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U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

• kafkaesq 10y ago
  In one example cited by the Labor Department, Palantir reviewed a pool of more than 130 qualified applicants for an engineering intern position, about 73 percent of whom 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. You'd kind of expect them to,† given the near certainty that they're being actively snooped upon by various foreign governments. Still one wonders what Labor's definition of "qualified" was in this case, and whether the need for visa sponsorship played a role in the selection process. † Which should please not be construed to mean that I condone such discrimination (if it's happening to the degree alleged), or that I think it's inevitable. Only, one would suspect, not unexpected behavior for companies working in the so-called "intelligence community", or overlapping it to a significant degree.
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  • lettergram 10y ago
    This is 100% a political move. The number of people hired matches the national average, which is what is usually used to determine "diversity". Honestly, there is no reason this lawsuit should be pressed. As you pointed out I'm sure there were visa's required for some applicants, and 20% Asian is still good by percentage.
    • TallGuyShort 10y ago
      And if ratio hired matched ratio applied, then 73% of those hired would have been Asian and they could be accused of discrimination the other way.
      • mikeryan 10y ago
        And if ratio hired matched ratio applied, then 73% of those hired would have been Asian and they could be accused of discrimination the other way. If the ratio of those hired matches the ratio of applicants how does anyone make a complaint of discrimination?
        • aab0 10y ago
          You compare it to the general population. In disparate impact lawsuits, this is the 'applicant' vs 'pool' distinction; the idea is to make it possible to sue even when the discrimination 'barriers' operate before the formal application process, but of course, you wind up in Orwellian games where the necessary number of minority potential-employees simply do not exist and the employer is forced to provide a devil's proof to show they weren't being discriminatory and they argue over what 'proxies' are appropriate... Ward Cove and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_School_District_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_School_District_v._U...
        • TallGuyShort 10y ago
          The same complaint is the basis of sexism in the tech industry. I haven't seen many resumes from women cross my desk. So it's not that I'M being sexist, but clearly there's a problem somewhere. And it could be the way I'm soliciting those resumes in the first place.
          • mikeryan 10y ago
            The same complaint is the basis of sexism in the tech industry No it's not. It's in fact the opposite. Sexism is systemic to the point where you're lucky to have 5% of your applicants be female.
            • osmala 10y ago
              Actually, its not that its a personal choice question. There are real differences in what different sexes value. What you choose to spend your free time on? How much you value stability? What you enjoy doing? How risk averse you are? How much you value having more free time? What hobbies you have? There are real differences there between sexes, and those preferences affect what career is the best for you. You don't pick whats average for you, you pick your best career with all things considered, and small differences in preferences can skew the outcomes heavily. Also I like to point out there is bunch of careers where there is heavy shortage of MEN choosing it for same reasons.
    • colmvp 10y ago
      Do we know that the non-Asians also didn't require visas? Also, I find it interesting how national average always seems to justify discrimination against Asians when it comes to jobs/college acceptance but then if someone brings up how Asians can be under-represented in things like media representation or politics, some people will say it's because there aren't many Asians who go into acting/modeling/politics.
      • jza00425 10y ago
        agree, it is total discrimination. the narrative is that it is normal there is no Asian at all, as long as there is more than one Asian, Asians are overrepresented. so no matter what, screwing asians is the safe bet.
    • what_ever 10y ago
      Work authorization for internships is very easy to get. If you are on F1 visa, you just need to apply for CPT (Curricular Practical Training) and it does not require any costs on the employer's side or different visa. You remain on F1 visa.
    • tropo 10y ago
      I was thinking not, but then: the place was founded by Peter Thiel, who spoke at the Republican National Convention. It does smell like revenge, especially given that the numbers are so unusual and the company is probably dealing with security clearance issues. The fact that the numbers are so strange in the supposed pool should raise lots of red flags about one particular country too: were these people with family connections to China? That is normally disqualifying. Is the company expected to hire people who are certain to fail the clearance process, and then get stuck firing them for that failure?
• themoon 10y ago
  Hang on... so ~20% of the hires ended up being asian. Doesn't the same thing happen at other firms aiming for ~diversity~ where the % accepted deviates from the % applied?
  • angry-hacker 10y ago
    I'm reading it and I'm also surprised. As far as I understood the whole discrimination and quotas fiasco for minorities always talk about the general population to be compared with.
• vthallam 10y ago
  Is this just like the complaints about elite universities discriminating against Asians/Indians to maintain the diversity? Perhaps people who know about Palantir's diversity ratio can comment. I have seen some companies preferring certain race of applicants to maintain diversity in teams even though there are plenty of qualified applicants.
• malchow 10y ago
  "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. What in the world does that alleged statistic mean?
  • kafkaesq 10y ago
    It's an elementary statistics calculation (which I'm not saying was done right; but that's the direction it was most likely coming from). Left unstated was what P(portion of Asian applications being >= 74%) should be given that, if I'm not mistaken, the percentage of Asian undergraduates (even at upper-tier schools) seems to top out at around 45% (a very rough figure based on quick eyeballing; but I doubt it pushes 60%).
    • malchow 10y ago
      I understand that, thanks. The problem of course is that it bears no relation to actual reality. It may be the case that, for a pipefitter, every human body with Pipefitter Certification 409B can do the job identically to his fellow 409Ber. But there are very few jobs like that–trending to zero. Result of this case: lawyers make a few million bucks. Government gets a few million bucks. Palantir has a few million bucks fewer with which to grow and produce new value. Fewer people get hired. No one wins. Administrative overreach: it's a thing.[1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Administrative-Law-Unlawful-Philip-Hamburger/dp/022611659X https://www.amazon.com/Administrative-Law-Unlawful-Philip-Ha...
