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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.
"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?
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.
Maybe the recruiter at their agency was Australian. It seems to have been a problem at least once in the past.
do they think the applicants come with a hardware backdoor?
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.
PS when I say asian I mean asian as in from an asian nation not one who has grown up locally in a western nation.
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.
speak good English
"speak English well"
Both are grammatically correct. Its the second AC who doesn't speak English good.
It depends which Asians. TFA is incredibly vague.
Are they talking about middle-eastern applicants? Perhaps there are security concerns?
Indians? Around here its not unusual to get a lot of applications from blatantly unqualified Indian immigrants, or fake qualifications that become apparent at the interview stage. So applicant numbers don't mean much there.
I wish TFA would just say what it means. It might be obvious to the locals, but not to everyone else.
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/
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.
If these were IT positions, then I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them who were qualified on paper were rejected because their actual knowledge didn't reflect their written qualifications. That is, they might have braindumped their way through some vendor certifications, which would qualify them on paper, but doesn't necessarily mean they're knowledgeable. Braindumped IT certifications look far more legit than a degree from a diploma mill, and would probably fool a government entity who is auditing their screening process just based on paper qualifications (I'm guessing they probably didn't have recordings of the phone screenings.)
Besides, I'm having a really hard time believing that an IT shop would discriminate against Asians.
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.
also when has stating reality been a racist comment!! The reality is the same would apply to a western trained english speaking engineer trying to join a predominantly asian engineering team in lets say Japan. I would happily accept that they have more asians than westerners on a Japanese team and will employ (yeah dream on) a few western engineers for off shore sales and translation. Have you ever tried getting a job as a western engineer in lets say Japan even "when there is no language barrier". Trust me you will feel like an Olympic champion in an arse kicking team after 12 months of employers pretending your application never even turned up.
This is an American news story. Here, Asian means Oriental, which is where ninjas, samurai and kung-fu monks come from. But we shouldn't say Oriental any more because it reinforces racist notions about which direction the Roman Empire thought the sun rose from in the morning. (Part of that is a joke, but, sadly, not enough.)
If it was a European news story, Asian would mean Muslim and nothing more, though you can usually make a good guess based on the country: English Asians are mostly Pakistani, German Asians are mostly Turkish, French Asians are mostly Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, etc, Italian Asians are mostly "Syrian, *wink* *wink*", and so on.
See that "Preview" button?
Seems like it was less intentional racism, and more exposing the systemic racism of the good ole boy system.
In all companies I've worked at, there has always been a strong statistical correlation between the race of the hiring manager and the race of team members. This has been true for Chinese, Indian, and white managers. For my managers, I have felt that the bias has not been intentional but rather subconscious. Nonetheless, it is usually obvious.
For my first job, my Indian manager had a team that was one-third Indian and one-third Chinese. After about three years, all the Chinese had left, while all of the Indians had stayed. When I pointed this out to my manager, he showed obvious embarrassment about the implication of racial factors in the makeup of his team. I liked my manager, and I don't consider him to be racist. However, race is always factor, at least in a subconscious way.
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 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=-
Nope. I've never heard Turks or Arabs described as Asian. In England at least it's the superclass of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
True that most of the failed applicants were asian or indian but even the asian and indians on our team appreciated the method as it meant we didn't waste weeks with someone who wasn't qualified
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
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.
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.
Spell. Where is Conan the Grammarian when you need him ?
Very few Pakis are "dot heads" and those who are suffer great discrimination as well as rapes and physical attacks from the muzzies. Of course any organisation tracking down terrorists would have to turn away the majority of Pakistanis.
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.
You're assuming a 50-50 split of Asians to non-Asians, but in this case, 73% of the applicants were Asian, so the chance of picking a nonAsian's resumé at random is a bit less than 50-50.
sum(i = 0..4, Binom(21, i) * 0.73^i * 0.27 ^(21-i)) ~ 1 in 2.5 million. This is not quite the right figure, since we're sampling without replacement from a finite pool of applicants, but my combinatorics is a little rusty, and binomial coefficients with the number 130 in them are a little unwieldy at the best of times.
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.
I am European and have lived in three of the countries you mention above (not Italy) and I think you are making a very broad and incorrect statement about what Europeans mean by Asian. In most places, Asian means primarily what it does in the US, that is the subgroup formed of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese (to some extent). In some places, the UK, but only in more formal conversation, Asian is considered to include people from the Indian sub-continent and greater South-East Asia, but even there the term Asian is rarely taken to include the Middle East. Germans do not refer to Turks as "Asians", but mainly as Turks. Even the geographical separation between Asia and Europe is widely contested, especially around Turkey.
