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.
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.
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._U...
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.
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.
That's exactly what I'm saying. "5% of my employees are female because 5% of my applicants are" does not mean that you've actually done what you can to eliminate bias in your recruiting, marketing, etc.
You can't point to the "industry" when the industry is composed of individuals with distinct roles. The scope of influence of the average employer, for example, begins with the receiving of applications - they have less control of who chooses to study the subject.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
"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?
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%).
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]
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).
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.
Yes - but the objection is that no one in his/her right mind should be making hiring decisions at random. So, comparing it to choosing at random in rather obtuse (and clearly intended only to score cheap points by the person who filed the lawsuit.)
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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) 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why are you trying to shut down debate? It's a good point. I want my tax dollars to be maximized and not used to somehow enforce your idea of racial justice.
Eh, I sure hope My situation is more like an investor with a vote, because I have very little ability to boycott the US government. Even if I go to the trouble of choosing a competing "product" by getting citizenship somewhere else I will still feel it's influence!
Stop that. Stop that shit right now. This is not a business, and we don't you acting like a jerk CEO and yelling at people.
I guess you didn't get downvoted because people agree with you. I agree with you also. And yet, being right is not an excuse for the overly antagonistic way you made your point.
The money is going from some Americans to other Americans. There's also an ROI issue if we're all paying equally, but the recipients are chosen in a biased manner.
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.
In terms of tax dollars, I'm disappointed that I had to pay for this to begin with. It's a waste of money.
I highly doubt Palantir did any kind discrimination based on race.
The initial demographics of the founders and the early team has a large impact on the rest of the hires in my experience at previous startups. Main reason being that the early people are more prone to hire from referrals in their network of people they know.
Some things to consider:
P(qualified | referral) > P(qualified | all applicants)
I wasn't suggesting monetary ROI; rather, effectiveness at achieving whatever goal is in the department's charter to achieve, by whatever metric that goal is measured: QALYs for the surgeon general, victories for the army, average time-to-destination for the Department of Transportation, etc.
Currently, we seem to just think of the government as a machine that turns dollars into achieved consensus goals at some fixed (very low) efficiency. We never seem to say "what if we measured [metric] out per dollar in, and then tried to make that ratio increase?"
I would assert that its not a higher standard, but a less-informed one. If I have people I trust sharing their knowledge with me, its not immoral to leverage their judgment.
And that's part of the problem with government doing things. It does not handle intangible considerations very well.
> why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians?
This is almost certainly because they're using recruiters, and the recruiters are funneling them candidates who aren't representative of the broader CS-degreed candidate pool.
I don't care who you are or what you look like. I don't care how old you are, your gender, sexual preferences, citizenship status, and so forth. I'm certain that having a large mix of these will make my work environment more productive and interesting, but for each candidate I have much more important things to think about.
The job is to make technology do stuff for people. This means you must have technology skills and people skills. Folks can argue about the ratio, but as a first approximation, for the vast majority of commercial software development work, it's about 10 percent tech and 90 percent people skills. We aren't building the next Google. We're going down the hall to talk to the CSRs about why the IVR system is acting up.
I have interviewed devs. I found them almost universally atrocious both in tech and people skills. I found no correlation between certifications and actual ability to perform (except a positive correlation between advanced degrees and feelings of self-entitlement.)
Do whatever tech tests you want, and for sure capture a ton of metrics. But the only process that has made any sense to me over the years is the team audition process. It's a play. We have try-outs. For a few folks we pick some candidates and backups. Everybody shows up for a sprint or two and the rest of the team sees how it works out.
I don't see that universe as being anything close to the universe the government allegation seems to assume, where ratios of one category of candidate should translate into the same ratios of successful applicants.
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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Even if they are only equally qualified, Palantir would be hurting themselves, because, if they had more candidates (larger supply) to choose from, they could make more offers at lower compensation, live with lower acceptance rates, still fill all their open positions, and increase profit margins.
It's not equivalent, because those are traditionally oppressed groups. Whereas Asians are not oppressed and are fantastically successful relative to their tiny portion of the general population. Based on the report above, they were hiring between 20%-40% asians, which is 5-9 times their rate in the general population! You could make an equally strong case that they are disparately impacting whites!
I don't think you can judge whether someone is oppressed based on how successful they are. If they're successful, it might mean they weren't oppressed, or it could just mean they overcame the oppression.