      • zachsnow 10y ago
        Not sure about pipe fitting, but for welding, say, or framing? There are definitely 10X welders. So your "trending to zero" point resonates with me (being a shitty welder).
  • nicolashahn 10y ago
    Without actually doing the math, I believe it means that the odds that, if 21 names were pulled out of a hat with 130 names of "qualified applicants," and 73% were Asian, the probability that only 4 names (or less, I assume) are Asian is 1:1,000,000,000.
• deleted 10y ago
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• xemdetia 10y ago
  It would be really nice if some of these reporters at least clarified if among those rejected were US Citizens. In the kind of work Palantir is involved in it is quite possible that they are trying to staff a US Citizen only shop to meet government requirements. Just look at the ITAR regs for example and the 'nonpermanent resident' gets waved about quite a lot.
  • djtriptych 10y ago
    I thought the same thing, having worked in defense. If these engineers need TS/SCI clearance that's gonna trump a lot of technical considerations. They'll deny someone for all kinds of reasons, and you really don't want to find this out after a hire. In DC being pre-cleared basically guarantees employment.
    • Pfhreak 10y ago
      Surely, if the position requires the ability to get a clearance, and a person incapable of getting that clearance applies, they are not a 'qualified applicant'?
  • codeonfire 10y ago
    It doesn't even matter what Palantir's intentions are, the regulators argument doesn't pass the smell test. Under their standard 5 million foreign nationals could stuff the application box and US contractors would be forced to hire 95% of them, relocate them overseas, and grant them green cards simply because of their race. The government needs to decide what race ratio's they want so US businesses can pay to import those races.
• KanyeBest 10y ago
  How does the Department of Labor determine the applicants' qualifications?
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  • mikeryan 10y ago
    Palantir is a government contractor. In this case there's a whole Compliance department that can be involved in audits of hiring practices. https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html In this case I'd assume based on resumes.
  • dqv 10y ago
    My understanding is that they were Internet Applicants [1]. The wording the DOL used makes it appear that someone just needs to say they meet the basic qualifications (defined in another section on the same page). What should be concerning is it applies to these 3 jobs specifically. Palantir is offering a lot more jobs than what is indicated in the lawsuit [2] [3]. As another poster has said, could it be a poisoned recruiter? I wonder if that will be considered and if it will affect the AI (adversity impact). [1] https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#Q1BQ https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#... [2] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... [3] https://www.palantir.com/careers/ https://www.palantir.com/careers/
• guelo 10y ago
  Here's the actual government complaint, the allegations are listed in sections 10 and 11, https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... My concerns, 1) why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians? 2) The complaint is concerned about the use of employee referrals. Studies have shown that building teams from referrals can be a big productivity boost because it enhances team cohesion. While employee referrals can lead to a monoculture it doesn't seem that the federal government should prohibit it.
  • onmatest 10y ago
    I would guess for the second part that the government prohibits it because it could result in unequal opportunities for job seekers based on race. While referrals are more acceptable in non-government-sponsored companies, government-sponsored companies are held to higher standards because that is where taxpayer dollars are directly headed. If the applicant pool was overwhelming black and Palantir hired more white people because of referrals, there would be more uproar. Ultimately, the implications would be that if that logic were applied to government positions, (ie, if government positions took into account referrals more than merit) you could end up with a government that is overwhelmingly white and/or arbitrarily discriminates against people applying to positions.
    • derefr 10y ago
      The general form of this question is: do we care more about government departments in their role as equal-opportunity jobs projects, or do we care more about the government being "effective", doing the most it can with each tax dollar? In this case, I can see how "increased cohesion"—although decreasing the "jobs project" value—would be extremely helpful for increasing tax-dollar ROI.
      • ezzaf 10y ago
        Tax dollar ROI for whom? Part of the benefit of ensuring a diversity in government roles is aiding governments to better provide services for all aspects of society, not just the minority who hold those roles.
• gnicholas 10y ago
  Does anyone know how affected applicants are supposed to participate in this lawsuit? That is, the remedies include remuneration for these applicants, but it doesn't look like there's a clear way for people to indicate that they think they were affected by this bias. (Note that this is a government lawsuit, so it's not like a class-action where additional parties "join" the suit or are included in a class. It's just the government versus the company, with remedies (apparently) to be paid to other individuals.)
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Does anyone know how affected applicants are supposed to participate in this lawsuit? They aren't. > That is, the remedies include remuneration for these applicants, but it doesn't look like there's a clear way for people to indicate that they think they were affected by this bias. Hiring, not remuneration, of some from the "affected class list", is one of the remedies sought. Since the government has through the compliance audits which identified these issues all the hiring records for the positions at issue, including the information on the unsuccessful applicants, they don't really need people to reach out to them to identify that they think they were affected. If there is an remedy issued that would require identifying affected individuals, they already know who is involved.
    • gnicholas 10y ago
      From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me. I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants, since this cannot reliably be done by surname or by any other indirect method. And since applicants cannot be required to provide this information in an application, there is no direct method either (other than seeking applicants to identify themselves after the fact). I am curious about this partly because I am an Asian American who interviewed at Palantir and was turned down for not having enough X skills, when I was never asked any questions pertaining to X.
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  The key question, it seems to me, is what the evidence is that this allegation is true: "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".
• yodsanklai 10y ago
  I'm wondering, how do they define equally qualified? Suppose for instance that a company has an anonymous interviewing procedure (e.g. maths puzzles, supposing it is relevant for the job) that somehow discriminates against a minority, would that be an issue?
  • duaneb 10y ago
    How would you have a process that is both anonymous and discriminatory?