And no Frenchman that I know would refer to Tunisians, Algerians or Moroccans as "Asian". All three of those countries are in Africa (and the term "African" is indeed used).
The only major mistake made by most Europeans that I have noticed is the tendency to refer to all Muslims as Arabs.
. . . 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. . .
nice try but you are miles out, btw I have been happily married to an asian wife for 23 years. And if you think I'm bad you will spit out your lunch, dinner and tea after learning every asian culture have even worse stereotypes for each other than anything I could drag up.
Like how filipinos are not considered asians by other asians? Yeah, stereotypes get funny.
--WooooHoooo--
Also, they're only looking at resumes to determine qualifications. I'll tell you right now that we get a TON of bogus resumes from body shops, especially Indian ones. Make no mistakes: we have many qualified Indians, including management, but you get a ton of padded resumes that don't hold up under questioning. And yes, you do get those from everywhere, but the predominately Indian body shops can drown you in them.
I concur. Unfortunately, of all the job interviews I do, there's a strong correlation between padded interviews and the origin of the applicant. That doesn't say anything about the individuals from these countries, but based on the original number of applicants, a proportionally higher number of them will not get hired - their qualifications did not meet the requirements.
For applicants from some other countries, there is a pattern of not listing all qualifications they have. That doesn't mean that the individuals are better, but statistically, those applicants are more likely to advance in the queue after an interview.
This is not racism. It's looking at actual qualifications.
I couldn't care less whether you're green and furry, but if something in your resume appears to be an untruth, you're not going to get hired. If a higher percentage of Indians put qualifications they don't have on their resumes, a higher percentage of Indians are going to get turned down.
The recruiting companies have to take a lot of the blame, I think. Some, i fear i have reason to believe, suggests what the applicants should add.
But if your resume says several years of Unix sysadmin experience, and you cannot name a Unix vendor or OS name when asked, you're not discriminated against when turned down.
Say the government wins or Palantir settles. Who gets the money? The aforementioned harmed Asians? Highly doubtful. The government has become an extortion racket.
"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.
> The only major mistake made by most Europeans that I have noticed is the tendency to refer to all Muslims as Arabs.
Well, that's where that particular form of superstition came from. Anyway, as long as they refer to all muslims as "enemy" it is OK with me.
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
Well most Turks are Asian, seeing how only one little part of the country is in Europe, but the bulk is in Asia.
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.........
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
Isn't the EE is electrically erasable? Meaning that it can be erased and rewritten to. Or doesn't that count?
Proverbs 21:19 It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman.
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.
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.
What you see as "reality", others see as a gross oversimplification of reality. You know, on account of how you're incapable of nuanced thought.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Even pass a security clearance.
Maybe fake the resume and degree (until someone checks). But security clearances aren't portable that way. Having one at a former company might be an indication that you can get one again (no flags in your file). But your next employer will have to run you through the process again. And if you lied about having one in the past, that pops up pretty quickly.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why don't these 'Asians' want to live in their own countries
TFS didn't make it clear if these people were of Asian descent or immigrants. But there are Asians in the USA whos families have been here for generations.
Have gnu, will travel.
As someone who has gone through several rounds of hiring and reviewing applications and interviews, I can confirm. The vast majority of applications are trash. Certain groups tend to have trash or bogus degrees / credentials. Additionally, when the grammar and spelling in your resume is only a half step above a tweet you don't stand a chance. Language skills are also a huge issue if you do make it to an interview.
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.
Lost wages for a job you didn't get is like lost profit for a sale that never happened
It works for the music companies!
LOL WTF? Those countries are in North Africa. (Hell, they don't even count as the "Middle East" either, because they're as far west as France is itself.) No way is the average French person that ignorant about geography!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I also think another objective of this would be to try and win the 'Asian' vote, whatever it is. While the Indians tend Democrat, the Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans tend Republican
Which group of Asians did the above story allude to? Indians, Chinese or others?
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.
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.
That's kind of my point.
It's not an "Asian cultural thing" but instead a good idea.
Probably.
woosh?
Obvious grammatical error in sentence about grammar is obvious. Let not take it too seriously. I was responding to the grammar nazi, not being one.
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
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 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.