
U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians - flinner
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-tech-discrimination-lawsuit-idUSKCN11W2DA
======
ones_and_zeros
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.

~~~
throwaway8976
I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a
week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants
who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or
two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large
majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens
(or asked in person at job fairs).

~~~
api
I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at
alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these
backgrounds.

How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without
actually.... uhh.... you know.... _knowing_ the subject _at all_?

~~~
dabockster
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without
> actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?

Recent undergraduate grad here. A lot of the algorithms I've seen on technical
interviews were only covered once or twice in the curriculum. Basically, one
such algorithm would come up in either the data structures or algorithms
class, we would then work on it for the given assignment/exam, and finally we
would move on from it. Subsequent course work would barely reference it.

These things are best learned through repetition. Unfortunately, with all of
the other CS coursework topics that I was being educated on, it seemed like
there was little room for the repetition to take place. (At least, not in the
stereotypical four year timespan assuming that the given student enters a CS
program with no prior programming knowledge.)

~~~
NoPiece
If you know even some basic programming and logic, you should be able to come
up with a reasonable fizz buzz solution. You don't need to have studies the
fizz buzz algorithm in college, or have practiced a solution.

~~~
jnordwick
I spent weeks on that algorithm. It is only through daily katas that I still
remember its rigors.

------
guelo
Here's the actual government complaint, the allegations are listed in sections
10 and 11,
[https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...](https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf)

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
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
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.

~~~
Shivetya
tax dollar ROI is less important to politicians than an equivalent of voter
ROI. It cost them nothing to turn out an inferior program, project,
expenditure, or whatever, provided the political points are accounted for.

seen companies at local airport bidding contracts who have minorities who are
merely paid to be on the board so they qualify for the contract.

want to know one reason the government is so large, intrusive, and
inefficient, look no further to rules that enforce everything but efficiency.

~~~
simplemath
How do you know why those minority employees were hired?

~~~
tastythrowaway2
my guess is it's...

simple math

YYYEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

------
thedz
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
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
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.

------
yesthereis
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.

~~~
jonnybgood
> then got scholarships because of only ethnicity.

Are you absolutely certain of that? How did you know?

~~~
yummyfajitas
One can't be 100% certain of anything. However, between 2/3 and 5/6 of black
students at top colleges probably would have been rejected under a
meritocratic admission system.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904256)

Similarly, it's established that Asians tend to meet a much higher SAT cutoff
than blacks and whites.

[http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-
health/asian-...](http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asian-
american/article-admission.aspx)

It's pretty safe to say that most blacks at Harvard don't deserve to be there
and it probably should be an Asian in their place. You just can't say _which
specific_ blacks and Asians it should be.

~~~
burkaman
I don't think you can jump straight from "some people benefit from affirmative
action" to "they don't deserve to be there". Obviously supporters of
affirmative action do think they deserve to be there, despite their lower test
scores, and it's worth at least considering that point of view.

------
manish_gill
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.

~~~
morgante
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.

------
smallnamespace
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
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
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?

~~~
vertex-four
We (lefty types) generally want companies, Governments and people to put in
effort to expand the "qualified candidate pool" to a point where it generally
matches the population, and then put effort into ensuring they're non-
discriminatory in hiring.

Governments then create indexes which companies and politicians game because
it's cheaper to "positively discriminate" in hiring than to put effort into
attracting qualified candidates or fix the broader social issues, and then the
population as a whole judges everybody by the index the Government created.

~~~
marcoperaza
What a distressing view of the world, where people are forced to live their
lives according to your conception of what the "proper" proportion of things
are. The applicant-pool should reflect the people who want the job, period. If
the people that want a particular job are 90% women, or 80% men, or 50% black,
or whatever, then that's totally fine. We are a nation of individual people
deciding what to do with our own lives.

~~~
vertex-four
In practice, people have pressures put on them from an early age to do
whatever their elders think is best for them, and, frankly, their elders are
often sexist, and the community they're born into might push them one way or
another. This goes all the way up to the first year of university for many
people.

There really isn't another good reason for a lot of what we see in terms of
what people wind up doing (and some of how they behave while doing it!) when
they're older, and we're well aware that socialisation during childhood is a
powerful thing. As an example, there's relatively few people who are brought
up without religion but find religion later - but there's a heck of a lot of
people who were brought up with religion and never leave it.

Attempting to remove some of those pressures and counter-balance others seems
perfectly reasonable, and unless there actually is something innate which
causes boys to enjoy computers and girls to enjoy nursing, the result of that
should be that we see a number of job markets level out to look like a
reasonable cross-section of the population. Anybody who thinks that
independent thinking is a good thing should likely support these efforts, or
at least the well-implemented ones.