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.
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)
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.
Maybe I'm just naive, but I have trouble believing that one group of US citizens as a whole has more "loyalty" issues than another. Is it a concern about spies? Racially biased hiring practices seems like an overly broad way of trying to address focused espionage.
If it's about hiring non-citizens, then I think there's a legitimate procedural issue around employees needing clearance levels, but I'd find it hard to believe that there would be a lawsuit over racial biases if it's driven by clearance requirements making non-citizens ineligible.
Who would be more likely to be compromised by last year's OPM database hack by the Chinese (supposedly) which contained info on most of the cleared government and contract workers in the US?
* A guy of European ancestry from Anywhere, USA who has no family, friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
* A naturalized US citizen from China whose friends, family, and associates still live there, and who often travels back for visits.
Even if the naturalized American - Chinese citizen was not corrupted himself, countries like China would not be above threatening his relatives still there.
There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems:
1. You should be filtering for foreign connections in general, not for ethnicity. That test already happens in the process of getting security clearance.
2. You can leverage people in plenty of other ways that do not involve threatening friends or relatives. Both the US and China have teams in government agencies that do that for a living.
3. Oh man this is a huge can of worms when it comes to civil rights, equality, and constitutional issues in general.
That makes for a not-very-accurate filter that is ethically suspect that is also not hard to bypass for the seemingly valuable intel underneath. Seems like bad ROI.
Perhaps I really am naive as you say, but on the second order of analysis it seems to me like an ineffective policy if it were actually a policy.
Companies can decline to hire someone for a position that requires a security clearance if they have reason to believe that it will be difficult or impossible for that person to obtain a clearance. There is a specific exception to nondiscrimination laws for this: Section 703(g).
Section 703(g) exceptions are somewhat tricky from a HR perspective because they can edge into territory that would normally be an EEO violation (I mean, obviously, since it's an exception to the rule) and there's very little precedent on them. AFAIK, there's only one court case around about it, where a guy was not hired for a cleared position on account of having family in Cuba. [1] The decision not to hire him, based on the reasonable belief that he would not be clearable, was considered acceptable. "Example 3" on that page also gets into another common scenario, which is declining to hire someone based on the belief that their clearance process would be long, and the company has an immediate need. (IMO, this is the most common scenario. Someone with a lot of family in China or Russia might well be clearable, but their clearance might be likely to take too long for them to be a viable candidate, particularly at a company that doesn't have non-cleared work for them to do in the meantime.)
(I'm not who you responded to,) It is a known tactic of the Chinese government. This book has a good overview of their intelligence apparatus: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Intelligence-Operations-Nicho... . This isn't an abstract concern, it is something that has happened thousands of times, for political and industrial espionage and political repression.
likely or not. your thought just remind me of japanese internment camps. if there is a need to double check a naturalized US citizen from China, that is all good. But excluding someone for that is totally racism. this has no difference from Trump's idea of banning all muslims
Your argument exists only in the theoretical. Indeed the naturalized citizen with extensive ties to a high espionage risk foreign power has a higher risk of denial of clearance. But your example is practically a straw man. The typical Asian applicant profile does not match the example you gave.
The U.S. government decides who gets clearances. Contracting companies submit prospective employees for contractor positions based off of their qualifications. This is done by a worksheet considering the essential skills for the position and points for education, previous experience, etc. Contracting companies have no business pre-screening based off of anything more than U.S. citizenship.
Chinese espionage actions have not been about coersion; they've been about incentives and appeals to heritage. The only notable Chinese-linked espionage cases in recent history have been first-generation immigrants, with nationalism and loyalty appeals, not threats against family members.
I haven't seen any denials of clearances in the Industrial Security Clearance Decisions [1] based off of simple national origin claims.
Probably a big part of it. They might be very interested in appearing not to be a typical body shop.
The odd thing is that there are fairly straightforward ways to write position descriptions such that the "qualified applicant" pool is as small and well-defined as you want it to be. This is practically a subspecialty within HR. That they are getting sued would seem to imply that they didn't do any of the normal procedural stuff that most companies have their HR departments doing to head off such accusations, meritorious or not.
These guys applying dont care what you write: its immigrate hell or high water.....worse, palantir might actually hire foreigners on visas...
I used to run an import/export business......Pakistan guys would try to connect online to score a business visitors visa. Some were upfront, others had no problem wasting 5 hours of your time with a fake business deal in hopes you'll sponsor a visitor visa at the end.