    • yodsanklai 10y ago
      Discriminatory in the sense that the distribution of "winner" in terms of minorities doesn't match the distribution of candidates. I assume it can be the case that minority X is much better at solving maths puzzles than minority Y.
  • samfisher83 10y ago
    Probably use GPA, SAT scores or some other metric.
  • ryuker16 10y ago
    One shady tech company gave me an IQ test
  • ryuker16 10y ago
    One shady tech company gave me an IQ test
• nateberkopec 10y ago
  Very interesting line in the complaint that other companies should take note of: > "In addition, the majority of Palantir's hires into these positions came from an employee referral system that disproportionately excluded Asians." Also, the complaint says they tried twice to get Palantir in compliance (starting in late '15) and are only now filing this complaint.
• djtriptych 10y ago
  Really surprised that they would see an 85% rate for Asian applicants. Is that normal in SV?
  • Kadin 10y ago
    That seems very skewed, based on hiring I've done. My suspicion is it's related to recruiters or other pipelines they were working from to provide them applicants / candidate resumes. There are definitely recruiters who have client populations that are very disproportionate (largely based on where those recruiters get their clients from in the first place). It wouldn't surprise me if the end lesson that comes out of all this is "be very, very careful who you work with to do your recruiting and the effect it has on your applicant pool". If someone (be it a recruiter or just employees hoping for referral bonuses) pumps your hiring pipeline full of low-grade resumes but who nonetheless represent a particular ethnic group, and you end up turning them all down or turning them down at a higher-than-normal rate, you could really be increasing your EEO exposure without realizing it.
• wrong_variable 10y ago
  The interesting question to me is how does discriminating against asians help palantir's bottom line ? Has this something to do with culture, or the fact that Palantir think that even american asians are leaking information to countries like china, india, etc.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > The interesting question to me is how does discriminating against asians help palantir's bottom line ? It quite possibly doesn't; discrimination is often done (even when it is done deliberately and overtly) because it serves non-financial interests of the people choosing to do it, not because it is an efficient means of maximizing profits.
• a-no-n 10y ago
  I bet it's more subtle than overt (not an excuse if it's happening, of course, merely a possible explanation)... probably managers hiring unaware they're hiring people whom look like them, rather than hiring the most skilled and capable people whom fit with the company culture. I've seen this at a number of universities and enterprise shops when there's not a conscious effort to minimize useless bias.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I bet it's more subtle than overt (not an excuse if it's happening, of course, merely a possible explanation)... probably managers hiring unaware they're hiring people whom look like them Actually, from the government filing, it sounds like they are saying a big part of it is very active, through the heavy reliance on an employee referral program.
• Houshalter 10y ago
  Who cares? If the Asians are equally qualified as whites then they are only hurting themselves by excluding them. And they aren't really excluding them. They still hire vastly more Asians than expected by the proportion of general population.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Who cares? The government, because its a violation of an executive order that applies to all government contracting, and Palantir is a government contractor. (Hence why one of the proposed remedies is cancelling all of Palantir's government contracts and subcontracts, and banning them from future contracting.) > If the Asians are equally qualified as whites then they are only hurting themselves by excluding them. If they are only equally (and not more) qualified, and they have to narrow the pool anyway to get a manageable pool for later stages of the hiring process, then they actually aren't hurting themselves, before considering the consequences of enforcement actions like this one.
    • Houshalter 10y ago
      Well obviously the government cares, I'm suggesting that they shouldn't. And yes technically you are correct. But that assumes they are exactly equal. If you exclude a bunch of people for arbitrary reasons then you necessarily get worse results. Some of the best candidates may be excluded.
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
        > Well obviously the government cares, I'm suggesting that they shouldn't. There may be an argument that the government shouldn't require non-discrimination by government contractors, but I don't think that there is a particularly good argument, that, given the existence of the requirement as a term of every government contract, that the government should not care that a government contractor is just casually disregarding the terms of its contract with the government and expecting to continue to be paid. > If you exclude a bunch of people for arbitrary reasons then you necessarily get worse results. Some of the best candidates may be excluded. Since Palantir is a government contractor, the argument that they would be hurting the quality of work they do (which is valid, just not supported by mere equality of qualifications) is another reason the government should be concerned. Remember, this isn't an enforcement action under general anti-discrimination law, its an enforcement action under the specific rules that apply to government contractors.
• munchbunny 10y ago
  The part that doesn't make sense to me is... what does Palantir have to gain by discriminating? The other way this happens is by cultural biases causing discrimination, but not intentionally with some specific goal in mind. I'm operating only on anecdotes, but in the tech industry, discriminating against Asians at the intern/ground level seems to be a non-issue. Maybe different story when you get to management, and maybe different story when you bring gender into the mix, but I didn't think Asians as a whole had issues with employment discrimination at the ground level. I could just be wrong on the aggregate statistics though.
  • rb2k_ 10y ago
    I have no idea, but just a random guess: If you try to sell a lot of secret spying services to the government (which I think Palantir does?), they probably think it helps if your employees don't look/sound Chinese, seeing as the government might be afraid of China's espionage efforts. I also don't know how much trouble they have getting clearance for someone that grew up in China compared to other countries. (again: I have no idea, that's just a random guess)
    • kzx0110 10y ago
      I would speculate that the majority of 'asians' who applied to Palantir were not from China, but rather from the region sometimes called South Asia.
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      • rb2k_ 10y ago
        To save the lazy people a google search: "The current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form the countries of South Asia."
    • MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
      That's what I thought too. I would imagine if something like this were the case, it would be more likely done out of clearance concerns or even a genuine fear of infiltration, than for customer facing optics.
• latinos_latinas 10y ago
  What about top universities discriminating against Asian applicants? In many states, affirmative action is legally denying opportunities for Asian Americans.