~~~
marcoperaza
Culture is a legitimate source of differences between people and groups of
people.

------
xemdetia
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
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
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'?

------
munchbunny
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_
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
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.

~~~
rb2k_
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."

------
themoon
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
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.

------
throw16
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.

------
Steeeve
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
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
> 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.

~~~
hackuser
> They're white men with rich parents and Ivy League degrees and so on.

I think that's a very good point.

However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very
prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of society,
it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized racism it
would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the
excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized
discrimination until the civil rights era.

Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist
views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or
Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the
harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!

I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various
excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also
of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a
sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've
never seen data supporting it.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very
> prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of
> society, it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized
> racism it would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be
> coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that
> suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.

It's clearly not a coincidence, the problem is that part of the cause is
present day racism and part of it is the economic fallout of historical
racism, and they're separate because only the first is actually a race
problem. The second is just a slice from the general problem of poverty and
mobility and has to be solved in the same way.

But that means the statistics don't mean anything unless you can identify what
caused it, because it changes what we have to do about it. If black people are
underrepresented because of real live racists then we need to hunt down the
racists, but if they're underrepresented because they're poor or raised by
single parents or other such things where everyone like that is
underrepresented, then we need to fight poverty and promote premarital
contraception and so on.

And in practice it's going to be both, but that doesn't save you any work. You
still need to find each root cause to destroy it. The problem isn't that there
aren't enough black Senators, the problem is that a promising black
entrepreneur who would otherwise have become a Senator had no choice other
than to go to a racist loan officer who denied the loan. The lack of black
Senators is the _consequence_.

> Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing
> racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying
> 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were
> faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor
> strength!

A hundred psychology experiments have shown that if you put people on a team
and put some other people on another team, they'll instantly become
adversaries. To actually eliminate racism you have to destroy the idea of it.
It was never a real thing -- the human race is the only race. To make it go
away we have to stop having "African Americans" as a category. They need to be
just Americans.

I mean your PhD friend is clearly wrong. Weren't the people still in Kenya the
ones _not_ captured as slaves? Otherwise they would be in Alabama. But the
stupidity of the argument doesn't phase because it isn't meant to convince.
It's meant to rationalize a win by The Other Team when Our Team is supposed to
be better at everything.

But we can't convincingly argue that race isn't important and people shouldn't
identify with it, while at the same time making a big deal about racial
disparities and rehashing the differences between races.

> I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various
> excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also
> of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as
> a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but
> I've never seen data supporting it.

The reason there is never any good data one way or the other is that people
keep trying to measure the empty space. You can't just go to companies and do
a survey that says "how many black people didn't you hire because you're a
dirty racist?" So what people do instead is to say that there is X amount of
disparity, and if you account for income then this much goes away, and if you
account for education level then this much etc., and then whatever is left at
the end is labeled the contribution of racism.

But there are arbitrarily many confounders. If you account for enough of them
then the _whole_ amount might be "explained," but it isn't really because you
e.g. accounted for credit history but that includes the racist creditors who
maliciously ruined the credit of minorities. It turns into a political fight
over what factors should be considered and there is no answer. And even if
there was, it would only tell you how much racism there is, not _where_ it is.

But there is a simple solution, which is to realize that the exact number is
irrelevant. It isn't zero. Nobody seriously claims that there is _no racism at
all_. It doesn't matter if it's 50% or 0.0001%. You do the same thing in each
case -- fight every instance of racism you find.

But actual racism, not statistics and aggregates. Your friend with the PhD is
Wrong. It is now your responsibility to fix it by convincing them.

------
malchow
"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
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
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-
Ha...](https://www.amazon.com/Administrative-Law-Unlawful-Philip-
Hamburger/dp/022611659X)

~~~
zachsnow
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).

------
kafkaesq
_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.

~~~
lettergram
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.

~~~
colmvp
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
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.

------
latinos_latinas
What about top universities discriminating against Asian applicants? In many
states, affirmative action is legally denying opportunities for Asian
Americans.

------
statictype
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
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
_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
> 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.

------
mankash666
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.

------
codeonfire
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.

------
smoyer
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.

------
jedmeyers
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
> 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
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.

------
KanyeBest
How does the Department of Labor determine the applicants' qualifications?

~~~
mikeryan
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.

------
djtriptych
Really surprised that they would see an 85% rate for Asian applicants. Is that
normal in SV?

~~~
Kadin
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.

------
sib
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
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.

------
yodsanklai
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
How would you have a process that is both anonymous and discriminatory?

~~~
yodsanklai
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.

------
zaroth
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.

------
BuckRogers
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
[http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html](http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html)

------
United857
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
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.