Well, yes, which was why I thought of unintentional "culture fit" bias as the reason, because that's certainly the case in many other situations.
But for a company Palantir's size, I would expect the law of large numbers to push hiring preferences towards being more or less representative of the industry, after controlling for things like security clearances and other domain specific issues.
The missing piece of information to me is whether there really is something wrong with their company culture that would cause hiring preferences to deviate away from "generally average in the aggregate."
My point is that, while I agree with you that it's self-destructive, it is so prevalent that clearly many people don't agree with us and believe they can accurately judge people by their race.
they do a lot of government contracting, and government contract awards often want you to have population-proportional hiring, to show you aren't racist.
I don't think it's explicit discrimination. From what I've heard they're very "culture fit" biased in their hiring.
"Culture fit" is a notorious discrimination problem in startup-land, but it often just comes from wanting to hire people who share similar interests and socio-economic factors rather than race -- but it can have the same effect. For example, if somebody started a company that hired people overwhelmingly on their music preference, and that preference was Blue Grass, the employee pool would probably not well represent the racial makeup at large.
What about top universities discriminating against Asian applicants? In many states, affirmative action is legally denying opportunities for Asian Americans.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
I have nothing to say about profiling individuals but cheating appears to be a huge issue among international students. Per the WSJ [0]:
Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students
Faculty singled out Chinese students in particular.
I live in China. I have not made any effort to learn about plagiarism or impersonating people at exams in the four years I've been here. I know one Chinese person who sat an English language proficiency exam for her cousin, another whose Bachelor's thesis was almost entirely plagiarised. I met a Canadian guy who did a Master's degree in econometrics at Tsinghua (top 3 university in China). Apparently plagiarism was rampant.
On a more anecdotal level one of my fiancee's friends was dating a guy who sold SAT answers for a while.
I have a couple of friends who teach at international high schools here in Shanghai. It takes quite a long time to get through to the students that plagiarism is not okay and is taken seriously.
By the way no one brought up race in this thread until you did.
I'm sure others were cheating as well, but it wasn't as blatantly obvious as with those Chinese who didn't even speak English. So I'd say being fluent in English is a good way to avoid being profiled this way.
Wow a tad racist eh? How about this, I wonder how whites get in to top schools as they have lower GPAs, lower SAT, lower activities, etc. than their asian counterparts. I put more than half the blame on the universities and their "DIVERSITY" BS.... Long term it really dilutes the value of education in my eyes...
Quality-checking the contractors a consulting agency is feeding you feels like the perfect case for a Starfighter-alike "bar exam"—much moreso than the actual Employee-Employer matchmaking that Starfighter tried.
I worked in India and also went through several CS training programs there.
Indians cheat. A lot. It is just a different culture. Students in three different groups would turn in the exact same solution to a coding assignment, and they'd all get the same grade. I was baffled at first, then furious, and finally just learned to laugh about it, while understanding that they were only screwing themselves by not learning the material.
However, it did mean that the training programs would push out a ton of students that did not know a thing about programming, and definitely should not be in the industry. But it is understandable in a place like India where a software engineer can make a lot more money and earn far more respect than many of the alternatives.
Witnessed it firsthand in grad school on a few occasions. Instructor momentarily leaves during an exam and the Indians start asking one another the answers, thinking nothing of it. WTF! This was not all of them, there were many straight-up smart ones, but cheating wasn't uncommon.
I also saw this a great deal among Indians and citizens of neighboring countries when I was in grad school. It was a huge problem, so much so that the Dean sent out a letter about it. Without specifying nationalities, but everyone knew who was implicated.
I was friends with some of them who engaged in this. After being straight up asked for help during one exam, I warned them not do it, and that this behavior would get them kicked out of school here, but it didn't matter. Most were very smart and talented, and really didn't need to cheat. But they did anyway. Cultural thing, I guess.
While I was studying at University there were quite a few instances where particular groups of student got caught cheating in various forms. It seems some people want to get ahead at all costs because they seem to have a lot of pressure from their family or peers to make it in a particular discipline. This is something foreign to me, as I chose what/where I wanted to study, free of these particular pressures.
I have had a similar problem - interviewed dozens of people with exactly that pattern and they were universally clueless. No idea how seemingly-good Masters programs bring in so many people with zero basic CS knowledge.