• jedmeyers 10y ago
  When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro? And who exactly qualifies as an 'Asian' applicant? Does a person born, say, in Israel qualifies as one?
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > When was the last time U.S. regulators reviewed the percentage of 'asians' in companies like Infosys and WiPro? Are Infosys or WiPro government contractors covered by EO 11246? The audit process doesn't apply to most employers, only government contractors. NOTE: An earlier version of this comment incorrectly referenced EO 12466, because of a transposition in reading from the scanned-but-not-OCRd copy of the lawsuit text.
    • jedmeyers 10y ago
      So only the projects being done under the govt. contract are being evaluated, or the whole company if at least one such project exists? Also EO 12466 is an executive order on Reimbursement of Federal employee relocation expenses. I fail to see how is it related to the topic.
  • codeonfire 10y ago
    Yeah, sounds like a good deal. I will apply to one of these blatant all asian shops that happen to have a government contract and file an EEOC claim. I will get back pay when I am predictably not hired as they have essentially zero non-asian hires. That's assuming US regulators are not totally full of shit. Infosys has IRS, NIH, and UN contracts. WIPro is "is bidding for various government related projects in the US, Europe and Australia." I don't see how they will be able to sue Palantir and not have to sue the fuck out of these racist outsourcers.
• United857 10y ago
  Do they mean Asians from Asia or Americans of Asian descent? The article is unclear, but if the former, given Palantir'a security work with various US government agencies, it might be a factor as others have pointed out.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure the government auditors whose only job is to do compliance audits of government contractors are more than aware of the relevance of citizenship status to qualification for certain jobs related to certain government contracts. And, even if they weren't, I'm pretty sure that Palantir could easily have pointed that out in the two rounds of attempted to pre-lawsuit conciliation initiated by the Department of Labor to resolve the identified issues.
• ones_and_zeros 10y ago
  Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in India doing something that could be argued is software development and now doing a master's at a large state university. To be honest I'm not sure how they got in or are able to graduate.
  • vthallam 10y ago
    Wow! I kind of fit into your sterotype, except i graduated from a large private university. Isn't it stupid that you are putting a billion people in the same pool(Indian bachelors+ consulting firm exp+US State school = suckers)?
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    • mahyarm 10y ago
      That subset of indians isn't a billion although...
    • deleted 10y ago
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  • Spooky23 10y ago
    There's alot of cheating and other shady nonsense. Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.
    • tomp 10y ago
      I agree woth this. I and my friends always wondered how so many Asians get accepted to top UK universities (with very high English-language requirements), when they can barely speak a word of intelligible English. Now I have a close friend from China, and the mistery is solved: others are doing their exams/essays/assignments for them. Keep in mind though, this is likely a huge generalisation (not all Chinese cheat and other nationalities cheat as well), and I put more than half of the blame on the universities themselves (they earn a lot of money accepting these kinds of students), but long-term, it really dilutes the value of this education in my eyes.
• h4nkoslo 10y ago
  Compliance would be a lot fairer and lower-overhead if the government would simply inform businesses of the racial composition they wanted to see, rather than randomly cracking down on firms because particular groups were "only" 4x overrepresented rather than 10x.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    They aren't cracking down because of the ratio, they cracking down because of allegations of systematic elimination of qualified Asian applications from consideration at various stages in the hiring process. The applicant:hired ratios are among the pieces of evidence supporting the conclusion that discrimination was happening, but aren't the subjects of targets.
    • h4nkoslo 10y ago
      Right. I am saying that auditing the process is significantly more onerous on all parties than auditing the result, especially when it looks like the jurisprudence around the former is a complete clusterfuck that only exists so the feds can non-transparently and non-equitably mandate the latter anyway.
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
        > only exists so the feds can non-transparently and non-equitably mandate the latter anyway. This premise is unsupported and, I would argue, completely unsupportable. Though I suppose if you start with the premise that the government is trying to mandate particular outcomes, the enforcement actions they take probably look like the target is capriciously moving, but that's just because the premise is incorrect.
• thedz 10y ago
  I think many of the comments are missing a few important points: 1. Yes, 20% Asian hiring rate is pretty decent when you compare to the general Asian population at large. However, the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians. 2. Palantir is involved in government contracting, so there are also very specific regulations for compliance https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html 3. The lawsuit is being brought on by the Department of Labor. IMO, generally government agencies are usually reluctant to initiate lawsuits that they are afraid of losing. 4. It might be malicious, it might not be. But Palantir was given multiple chances to correct their compliance issue: "The Labor Department sent Palantir a notice in October 2015 about its findings, according to the lawsuit. Both before and after that notice, labor regulators attempted to secure Palantir's voluntary compliance, the lawsuit said, but they did not succeed."
  • danso 10y ago
    Has any other major tech company released numbers on what their hiring demographics look like compared to their qualified application pool? I've seen the demographics for employees in diversity reports, but not qualified-applicant pool numbers. Because, sure, perhaps many of the Asian applicants are poor enough at English that it outweighs whatever got them into the qualified-pool. But I would guess that would be a problem for every SV tech company. So how does Palantir's stats compare to theirs such that it warrants the DoL to file a lawsuit?
    • jonathankoren 10y ago
      While I can't comment on the DOL's methodology because I don't know what it is, I've seen many SV tech companies essentially define the qualified-applicant pool in a way to explain systemic biases. The most obvious one, is "Unless you attended school X, you're unqualified," which quite frankly, is utter bullshit.
    • Twirrim 10y ago
      Relying on referrals sure does punt the ball down the park to the employees from the employers. I wonder how much it allows the company to say "It's not our fault!"