------
savvyraccoon
1,160 qualified people? How do the Labor Department define qualified? Did
Palantir interview all of them? reply

~~~
dqv
>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#...](https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/iappfaqs.htm#Q2GI)

[2]
[https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...](https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf)

------
Mao_Zedang
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.

------
Jugurtha
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
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
> _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.

------
sumitgt
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.

------
vthallam
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.

------
Kenji
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.

------
dragonwriter
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".

------
leroy_masochist
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.

------
wrong_variable
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
> 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.

------
gnicholas
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
> 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
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
> From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted
> individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me.

I missed that in reviewing the actual lawsuit (and thought it was an error in
the article), but see it on review. In any case, the point that the government
knows who the applicants are remains.

> I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants

The government can identify all the applicants. If it reaches the stage at
which more information from them becomes relevant, the government can reach
out to the applicants for additional information. It doesn't need to rely on
the applicants initiating the contact.

Though if, as you indicate, you are _personally_ interested and what to
proactively contact the government to make sure you don't miss out on any
opportunities, contact information for the office responsible for the lawsuit
is in the press release [0] announcing it.

[0]
[https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20160926](https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20160926)

~~~
gnicholas
Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised that there isn't any info in the
press release indicating how individuals can share their experiences with the
DOL. Perhaps they figure they have 90% of the info already, and that's good
enough?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised that there isn't any info in the
> press release indicating how individuals can share their experiences with
> the DOL. Perhaps they figure they have 90% of the info already, and that's
> good enough?

The processes under the contracting rules at issue are fairly well
established, and I suspect if additional information from applicants was
relevant they would have actively reached out before filing the lawsuit. I
think that this action is about the _overall_ nature of the hiring processes
at issue where the key evidence is the internal documentation of the hiring
process and decisions made with in it, and not the experiences of individual
applicants.

I imagine it must feel weirdly impersonal as someone within the affected
class, though, since its both about your experience in a general sense, but
not all that concerned with it in a specific sense.

------
danieltillett
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.

~~~
mildbow
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
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.

~~~
mildbow
> which they obviously don’t given who they actually hire

It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit.

> if they did hire 73% Asians they would rightly be criticised for
> discriminating against non-Asians.

Why would they _rightly_ "be criticised for discriminating against non-
Asians."?

Anyway, what you are suggesting _does_ happen when listing jobs (eg how
startup jobs are marketed towards younger people). Doesn't mean that it's
right or wrong in private companies. But to say it _isn 't_ wrong when you are
taking government money is disingenuous.

~~~
danieltillett
>It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit.

It is obvious to Palantir. They are rightly recognising that talent is much
more evenly spread despite attracting a disproportional number of Asian
candidates at the top of the funnel. They are trying to fix a broken funnel by
discriminating at the end of the process.

I don’t think anyone would think the appropriate solution is to just hire 73%
people of Asian decent because that is what the funnel provided.

~~~
mildbow
Feels like we are talking past each other :)

 _Of course_ it's obvious to Palantir: they are the ones doing it. Of course
it's _not obvious_ to DOL: they are the ones with the lawsuit.

Of course it obvious to anyone that demographics at various level of any
funnel wont/cant be translated to the bottom.

What's _not_ obvious are the _causes_ in this specific case.

~~~
danieltillett
I will agree that we seem to be talking past each other :)

I don't know the cause of the broken funnel, but that does not stop me from
being to identify that there is something broken with how Palantir are filling
their funnel.

I do think the DOL are looking at the wrong end. What Palantir needs to fix is
how they are filling their pipeline so that they capture a much more
representative cross section of the talent pool. I am pretty sure Palantir
have not deliberately set out to do this, but there is something about their
selection criteria, advertising, or outreach that is going wrong to end up
with such a skewed funnel.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I do think the DOL are looking at the wrong end.

Its illegal for Palantir to discriminate in the end DOL is looking at
irrespective of whether or not they should be doing something at the other
end.

~~~
danieltillett
I am not sure it is illegal what Palantir is doing (the court case will
determine this), but on the face of if 20% of the people you hire are of Asian
decent this does not look unreasonable. If their funnel had 20% Asian
candidates and they hired 20% I don't think the DOL would have intervened.

------
mcguire
" _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._

------
solidsnack9000
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.

------
smegel
I wonder to what extent by "Asian" they really mean Indian.

------
kh812000
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..

------
a-no-n
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
> 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.

------
abysmallyideal
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.

------
rpcastagna
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?

------
Devthrowaway81
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
You mention a bunch of random companies .. what is the common thread?

------
Houshalter
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
> 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
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
> 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.

------
nateberkopec
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.

------
cromwellian
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
Wait, you think libertarians are pro-CIA?

~~~
jacalata
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.

------
h4nkoslo
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
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
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
> 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.

