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The FAA's Hiring Scandal: A Quick Overview

skymast 3y ago
[flagged]
- linhns 3y ago
  Hopefully you won’t get downvotes for saying this. Last time I put on a similar comments got folks jumping in to protect DEI.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Probably because its important to stay on-topic: for example, here. article doesn't talk about DEI scores, DEI, or ESG.
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    It seems like a lot of the most liberal people left Twitter and some of them ended up here. They still believe that progressivism is calling people racist that disagree with policies like this. I have hope that things will change though, once the virtue signalling result in something that can effect their safety theu will reconsider.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- kanbara 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    Yes, if you define the role you are hiring for as one where the applicant would have failed science in high school you will be hiring the most qualified applicant if they failed science in high school. But how is failing science in high school good for working on aviation safety?
  - peanutcrisis 3y ago
    If they are qualified, shouldn't they be able to compete fairly with the rest of the applicant pool? I think this scenario should only be a cause for concern if people are being passed on for anything other than their competency, such as race.
  - corindallax 3y ago
    This article is about a government agency that deliberately used race over merit. The documents show that a merit-based test (of cognitive ability) was scrapped because too many black people failed. It was replaced with a point system, based on biographical data, where a lower grade in high school science improved an applicant's odds of being hired. Regardless of what is true about "most organizations", the FAA engaged in a deliberately racist scheme to exclude the most qualified people if they are an undesirable race. You seem to be responding to a specific example of a federal agency engaging in racism by saying that most organizations are not that way. How does that make this instance acceptable? Given the long period of time the government has been getting away with it, how do you know most organizations are not quietly doing the same thing?
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    > most organisations do not _hire_ using DEI over merit Scientific study needed. There's a reason we use double blind studies; there are many biases that can influence results. I'd bet a pretty penny that most organizations ARE hiring DEI over merit, they may simply not be doing so explicitly. If you're "collecting candidate pools based on diversity", you're not going to convince me that you aren't biasing your hiring in some way. https://xkcd.com/463/ https://xkcd.com/463/
- 303uru 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - corindallax 3y ago
    "there's also countless examples of businesses who clearly only hire white dudes with beards and wraparound Oakleys. So the point feels fairly moot." Name one. I bet you can't. If you could, multiple public interest law firms would be competing to sue that employer. I believe there was a time when hiring managers discriminated against black people, women, etc. But aside from one indian manager who only interviewed indian candidates in 2005, I have seen no evidence of it in the last 20 years. In contrast, I have seen dozens instances of favoritism toward female candidates in my last three jobs as a programmer. I think your stereotype of corporate america is 20+ years out of date. I will change my mind if I see evidence. Will you? Do you actually see white and asian men being favored in any way at work?
    - georgepinkfloyd 3y ago
      "What have white men ever done for us?" I used to work for an American company in Australia and there was definitely a push to hire female managers, to the point where they would ignore the stack of resumes they already had and actually went poaching for candidates on LinkedIn (i.e. messaging women who were not applicants in the first place, offering them an interview). We also had a ton of nonsense from US clients asking us not to use terms like "blacklist" or "master" in our software, requiring completely useless changes to be made for compliance.
    - 303uru 3y ago
      Black Rifle coffee. Damn near any welding shop. Every gun shop or range I've ever been to. 20 years out of date? Curious as I was high school. You live in a small little anecdotal world, try touching grass.
- techdragon 3y ago
  This wasn’t just some DEI/ESG score based thing… There were people who had the answers fed to them! I don’t care why it was done, doing this seems to be the real moment the entire diversity effort seems to have become a farce. It’s unacceptable manipulation of a candidate selection system that would obviously lead to some kind of repercussions. This is classic “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” stuff. Everyone is trying to do the right thing, wanting to improve the situation where the FAA was the least diverse federal agency seems like a laudable goal, they didn’t just rush it, they took years to develop new processes… it just so happened that some people got too keen, forgot their own responsibilities and began to advocate to help diversify candidates using methods that go beyond what is acceptable OF ANY CANDIDATE. No one should be fed answers like that, I don’t care if your Black, White, Martian, or Italian, it’s cheating, it’s just cheating the damn selection process and it’s obvious a problem… Separating this from the diversity issue is quite difficult given the history, but fundamentally it’s necessary to have a proper discussion about it. It’s not DEI as a concept that lead to this, it’s people who made decisions and conducted themselves in a way that had broader consequences than just helping make the FAA a more diverse workplace.
swagmoose 3y ago
Part of this tweet[1] stood out to me. I wish I was more optimistic about Buttigieg handling this appropriately, but I'm not aware of any significant action on his part over the Norfolk Southern freight explosion a year ago. "He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities. He has extraordinary power to end this mess in a moment and begin to make things right for those who were directly denied a chance at the jobs they had worked towards thanks to an arbitrary and perverse biographical questionnaire." [1] https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471 https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/17520918310959394...
303uru 3y ago
[flagged]
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  I couldn't agree more. When I'm in the air, I am much more comfortable knowing that the initial barrier to air traffic control training is to ask how many sports a candidate claimed to have played in high school rather than an 8-hour long cognitive ability test.
  - 303uru 3y ago
    Nice strawman. Enjoy it.
thegrim33 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
YeBanKo 3y ago
Why is this flagged?
- doublepg23 3y ago
  Dang, for future reference, is their something rule breaking about this post?
  - YeBanKo 3y ago
    I doubt he will ever read this or even if he does, that he’ll answer.
Inward 3y ago
Flagged why? How does this break any rules?