My alma mater has a great undergrad program, but an absolutely awful masters. I've been told that they don't have the resources to teach it, and that the college keeps sending recruiters throughout Asia to pick up as many foreign students as possible for the extra tuition money, though that might have just been a bitter professor.
Masters programs are run as a cash cows for many universities to be filled will anyone who can fog a mirror. As a former academic I can tell you that there are literally different marking criteria for overseas masters students than local undergraduates.
Is that knowledge transparently available to students? How does it impact the curve?
I imagine quite many would be upset if they found out they were not being held to equal standards, and would probably point to foreign students paying more as the reason.
>Is that knowledge transparently available to students? How does it impact the curve?
Of course not. You find out when the head of school tells you that it is your fault that all the masters students failed the subject and that you need to fix the situation. If you are dumb enough to ignore the hint the head of school gets someone else to re-mark the exams - either way the cash keeps flowing.
Anecdotally, in European universities, bachelors are the "get in as many people as we can for the tuition fees", while masters are the "let's be as selective as we can get away with".
Sometimes it's even worse... For example, in France, a university is required by law not to be selective for it's first year programs, as long as the candidate graduated high school.
I assume there's an upper limit on the number of students an university can take in for the first year, determined by staff and classroom availability.
Simple - it's no different than a seemingly good white American programming teacher pursing masters degree, yet screaming "JavaScript" is not a prog language in front of the whole class.
33% of all American, Asian, or Southeast Asian programmers suck (hard). Since China or India has 3 times the population of US. The absolute number turns out to be higher.
Don't act surprise. I could easily challenge you on a simple algorithm and mathematics problems, and see your American ass turn yellow. Get it.
As someone who might apply once I get my PhD, what does basic CS knowledge mean for you? Like what a tree is or fizzbuzz? Hopefully it isn't that terrible...how someone can make it through any amount of CS related schooling and not know the basics?
Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to-be-minted computer science PhD student who was also an intern. Most of the systems have pbs[1], a batch system that prioritizes jobs from users based by amount of requested time, number of nodes, etc. The seminar leader (and I have before) referred to it loosely as a queue, because it sort of is, and the CS guy kept interrupting the talk (may be two or so times) to point out that PBS really wasn't a "queue" because it didn't respect FIFO in a strict sense... I mean, sure, he did know what a queue was, but I'm pretty sure that isn't the most interesting problem you could have.
[0] there was one fact I found useful, which was where to find their docs online. Other than that, it was the sort of stuff you can find by just reading man pages and such. Waste of time but checked off a box for the internship which made the funders happy, I suppose.
Weird. No one else would want a scheduler to be FIFO, either. Rather, the actual optimization that is performed by slurm, pbs, etc. under the hood is pretty interesting.
The point of schedulers is much more complicated than a straightforward queue, as they seek to project how best to utilize system resources into the future.
Strange he would be so pedantic. Everyone in HPC certainly does call it a queue, as you noted.
Common problem with programmers: when they learn a term means something, they associate that term absolutely with that meaning (common in other fields with people who are highly analytical, IME).
The HPC people are referring to a "job queue", rather than a "ADT queue". Those are distinct things, the ADT queue is a much more restrictive defintion, but it's not an exclusive one. HPC queues are more like priority queues with complex ranking functions (and queues of queues), just like real-life queues where people can cut by paying more money (first class airline ticket).
Anecdotally, I've learned to expect nothing. I used to ask a graph-based question -- I had to adjust it so that the first step was doing a dead-simple DFS. This tended to weed out a good sixth of candidates and save us both a lot of time. And this was pretty constant against education level and background.
was writing DFS from scratch ever needed to perform dev job or was it a thing that stumped 95% of applicants (and let you read some hacker news/email on your phone/laptop in the mean time)?
It only stumped the candidates that clearly wouldn't make it through the rest of the problem. One sixth was a probably a high estimate.
DFS for an acyclic graph is about five lines of code and shows me that you A. know a programming language B. can figure out a data structure. I would argue both are needed to perform a dev job.
I've written DFS about 1-2 times a year, on average, for the last 15 years. Why do I need to? Usually, because I need to modify or create a data structure that is kind of graph-like but not quite. If someone didn't know how to write one or at least derive it, they would confuse a lot of people, so yeah it's kind of important.
