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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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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 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.
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."
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.
Spell. Where is Conan the Grammarian when you need him ?
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.
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. . .
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.
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.