and I could look up people in my own company's email system to see if they had previously worked here. They used contracting agencies to cover their tracks to claim they would work at a particular company and give good references. Finding that the applicants hadn't actually worked at the companies they "contracted" to, she rejected all 10 applications and blacklisted the contracting agencies.
Apparently, you can buy a pretty good rssume (and even degree) now online for a little money. Even pass a security clearance.
because fuck you thats why! its america here.
Until then it fits in the bucket of "it's only wrong when a white male does it".
Looks like the ante has been upped and the phrase should be amended to reflect the new reality: "it's only prosecutable when a white male does it"
Seen through that lens it may reveal the prevailing winds of racism in this country.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
But I can't tell one spy from another.
It's interesting, the likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion and that's just the same number of Chinese there are in our military-adversary cum spy-factory, Communist China ..
I wonder what the odds of THAT are.
I love it. The ChiComs are using our EEOP process to force infiltration of their spies into our most sensitive corporations. Can't say they can't sniff out a vulnerability.
I can see the SJWs massing outside Palintir from here.
This is nothing more than Obama doing what he does best - using government agencies and resources to retaliate against Thiel's support of Donad Trump. For the record, I'm by far not a DJT or HRC fan. This type of repeated behavior by the currupt Obama administration is getting a bit old and tiring. If the two presidential candidates is the best America has to offer for the next four years, God help us all.
Palantir, huh? Well they didn't spot that coming so maybe they should rename it. Or was it just that no-one in HR asked: "Palantir, what will happen if we discriminate against Asian people?"
Even if they straight-up don't want to hire them, what's wrong with that? I find something very wrong with the government doing a shakedown of a private company because of its internal activities which, basically, should not be the government's business.
Also, there are way to many "asians" in Silicon Valley. Deport them all. All companies in America should have an Americans first policy. H1B immigrants, illegals, and their offspring should not be considered the same as natives. They need to undo the damage of appalling government policies before they can restore something that is even close to a normal balance in that area.
2 problems.
1) statistical likelihood of an event , while being good enough to reasonably prompt an investigation and perhaps require defense against an accusation, is not proof. So the chances are 1 in a billion, that that doesn't constitute proof it didn't happen. I bet I could find at least 1 lottery winner who bought only a few tickets in there lifetime.
2) More likely though there is a problem with selection criteria. How about , 'no family members who are members of the communist party'? Or no immediate family members who are citizens in foreign country? while not being normally reasonable criteria, those kinds of requirements might be perfectly reasonable if you are talking about wanting greater security than normal Top secret clearance.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Several years ago when I thought the company I worked for was gonna go bankrupt... An old colleague of mine who already worked at Palantir got me an interview at this company. I was very grateful for my friend's introduction. He is a good friend.
I got through phone interviews just fine. But when I showed up for the team interview, I got through a few of the teammates just fine until I got to the last guy. He literally tried to derail me. He asked me a question that could have lots of answers (How do you troubleshoot a webserver's error 403). He chatted on his laptop at the same time... and kept saying "that's not it... try again" like several times.... and then he started laughing outloud with whoever on the chat with him.... I thought he was impolite.. but now it sounds more like deliberately not wanting me to pass.
I thought it was not necessary to continue with the interview, but I kept myself cool... I said I didn't have anymore to offer on the question... and we left things there. I left Palantir and got a "no go" result from HR. If the guy really tried to derail me just because I was Asian... he sure was a racist.
I can think of a reason this is happening, other than actual discrimination. It stretches back to a pretty egregious astroturfing campaign designed to humiliate the DoD and pressure elected officials into giving business to Palantir. Payback is a bitch.
PS: Politico did a write-up on Palantir's long reach-- http://www.politico.com/story/...
All you need to know about this suit can be found here: https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/about/patricia_shiu.htm (the official who brought the suit), where you can read that she received "the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area’s “Woman Warrior Award.”"