No, they'd probably look it up, skim a blog for a few minutes, then figure it out and promptly forget. This is no different than forgetting the order of the arguments to socket() and accusing that person of being incapable of writing networking code.
The difference is that the arguments to socket() were arbitrarily defined, but DFS is an algorithm. Anyone who has taken a intro data structures course should be able to at least derive the pseudo code for DFS.
If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs. I'm sure I wrote a DFS long before I had heard the term.
I hate brain teaser interviews as much as the next guy, but being able to do basic operations on basic data structures is pretty much the minimum to be a developer.
> If you ignore the terminology, DFS is basically just recursively walking a graph, something which actually happens all the time in most dev jobs.
In ten years of full-time professional development I have never needed to recursively walk a graph. Hell, the only data structures in the software I worked on for the first six (real-time signal processing code) didn't use any data structures other than lists, arrays, and C structs. I would not be able to answer the interview question that started this subthread, despite my track record of efficient and well-designed code.
I'm very sure. The signal processing code had no graph structures whatsoever.
That's certainly not the case with the NLP code I have been working on for the past 4.5, but I have never personally needed to search the (usually) trees in a structured manner. Most of our code that searches for things doesn't care about the structure of the graph during the search; it just searches a node list. Once the node is found, structure matters. There are some algorithms that use calculations like shortest path and tree height, but I didn't write the code to actually do that.
Do you think you've ever had to do something as algorithmically complex as recursively walk a graph?
Sometimes these questions are used to probe the meta understanding of a candidate and using Graphs/Trees/DFS are universally understood concepts that make doing that easy.
Define "algorithm". In the broader definition, yes. Kalman filtering, motion compensation, track association, XY-mapping, and similar signal processing algorithms. For NLP it has been various forms of statistical modeling and general multithreaded architecture and coordination.
As for the algorithms typical of computer science, not really. Searching and sorting has not been much a part of what I have done. My experience is mainly in translating math into code, often into code with real-time deadlines.
Sometimes I get these questions in interviews and I really don't know if I should be offended. My resume is pretty good, and I wonder who T.F. applies to these places that they have to have such simple weeder questions. Then I get all paranoid that there is some hidden complication and soon I'm producing FizzBuzz in TensorFlow:
I think you shouldn't be offended at interview questions around skill unless you've been on the other side of the table. It's eye-opening, the range of people that apply for these positions.
Depends on your memory representation of the graph. If you simply use the obvious one (a node have a list of pointers to its successors), I don't see the difference except for successors[]/children[]
I would explicitly tell them that you should revisit nodes, and give them a few examples illustrating that point -- so all they needed to do was traverse edges.
Well, for example, I have an interview question where it's not just about knowing what a stack or a tree is, but rather realizing that a stack or a tree might be useful to solve a particular problem. (You could use either one.) And then writing out code to do it.
So, no esoteric data structures, but you really do have to know how to use the standard ones. It tends to trip up people who might have some book knowledge of CS but don't know how to apply what they learned.
There's also a difference between knowing that a tree might be useful and being able to actually write some code to build a tree.
But the thing is, the next interviewer will have different preferences - there's no standardization here.
It could also be that you only ever have to do this between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world, and many people who could do it just fine if they are given space to think about it or refresh their memory, which usually results in freezing up during a stressful interview. They probably haven't exercised that knowledge because they have been too busy building real things.
That seems like a lousy excuse to me. As a web developer, my entire job revolves around computing trees; and that is (as of now) the most common development environment in the world. My side projects (graphics demos/toys, a multiprocess text editor, various twilio SMS utilities, a high-performance pastebin server) end up using stacks, trees, hashmaps, and bloom hashes as logical responses to the problem descriptions.
Only somebody who doesn't write software for a living would claim that "between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world" should these techniques be readily accessible in working memory.
As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work? I certainly wouldn't want to work with somebody who is knowledgeable but will wimp out the moment you ask them a tough question on the spot.
> As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work? I certainly wouldn't want to work with somebody who is knowledgeable but will wimp out the moment you ask them a tough question on the spot.
I would argue that a workplace that is continuously stressful is not healthy, and optimising your interview process to filter for this is probably not a great idea.
Additionally, I would expect that when asked a "tough question" at work that you would have both the time and resources available to find or determine the answer, things that one likely doesn't have in an interview (and certainly not to the same extent).
