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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.
...that government agencies are apolitical?
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!
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."
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?