Insist that because future projects "may" require a security clearance and that the company wants flexibility to move people around, all applicants must be able to pass the "initial gate-keeper" steps of getting a security clearance, including "must be a US citizen or demonstrate ability to get a security clearance despite not being a US citizen."
This will weed out most people who were neither born here nor have been here long enough to get citizenship, including disproportionate numbers of people of Asian descent.
Is this legal? Very likely. Is it slimey? Assuming it's a cover for discrimination and you really aren't going to need a workforce where everyone can get a security clearance in short order, yes.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Statistically, it's as close as makes any difference.
What exactly is being referred to here? While technically, Asians mean people from Asia, the term is rarely used to describe, say, Japanese, since Japan is pretty much a first world country. If it's used racially for Mongoloid peoples, then they will include Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongols, while excluding people from the Indian sub-continent and a good part of South East Asia, leaving their racial definition nebulous as far as the census people go. Also, the term rarely includes the Muslim western half of the continent, since the Arabs are spread across West Asia and North Africa and the Turks like to think of themselves as Europe (both Turkey and Kazakhstan defining themselves as Eurasian countries). And usually, the Iranians get bunched w/ the lot, and the Pakis are culturally closer to the Arabs and Iranians than to the Indians.
"The government does not even bother to claim that Palantir deliberately excluded Asians. Rather, it argues that since only 44% of Palantirâ(TM)s software engineers are Asian, but 85% of the applicant pool was Asian, Palantir must, statistically, have discriminated against Asians."
Apparently Asians represent 85% of the population? Why else would the gov't argue that 44% of software engineers being Asian is 'proof' of discrimination?
I'm surprised they aren't being sued because their workforce isn't 120% African-American and 90% Latino!
Someone has never tried getting security clearance. Every thing you mentioned are the easiest parts, checking documents already at the hands of government agencies. The extensive background check is where people fail. As in, one person slips you've done a drug once two decades ago, no clearance for you.
I've never seen those. Can you post an example? Not questioning your claim, just legitimately curious. I wonder if it's related to being able to read datasheets.
Not datasheets. Mandarin is a legit requirement if your company does a lot of its business in China or Taiwan. Like my ex employers did. They had assembly and test facilities in places like Suzhou, as well as sales offices in Taipei. So if you want to hire somebody to cover that region i.e. talk to customers there, or co-ordinate activities w/ the factory there, it's legitimate to require that they speak Mandarin.
Just like any company that wants to open up Latin American markets usually requires the candidate to know Spanish (and/or Portugese, in case Brazil is covered)
Deport them all. Deport all H1B. Deport all illegals and their "dreamer" kids who steal opportunities from Americans.
If you're American, don't miscegnate with invaders.
Fuck the Obama administration.
Me thinks there's something fishy going on.
All Asians or just a specific subset? Mongolian? Sri Lankan/Tamil?
Here's the thing about any demographic group: just like wih bomb threats, even if a large proportion of calls are pranks, you can't take a chance and ignore them all. You may have to suffer through a long list of unskilled Indians who only learned a few buzzwords and got their certifications from a relative or subcontractor, but at some point you're bound to find a real gem. The trick is to find ways to discard incompetents quickly.
For instance, you have to ask the HR drone who does the phone screening to remove any question that can be answered with "yes", "no", "I'm certified" or "I have plenty of experience". It takes a while to tune the questionnaire but it's worth it. Somewhere amid the garbage there's gonna be a rock star, that's almost always the case.
Bullshitting their way to a job interview has long been a typical Indian move, but more and more I've started to notice this pattern emerging from other groups (East Europeans, North Africans and Chinese mostly). I will never understand the strategy because there's just no way it can lead to a great career, but until this signal-to-noise issue is resolved, recruiting will remain a nightmare, and those public employees and/or SJW who come up with racism accusations very very quickly when they don't understand the reality are making it even more difficult.
To anyone who contributed to these accusations against Palantir, fuck you.
lucm, indeed.
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.