• BuckRogers 10y ago
  Some great points here about citizenship/security clearance being part of the issue. But I'd also ask the government regulators to define "asians". Including East Indians? I'm not sure how the government breaks down their racial statistics but certainly East Indians are Asians. They might not be East Asians but they're Asians. Not only that but Native Americans and most Latin Americans are to some degree of Asiatic origin as well. So they'd have to define recent, or historical Asian origin? Further, we'd need clarification on whites vs Europeans. Europeans presently live in Eurasia, which technically is the same landmass as Asia. Beyond that, all Europeans and their white descendants alive today share the same ancestors as the Native Americans[0], which are of clear Asiatic origins. That also begs the question about my Saudi friends from college: they were adamant that they were Asians as they were indeed from the same continent. So, which "asians" are we talking about here? I think this whole type of thing is a mess and so anti-scientific that it's entirely political. The government and their racial censuses are awfully convoluted. Which should be abolished, as Mexico has been our leader here and already abolished racial censuses long ago- if the US government is truly against racism. Change should always start at the top, leading by good example! In sum, there's only 5 heavily-populated major landmasses in the world and 4 of those 5 are occupied by a majority with folks of wholly Asian or at minimum, mixed-Asian descent. With Africa being the only real exception. So our government need to get its act together and if they're going to use racial terminology and policy, to do it in a little bit more scientific manner. [0]http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29213892 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29213892
  • jacalata 10y ago
    http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
• mankash666 10y ago
  I'm asian, and I honestly believe the DOL has bigger, more real fights to fight than Palantair - which most likely isn't discriminating at all.
• Jugurtha 10y ago
  What is the definition of Asian, here? One has to remember that Middle Eastern countries and Pakistan are in Asia. Given the nature of what Palantir does, it is easy to guess why it would discriminate against a certain category of people who have ties to foreign countries in general, and sensitive countries in particular. It is the same problem intelligence agencies faced when they wanted Arabic/Urdu speakers. Those who spoke these languages would never be vetted.
  • palakchokshi 10y ago
    There are well established processes to vet someone who might be handling sensitive information. There are security clearances that can be obtained. The fact that someone is from a foreign country should not be the basis of discriminating against them. Secondly if Palantir works on highly sensitive data it probably requires applicants to be US citizens. So essentially it is probably discriminating against Asian Americans and not citizens of other countries.
    • Jugurtha 10y ago
      >Secondly if Palantir works on highly sensitive data it probably requires applicants to be US citizens. So essentially it is probably discriminating against Asian Americans and not citizens of other countries. My remark was about Arabic and Urdu speakers who are US Citizens (the possibility that they'd be foreigners didn't even cross my mind). After the Iraq invasion, there were many people who applied to work with Intelligence agencies. US citizens. They just happened to have ties to said countries (you know, your father or grandfather came to the US and you were born here, but your uncle still is in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan). There was a severe shortage of fluent speakers despite a lot of eager applicants. A "We want native Iraqi dialect speakers, but those who speak it just happen to be of Iraqi descent. We can't hire those" situation.
    • cwilkes 10y ago
      This is for internships ... does Palantir have interns working on highly sensitive data? I don't know but I doubt it. Then again they might as from what I've read about the company it is more like a glorified ETL shop. Granted upwards of 80% of a data scientist's job can be cleaning data.
• sumitgt 10y ago
  Indian here (I hope that still makes me Asian). I did interview on-site at Palantir in 2014. I did not feel like any kind of discrimination was in play at any point. In fact, 3/6 of the people I interacted with during the course of my interviews seemed to be from a Asian / east-Asian ethnicity. I did feel like the people working there were a little overly confident in nature, but discriminating? I don't think so.
• Steeeve 10y ago
  The cited example was interns. Who doesn't favor employee referrals for interns? You can be encrusted in diamonds and you're going to get put in the back of the line behind the known quantities and get-in-so-and-so's-good-graces hires for an intern position. There's also the fact that people start to favor/discriminate schools based on history. Had a great intern from Stanford? Hire another Stanford kid. Had a terrible intern from Texas Tech? Scratch all the TT kids who apply for a few years. We'll see how this pans out, but like most of the other people in this thread, I'm inclined to give Palantir the benefit of the doubt at the moment.
  • hackuser 10y ago
    It's common practice, but that doesn't make it ok. In fact, afaik, those network-based hiring practices are a major obstacle to social mobility and to ending racial and gender inequality. Think of it this way: In the U.S. in 1950, white men[0] controlled access to resources like education and jobs, and shared them only with other white men, intentionally discriminating against non-white and non-male applicants. In the past 66 years, network-based hiring practices have extended that systematic discrimination well past its expiration date. White men still dominate those resources, in large part because they network with and therefore hire each other. Who has good schools in their neighborhood? Who got into the good college? Who are their college buddies? Who do their professors and other mentors know? etc. Isn't time we broke that cycle? Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc.: If we step back from our expectations, conditioned over our lifetimes, those photos are absurd - and represent an enormous waste of talent, self-determination, and achievement. ---- [0] Really it was Protestant, heterosexual white men, and maybe some other parameters applied too, but let's keep this simple.
    • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc. But they're not just white men. Not even just protestant heterosexual white men. They're white men with rich parents and Ivy League degrees and so on. And when you realize that, you realize that the percentage of CEOs who have rich parents and Ivy League degrees is higher than the percentage of CEOs who are white men. A century ago the graduates of Harvard may have been 100% white men, but the graduates of Harvard are less than 1% of 1% of white men. The thing you're training your sights on is the scenario where 67% of the candidates are white but >85% of the employees are white. Here's how we got there: The company hired 100 people. First they hired 65 white people who the owners know ("the privileged"). Then they hired 35 more people who all got there on the merits, 67% of whom are white. Company is now 88.45% white. But let's separate the <1% of people (arguendo all of them white) who get the job no matter what and fill the first 65 slots, from the 67% of people who are white but still have to compete for the job like everybody else. What happens to those people? They suffer the same fate as minorities -- competing for 35 slots instead of 100 because 65 were lost to the Old Boys Network. So that 67% of people fills 23.45% of the slots when it should have been 67%. That's how it is now, before you change anything. Now suppose you require the company to balance on race. All the people the owners know are still in. They only made up 65% of the employees, up to 67% can be white, they all get to stay. But now only 2% of the slots are available to 67% of the population, because they were classified as the privileged elite when they weren't. It isn't a race problem, it's a class and social mobility problem.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• smallnamespace 10y ago
  This is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If their employee racial ratios matched the US population, then they will get bashed like this. If their employee racial ratios match the 'qualified candidate pool', then they'll get bashed for not hiring enough women and black people. We haven't as a society agreed on the right way to deal with race, but there's certainly plenty of loud and angry people supporting their own points of view...
  • jasonwatkinspdx 10y ago
    You didn't read the article. They're being sued due to their final hiring being grossly out of step vs the qualified candidate pool. You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population. That assumption is, and continues to be, the problem.
    • smallnamespace 10y ago
      I did read the article. Here is one specific context where they are facing potential penalties because employee racial distribution != candidate pool racial distribution. On the other hand, in a different context, tech companies as a whole are taking a lot of flak because employee racial distribution != population racial distribution. > You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population How is this even up for debate? Women and blacks are both underrepresented in majors like computer science compared to the population average. That flows directly into the candidate pool that tech companies need to hire from. And this article cites one specific example where the 'qualified candidate pool' looks nothing at all like the American population average. You're saying if that candidate pool only had 15% women, we'd want Palantir to hire just 15% women?
      • tomp 10y ago
        > You're saying if that candidate pool only had 15% women, we'd want Palantir to hire just 15% women? Well, yes, that's only fair. Efforts to expand the ratio of women in the qualified candidate pool notwithstanding.
• danieltillett 10y ago
  Doesn’t this result just tell us that Palantir’s recruitment funnel is broken. If your funnel is attracting 73% Asians then fix the funnel at the top, not the bottom.
  • huac 10y ago
    Fix the American educational system?
    • zootam 10y ago
      more like keep the asians accountable. everyone knows that indians/chinese are vastly more likely to go to great lengths to cheat/inflate resume
      • huac 10y ago
        There's a guy on my TV doing that right now, and he doesn't look Indian or Chinese
  • mildbow 10y ago
    It tells us something might be broken. Could be their applicant pool, and/or could be the way implicit biases creep in. The way you word it, however, says the problem is that they are "attracting 73% of Asians". If you want to work in the 21st century, get used to working with people who don't have your same exact background.
    • danieltillett 10y ago
      The problem is they are not attracting enough non-Asians at the top of the funnel - something about their criteria is either driving away others, or is too attractive to Asians. Unless you believe that talent is disproportionally concentrated in Asian candidates (which they obviously don’t given who they actually hire), then it is telling you that the funnel is broken. The funny thing is if they did hire 73% Asians they would rightly be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians.
• savvyraccoon 10y ago
  1,160 qualified people? How do the Labor Department define qualified? Did Palantir interview all of them? reply
  • dmead 10y ago
    i have no idea. over.
  • dqv 10y ago
    >the individual's expression of interest indicated that the individual possesses the basic qualification for the position [1] The issue for this case will be proving whether or not the applicants actually met the basic qualifications. Interestingly, the language implies that someone must simply indicate that they possess the basic qualifications. It doesn't go into detail on verifying the actual possession of those qualifications. I'd like to see what exactly is done to verify the applicants actually met the basic qualifications. [1] https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#Q2GI https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#... [2] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...
  • mattmcknight 10y ago
    By the written job description.
• smoyer 10y ago
  Since much of their work consists of analyzing classified data, they may also be screening out those they decide aren't likely to obtain those clearances. Many defense contractors hire you provisionally (and might put you on a non-classified project) but don't expect to keep that job if you wash out of the background check process. There are plenty of interview questions you could ask to avoid candidates that you know won't make it.
• cromwellian 10y ago
  This doesn't surprise me, Palantir was funded by the CIA (yay libertarianism eh Thiel?), and as such, is probably suspicious of asian minorities. Remember Wen Ho Lee?
  • threepipeproblm 10y ago
    Wait, you think libertarians are pro-CIA?
    • jacalata 10y ago
      I would have guessed not but Theil is certainly classed as libertarian whenever I've heard it discussed, and he is Palantirs major shareholder, and Palantir is a CIA shop. Connection seems pretty clear in this context.
  • StreamBright 10y ago
    Yes we and Wikipedia as well do remember him. "After federal investigators were unable to prove these initial accusations, the government conducted a separate investigation and was ultimately only able to charge Lee with improper handling of restricted data, one of the original 59 indictment counts, to which he pleaded guilty as part of a plea settlement. In June 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations as part of a settlement of a civil suit he had filed against them for leaking his name to the press before any formal charges had been filed against him.[2] Federal judge James A. Parker eventually apologized to Lee for denying him bail and putting him in solitary confinement, and excoriated the government for misconduct and misrepresentations to the court.[3]"
• leroy_masochist 10y ago
  I guess this is the other side of the coin when it comes to government contracting. Government contracts are great if you can make them work -- these organizations have big budgets, and many individual layers of the bureaucracy have a "we must spend our allowance or we won't get one next year" mentality. Find a good use case for your tech, hire a couple of people who are good at making gov't relationships and who know how to do the paperwork right, and you're in business. The flip side of this is that government contracting rules are really, really strict. And the impact of being barred or even partially restricted from government contracting work would be really, really bad for Palantir.