[flagged]

linhns 3y ago
Hopefully you won’t get downvotes for saying this. Last time I put on a similar comments got folks jumping in to protect DEI.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Probably because its important to stay on-topic: for example, here. article doesn't talk about DEI scores, DEI, or ESG.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  It seems like a lot of the most liberal people left Twitter and some of them ended up here. They still believe that progressivism is calling people racist that disagree with policies like this. I have hope that things will change though, once the virtue signalling result in something that can effect their safety theu will reconsider.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
kanbara 3y ago
[flagged]
- gitfan86 3y ago
  Yes, if you define the role you are hiring for as one where the applicant would have failed science in high school you will be hiring the most qualified applicant if they failed science in high school. But how is failing science in high school good for working on aviation safety?
- peanutcrisis 3y ago
  If they are qualified, shouldn't they be able to compete fairly with the rest of the applicant pool? I think this scenario should only be a cause for concern if people are being passed on for anything other than their competency, such as race.
- corindallax 3y ago
  This article is about a government agency that deliberately used race over merit. The documents show that a merit-based test (of cognitive ability) was scrapped because too many black people failed. It was replaced with a point system, based on biographical data, where a lower grade in high school science improved an applicant's odds of being hired. Regardless of what is true about "most organizations", the FAA engaged in a deliberately racist scheme to exclude the most qualified people if they are an undesirable race. You seem to be responding to a specific example of a federal agency engaging in racism by saying that most organizations are not that way. How does that make this instance acceptable? Given the long period of time the government has been getting away with it, how do you know most organizations are not quietly doing the same thing?
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  > most organisations do not _hire_ using DEI over merit Scientific study needed. There's a reason we use double blind studies; there are many biases that can influence results. I'd bet a pretty penny that most organizations ARE hiring DEI over merit, they may simply not be doing so explicitly. If you're "collecting candidate pools based on diversity", you're not going to convince me that you aren't biasing your hiring in some way. https://xkcd.com/463/ https://xkcd.com/463/
303uru 3y ago
[flagged]
- corindallax 3y ago
  "there's also countless examples of businesses who clearly only hire white dudes with beards and wraparound Oakleys. So the point feels fairly moot." Name one. I bet you can't. If you could, multiple public interest law firms would be competing to sue that employer. I believe there was a time when hiring managers discriminated against black people, women, etc. But aside from one indian manager who only interviewed indian candidates in 2005, I have seen no evidence of it in the last 20 years. In contrast, I have seen dozens instances of favoritism toward female candidates in my last three jobs as a programmer. I think your stereotype of corporate america is 20+ years out of date. I will change my mind if I see evidence. Will you? Do you actually see white and asian men being favored in any way at work?
  - georgepinkfloyd 3y ago
    "What have white men ever done for us?" I used to work for an American company in Australia and there was definitely a push to hire female managers, to the point where they would ignore the stack of resumes they already had and actually went poaching for candidates on LinkedIn (i.e. messaging women who were not applicants in the first place, offering them an interview). We also had a ton of nonsense from US clients asking us not to use terms like "blacklist" or "master" in our software, requiring completely useless changes to be made for compliance.
  - 303uru 3y ago
    Black Rifle coffee. Damn near any welding shop. Every gun shop or range I've ever been to. 20 years out of date? Curious as I was high school. You live in a small little anecdotal world, try touching grass.
techdragon 3y ago
This wasn’t just some DEI/ESG score based thing… There were people who had the answers fed to them! I don’t care why it was done, doing this seems to be the real moment the entire diversity effort seems to have become a farce. It’s unacceptable manipulation of a candidate selection system that would obviously lead to some kind of repercussions. This is classic “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” stuff. Everyone is trying to do the right thing, wanting to improve the situation where the FAA was the least diverse federal agency seems like a laudable goal, they didn’t just rush it, they took years to develop new processes… it just so happened that some people got too keen, forgot their own responsibilities and began to advocate to help diversify candidates using methods that go beyond what is acceptable OF ANY CANDIDATE. No one should be fed answers like that, I don’t care if your Black, White, Martian, or Italian, it’s cheating, it’s just cheating the damn selection process and it’s obvious a problem… Separating this from the diversity issue is quite difficult given the history, but fundamentally it’s necessary to have a proper discussion about it. It’s not DEI as a concept that lead to this, it’s people who made decisions and conducted themselves in a way that had broader consequences than just helping make the FAA a more diverse workplace.

Part of this tweet[1] stood out to me. I wish I was more optimistic about Buttigieg handling this appropriately, but I'm not aware of any significant action on his part over the Norfolk Southern freight explosion a year ago. "He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities. He has extraordinary power to end this mess in a moment and begin to make things right for those who were directly denied a chance at the jobs they had worked towards thanks to an arbitrary and perverse biographical questionnaire." [1] https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471 https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/17520918310959394...

303uru 3y ago

[flagged]

readthenotes1 3y ago
I couldn't agree more. When I'm in the air, I am much more comfortable knowing that the initial barrier to air traffic control training is to ask how many sports a candidate claimed to have played in high school rather than an 8-hour long cognitive ability test.
- 303uru 3y ago
  Nice strawman. Enjoy it.

thegrim33 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

YeBanKo 3y ago

Why is this flagged?

doublepg23 3y ago
Dang, for future reference, is their something rule breaking about this post?
- YeBanKo 3y ago
  I doubt he will ever read this or even if he does, that he’ll answer.

Inward 3y ago

Flagged why? How does this break any rules?