I heard of a funny "by the book" example. With high-speed trains developed in France, they had the problem that the overhead lines in Japan wore out a whole lot more than in France. They finally traced it down to "going by the book": when Japanese workers were told to put up masts every100m (or whatever it was), they used laser distance measurement to put up masts every 100.00m, giving the whole overhead line some perfect oscillation modes to work with. The French workers took distance much less serious, so their lines were not subject to the same large-scale oscillation.
So for the Japanese, they had to write a careful system varying the distance of the masts into the book.
That's kind of my point.
It's not an "Asian cultural thing" but instead a good idea.
Probably.
Indeed - success was from a lot more than "the workers consistently follow the specified procedure".
The cultural differences that you are crediting are neither so simple or even something that originally came from Asia.
The differences today really come down to a changed idea of who can be a manager and how to do it - the irony of the "born to rule" attitude infesting US management would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were not born to rule.
Actually, someone has had clearances since the early 1980s. Agreed, the DOCUMENTATION parts are simple, and mostly automated for US Cits.
The Logistics issues are the actual footwork involved in the background investigation. The more people you have to talk to who are NOT in the US, the harder and more costly it becomes.
And document searches overseas can be difficult, especially if language issues are involved. Not a lot of OPM investigators who read, for example, documents in "pinyin" Chinese. . .
1) What the Labor Department is doing is accusing Palantir and continuing its investigation. Once the lawsuit is filed, the government has more scope in investigating. There's no question of proof yet, as that will be determined in a court of law or settled between the government and Palantir.
2) The Labor Department very likely considered other bona fide hiring criteria. If not, it should be easy for Palantir to defend itself. Your proposal is nothing but baseless (if plausible) speculation, and doesn't provide any evidence that the Labor Department is doing anything wrong.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So you're against anti-discrimination laws? That's a valid position, although one I think wrong, and I'm not sure you've thought this out thoroughly. In that case, your proper course of action is not to criticize the government for trying to enforce the law, but to criticize the government for having such laws. Your beef is not with the Executive Branch but the Legislative.
You also seem to be assuming that Asians are noncitizens. The Labor Department classification is not based on citizenship, but rather on how people look, or are normally classified socially. They will count someone of Chinese ancestry whose parents were born in the US. You're making some unsupported assumptions there.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
that there are probably Chinese spies in the Labor dept. who are pissed off for not getting a job there.
With a name like that, how could this be a surprise?
This is retaliation for his speech at the RNC convention, duh.
Murphy was an optimist
Well, depends on what "good" is for you.
If it is innovation, then Demming is not your model.
If it is the perfection of a process, then it is.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I see absolutely no reason why we should not discriminate against them.
I was sort of taking that as read but since various people have attempted to apply "quality assurance" with strict processes in areas that are reactive by nature then I suppose I can't.
You don't want your R&D to be under strict process control. They are the ones finding out what you want as an end result and sorting out viable new processes after all.
I've seen it implemented at a mechanical testing lab - a good fit there - but for something like component failure investigations there is a point at relatively early stages where there is no "book" to go by. You would end up with massive decision trees that would have newly developed options available nearly every time you get to some branches.
Something is wrong with Slashdot! Not a single post at moderation 3 or above questioning if the Tolkien estate can or should do anything about the use of the name Palantir.
...what makes Asians what they are is not necessarily visible and immutable characteristics alone, but those that are constructively immutable. I speak of worldviews. Any time someone sees their reflection, there is a conversation that occurs within oneself that says to the effect: "I come from X. Even though I am not in X-land at the moment, I am reminded by my reflection that there are only X ways." or "My ancestors came from X. I was born here. I appear different from the majority which reinforces that identity originating from X. Therefore there are only X ways."
Reality is racist. Get over it. Getting rid of the Blue Eye would make humanity unfit for continued existence.
... the best guarantor of security clearance is someone whose ancestry does not qualify for any citizenship, landedness and/or residency in the nation(s) of said individual's ancestors or any nation whatsoever. Soil born, non-different appearing and stuck here. It is called "YANKEE WHITE".