Not sure what do you mean by computing trees in this context, but I personally as a web dev for 15+ years have never-ever had to e.g balance a binary tree or do any other low level operation of that kind. It's important to learn it at some point to be able to understand how it all works, but afterwords you just don't write the low level stuff yourself, ever. If given enough time I'm pretty sure I could come up with some solution for reversing a linked-list, probably even the optimal one, the same way I could probably also figure out how to fix my car when broken... but that doesn't make me a mechanic
I've never had to balance a tree either. But typically it's because the tree represents something essentially tree-shaped and preserving the structure is important. (For example, what would it mean to balance a DOM tree? Nobody would do that.)
On the other hand, I hope you're not saying that the DOM is the only tree you ever use and in 15 years you've never needed to build your own. If so, consider that companies might be interviewing people for programming jobs that aren't like that.
> As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work?
To add to roganartu's very good point about what filtering for that says about your company, you seem to be buying into the pervasive myth that "stress" is some universal and fungible thing. The stress of an interview is not of the same nature as the stress of, say, having a key server go down and take your company down with it. It's a fool's errand to think you can manufacture stressful situations in an interview and get a read on how the candidate would perform in a real situation.
Are you not aware that most languages provide that for free? Note that the question was about implementing, not using. People use them all the time, but they don't reinvent the wheel to do so when it is in the standard library and has nice abstractions already.
Why is a web developer implementing a DFS by hand every day? I would not hire that person.
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know any languages where you don't have to define your own node if you want to implement a new kind of tree, and write a bit of code to recurse over it. (In JavaScript the most common tree is the DOM, but you should still be able to build another one if you need it.)
Also, in an interview it's perfectly fine to say you'd use a library, if you know one that applies. (They might ask you next how you'd do it without a library, but you still get points for knowing about it.)
The other thing to remember is that everyone is effectively grading on a curve, and with practice you get better at interviews.
How would you filter those "many people who could do it just fine if they are given space to think about it or refresh their memory" down to the number you need to hire?
This is a serious question. I hate the way interviewing works at tech companies. Though I've generally done well and it helped me break into the industry as an outsider, it's a really time-consuming and wasteful process on both sides. So far, I'm leaning strongly towards Reid Hoffman's suggestion of weighting references much more strongly than interviews but it's hard to say how far one can safely go with that approach.
On one hand -- sure, I've sadly forgotten most of the math I ever learned.
But on the other hand, no. I can bounce around modelling with basic data structures (hashes, arrays, structs/objects etc) in my head like a good juggler can treat 3 balls.
I think that is normal for quite a large subset of developer work. I assume there will be some jobs that won't need those data structures, but can't think of any. (Graphics and game developers would remember more math, of course.)
The description in the GP sounds more like the (probably false) stories about the Japanese English education: People with a vocabulary of 40K words that are unable to order coffee or talk about the weather.
I have had many people with 3-5 years of 'experience' developing not know how to find the smallest element in an array. Initially I was thinking it would be a quick check to see if people thought about null values, but apparently this is a hard problem...
Now they might have been useful for something, but I suspect they are just playing the numbers game and showing up to a lot of interviews until they get in. So even if say 5% of coders are useless that 5% is vastly over inflated in the interview process.
I think it is interview paralysis. They can't believe an interview answer is ever supposed to be O(n). I've had it happen to me where I get tripped up on relatively easy problems because the initial easy solution I came up with wasn't sufficiently clever and magically log n or some such thing.
I can't believe it's just interview paralysis to be honest. I've had people try and solve problems like that with 3 nested loops. Completely failing to come up with a working solution after 20 minutes.
I've been in situations where those kind of people have been hired too. Their code tends to be quite bad...
Any suggestions for dealing with this? I try and keep things as relaxed as possible to start with and make it clear that trivia and syntax is not what I am going after.
I would walk out of the room, but I am happy to walk someone though most of a problem they are not getting. The goal is going from an understood problem to actual code.
In addition to the obvious have the person walk you through what they are going to do try rewording it slightly. In this case ask for the max value.
Maybe they are nervous and focused too much on the minimum part of this that they lose sight of what they are trying to solve for. But be careful not to spoon feed it to them.
In the last two weeks I interviewed three candidates with masters of science C.S. None of the three knew the memory size in bytes of a double precision floating point variable. None of the three could explain scenarios in which they would use an array over a linked list.
I don't think that first question proves what you think it proves.