• sib 10y ago
  But yet, it is ok when various US state government entities (e.g., universities, yes, I'm talking about you, California) adopt policies and procedures which are specifically intended to admit Asian students in lower numbers than the qualified applicant pool. Hmm, interesting.
  • khuey 10y ago
    Proposition 209 banned consideration of race and ethnicity for admissions to public universities in the State of California in 1996. Either you've been in a coma for the last twenty years or you are in fact not talking about California.
• smegel 10y ago
  I wonder to what extent by "Asian" they really mean Indian.
• Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  I hope plantair wins this sort of lawsuit could really hurt women and diversity efforts to get into tech jobs if companies are forced to hire based on qualified candidate pools.
• Devthrowaway81 10y ago
  I interviewed for Palantir in 2010 for a QA position. They flew me in from East Coast, and took good care of me. I didn't accepted the offer as I went on to accept a SW position in a different company. I didn't felt like I was biased against. I'm not sure about Palantir's bias against Asians, but the tone of comments here are surely negative and partially racist. Let me think, if I really meant "racist". May be it is the fear of competition, usually shown by below par individuals, or may be just signs of arrogance. Either ways, I am N.E.V.E.R. going to apply to companies like Palantir, Theranos, Snap, Reddit, Path, etc. Damage is done. Congrats. p.s. Throwaway account.
  • tostitos1979 10y ago
    You mention a bunch of random companies .. what is the common thread?
    • Devthrowaway81 10y ago
      Google 'em or ... Palantir - racial bias scandal Theranos - technical fraud scandal Snap, Reddit, and Path - sexual harassment scandal It's difficult to think about working for companies tarnished by scary scandals. There are thousands of jobs in the bay area. If you as an employer can't keep the pristine image. You'll be ignored. Period.
• Kenji 10y ago
  You have to stop discrimination from first principles downwards: Identify the discriminating policy or behaviour and stop it. You cannot assess discrimination from the other side, by looking at percentages and then conclude a systemic bias. That is not only unsound statistics, it is fascism.
• statictype 10y ago
  Some of the comments here are laughable - "I also had to deal with clueless south asians once so I understand how it is". Seriously?
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    Uh...me too. I don't know what you think is weird....some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did (depending on the truthfulness of allegations, of course).
    • statictype 10y ago
      some have a similar hiring experience to what Palantir did ... which is completely irrelevant to whether Palantir is on the right side of this issue. If a police department was reported as displaying bias against blacks or muslims, would it be reasonable to respond with "I've had issues with blacks and muslims in law enforcement too"? Now consider the fact that Palantir does a lot of work for intelligence agencies...
      • Chris2048 10y ago
        > If a police department was reported as displaying bias against blacks or muslims, would it be reasonable to respond with "I've had issues with blacks and muslims in law enforcement too"? But this has no context. What kind of bias, what kind of issues. The example wrt asians has this context.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
  • cup 10y ago
    The general HN users idea of race, discrimination or anything outside the realms of general whiteness is pretty dire.
    • 10y ago
• codeonfire 10y ago
  I don't think the regulators have a case. The applicants failed the phone screens. Apparently U.S. regulators don't think Asians can fail to be qualified or that they are qualified simply for being Asian. They don't define what 'asian' even means, and they are trying to make this a "white" vs "asian" thing. Sounds like a lot of bullshit, maybe they just want to stop doing business with Palantir and need an excuse.
• abysmallyideal 10y ago
  Haha Silicon Valley is notoriously racist. It was started by the US military. Hell, even Stage Jobs went public talking about nuking Koreans like it was pearl harbour and everyone thought that was a swell thing to say. There's gotta be some other motive here.
• zaroth 10y ago
  Wow this is flimsy; 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 applicants 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. I'm sorry, assuming what distribution? And hiring is not chance anyway. That statistic is mind-numbing. Perhaps it is true that... the likelihood that this result occurred according to chance, assuming applicants were selected randomly, is approximately one in a billion. But the applicants are far from randomly selected from a uniform distribution... The odds of choosing 4 Asians out of 21 interns baring racial discrimination do not sound that long to me considering actual educational dynamics and the population that is applying to US software intern jobs.
• yesthereis 10y ago
  This is a symptom of quota system that many schools and companies use to achieve diversity. Unfortunately, as Asian American, I have experienced it firsthand. Asian Americans are some of highest achieving minority, but due to their smaller number there is not enough quotas allocated to them. Many of my friends could not get into their first choice colleges or didn't get scholarships even with perfect grades, extracurricular activities, etc but some of my friends from other larger minority groups got full scholarships even with average GPAs. They laughed at us for working so hard, called us geeks, and then got scholarships because of only ethnicity. I know this is controversial topic, hence, throwaway account. But this is open secret in Asian communities. Hopefully, this lawsuit will change this ridiculous discriminatory quota system.
  • ryuker16 10y ago
    Hiring asians count towards the quota i believe.
  • eruditely 10y ago
    It's the politics of new england. Only once that very same ethnicity is functionally dealt with, will anything change, they prefer their preferred minorities to us.
  • jonnybgood 10y ago
    > then got scholarships because of only ethnicity. Are you absolutely certain of that? How did you know?
    • EJTH 10y ago
      I am not American. But don't you guys have that "affirmative action" thing, especially for the african american demographic?
      • GBond 10y ago
        Most top tier universities don't consider asian-americans as under-represented minorities and even hold higher standards via unwritten caps for the number of AAs admitted.
• kh812000 10y ago
  Who does Palantir think they are ?? The ivy league?? Geesh we all know only tier 1 colleges can discriminate against asians using the "diversity" card..
• manish_gill 10y ago
  I'm extremely disappointed by the vitriol and generalisations against Asians in this thread. Marginalising individual candidates because there are trends in the community is the textbook definition of racial profiling. I'm a dev from India. I work hard and always try my best to stay as honest as I possibly can, and I think I'm fairly competent. For the last job offer I received, I had to take around 7 interviews (phone + in-person) along with take home problems. Recently I'd been wondering if it would be a good idea to do a Masters in US, maybe specialisation in Machine Learning/Deep Learning. But it seems most people here would dismiss candidates like me because "Asians people cheat" or "Asians aren't competent enough". I expect better from my fellow HN-ers.
  • twin-yappi 10y ago
    Actually the definition of racial profiling is more specific and related to law enforcement: https://www.aclu.org/other/racial-profiling-definition https://www.aclu.org/other/racial-profiling-definition What is happening here is more like cultural racism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_racism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_racism
  • morgante 10y ago
    Please don't take these comments personally. I've seen lots of very incompetent Indian applicants. That doesn't mean I won't happily interview another Indian developer because I also know that there are lots of very competent Indian developers. Some of the best coworkers I've ever had were Indian. Anyone who lazily dismisses you because "Asian people cheat" are themselves incompetent interviewers. In my experience, it's actually incredibly cheap/easy to suss out the competent people with a quick 15-minute phone screen.
  • GBond 10y ago
    I too expected more from HN and I think it's because HN is generally more civil than other webs forums. I think the credit of this civility goes to the HN moderators and the enforcement of the policies, not because HN types are special. I used to think technical minded folks are more analytical and thus have less tendency for bias and generalizations but I've concluded that ultimately tech people are still people and subject to the same filters as "normals". I hope you not discouraged from pursuing your specialization in the US.
• throw16 10y ago
  I remember interviewing at Palantir in 2012 at the VA office, i did not see a single non-white person in the office. Everyone i met except for the HR person was most likely below the age of 25 and they all had similar personalities in a weired way. I still don't know why I didn't make past my final interview because i did not get any feedback. It never crossed my mind that it may have to do with the fact that I am not white. I thought it had to do with showing my concern over their unlimited vacation policy and the work life balance and they probably wanted someone that lives in the office. Hope it's the latter.
• mcguire 10y ago
  "In 2015, Asians represented 27.2 percent of the professional workforce at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo but were 13.9 percent of the companies' executive workforces, according to a study by pan-Asian professionals organization Ascend." Asians are culturally inclined towards collective work and are therefore disinclined to the competitive environment of management. Tongue in cheek comment of the day.
• rpcastagna 10y ago
  I'm not totally comfortable with the fact that the knee-jerk reaction here is that an allegation of racial discrimination in hiring is wrong on its face. Although Asians certainly aren't a significantly underrepresented minority in tech on the whole, eliminating bias from hiring processes is a hard problem and it definitely seems plausible to me that Palantir could have, for whatever reason, fallen into an anti-pattern that effectively (if not consciously) discriminated against the Asian applicant pool. Some of the comments here seem to suggest people might be instinctively identifying with Palantir when they talk about their own difficulties in trying to find qualified job applicants. It's without a doubt incredibly hard to find qualified job candidates, and there's a huge number of factors that can go into making any hire/no-hire decision, but for those very reasons these types of lawsuits from the DOL are both hard for them to win and pretty rare, which suggests to me that there's a fair amount of objectively quantifiable evidence pointing towards discrimination. I think, unfortunately, that it's much more common for widespread discrimination to never be addressed in certain companies than for the federal government to overzealously sue corporations on marginal evidence. I don't think there's any question that Palantir is going to be ultimately ok as a company, however the law suit turns out. Even if the ruling was to wrongly come down against them, they'd pay $___ million, change their hiring processes so they're at least less likely to be sued again, and then move on with their lives as a hugely valuable multi-billion dollar corporation. Discriminatory hiring processes, on the other hand, I think need to be routed out wherever they may occur because systemic injustices ultimately hurt our society as a whole. This allegation is very serious and I think needs to be taken seriously. When our instinctive reaction to an accusation of discrimination is that it's more than likely overblown or outright false, we're implicitly endorsing the idea that discrimination is both rare and always obvious, neither of which I think are true. I'm not ready to make any judgements about Palantir as a company or its hiring process, but it seems very likely that they (like any company) have blind spots in the way they're hiring that disadvantage some groups, especially if the DOL thinks there's enough evidence to win a court case over it. The great news for Palantir is that even if that's true, it's not an issue that really affects any core component of them as a company and it's 100% fixable with some extra HR spending. I think the more constructive take-away from a news article like this is to think about what we ourselves do to eliminate bias from our hiring and potentially talk about what works and what doesn't. No one wants or needs us to hire unqualified candidates, but it's undesirable for us to unfairly exclude groups of qualified candidates because of race or any other discriminatory factor, both because of the societal implications and because we end up missing good candidates in a time where good engineers are in incredibly high demand. Like I said, establishing fair hiring practices is a hard problem; it goes a lot further than just trying to "do the right thing" and reaches into a lot of core parts of how we perceive the world. As engineers we constantly try to study and adjust for our imperfect brains' natural tendencies so that we can build more useful products and get more done. Why can't we try to fight bias in the same way?
• solidsnack9000 10y ago
  I'm not sure how the stuff about executive positions is relevant for internships. > In 2015, Asians represented 27.2 percent of the professional workforce at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo but were 13.9 percent of the companies' executive workforces, according to a study by pan-Asian professionals organization Ascend.