Learning implementation details about a specific programming language is not what CS is supposed to be about (see the quote about astronomers and telescopes). In fact, if you use several programming languages at the time, I'd go as far as to call it a waste of my time - if I'm worried about overflow for a specific problem, I can get the range of data (in which programming language? which architecture?) in 30 seconds online.
I can see it being a valid question if you are working in a problem down to the bit level. But those are getting rarer, and ultimately it's what an Engineer excels at.
sizeof(double) is not specific to any one programming language or architecture; it's determined by IEEE 754, an international, cross-language, cross-platform standard. Non-IEEE floating-point implementations are exceedingly rare nowadays (although they do exist).
You're right about it being engineering, not computer science, but IMO it's reasonable to expect someone applying to a programming job (assuming this is what it was) to have at least some software engineering experience.
C and C++ offer a wide variety of arithmetic types.
Double precision is not required by the standards
(except by the optional annex F of C99, covering
IEEE 754 arithmetic), but on most systems, the
double type corresponds to double precision.
However, on 32-bit x86 with extended precision
by default, some compilers may not conform to
the C standard and/or the arithmetic may suffer
from double-rounding issues.
ap22213 (OP for this thread) was more precise than I was; they actually wrote "a double precision floating point variable" rather than writing "double", which could either be a shorthand for "double precision floating point" or be referring to a platform/language type (where that exists by that name).
So a reasonable answer could say - usually 8 bytes - but sometimes with extended precision it could be 10 bytes, etc...
I am actually kind of sick of the people that say these details are not important to being a good programmer. They absolutely are, knowing fundamentals of the machine, language, and environment that you are developing in is essential.
The particular positions that I'm hiring for require certain kinds of knowledge, unfortunately. When one is dealing with Petabytes of structured signal data, it's helpful (but not required) that someone know memory layout. But, it's not the first question I ask.
Usually, I start off with some behavioral, get-to-know-them type questions. One of these is to ask them to recall the 'best software developer' that they've ever worked with. The great majority of candidates actually say themselves which is unexpected (and a little arrogant to me - weren't we all 'junior' developers once? - didn't we all once look up to someone?). But, surely one of the best would know when to use an array and when not to or know the memory and precision impacts of the variable types that they use.
In C you kind of have to know the size of a double -- you'll call "sizeof(double)" fairly often, you'll notice the number in your code.
In most languages, you don't have a way of knowing the size of a double -- and furthermore the size a double takes in your code won't be sizeof(double) anyway, it will be much more.
> Like what a tree is or fizzbuzz? Hopefully it isn't that terrible...how someone can make it through any amount of CS related schooling and not know the basics?
Ah! You're in for some surprise down the line. Fizzbuzz almost always clear out large amount of applicants.
I was a CS major, but my career took a different direction, and I haven't programmed "professionally" for 8+ years. I looked up the FizzBuzz question and wrote some psuedocode in about 5m.
It's sad that FizzBuzz is such a "weeding out" tool, but I guess good to know that I can still pass the first round of an entry-level technical interview!
FizzBuzz (from the point of view of me as an interviewer) is not so much about knowing how to code, but understanding the thought process about basic problem solving. Read the instruction, provide a solution, don't over engineer. It also provides the basics, loop and conditional.
Once you're set on that, you at least know you have a person in front of you who, on the basic level, thinks like a programmer.
So I would say 8+ years doesn't matter so much and you shouldn't worry about that, as long as your mind can still "tick" the right way.
Easy... money. Graduate classes are required to pull in top-tier researchers and grants, but they have relatively-fixed overhead costs for teaching (eg. professor salary). Want to maximize the return on that fixed overhead? Add more students. Many public and private universities are "Masters factories" for budget reasons. They typically filter (strongly!) between completion of MS and entry into PhD programs.
(Identifying such Universities will be left as an exercise to the reader.)
I went to Georgia Tech, and a small subset of Indians there matched the "bachelors in India + work in consultancy" description. I didn't feel anyone there was clueless though. Definitely no fake resume shit.
It is possible that I'm clueless, and cannot identify clueless people.
Thanks to you, TIL that Tech is a state university. Never knew.
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).
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?
"How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?"
I'm sure that there are many more people who could complete FizzBuzz on a homework assignment, with the help of the Googles, than could do so in an interview. And there are many mid-tier MS programs that are happy to take money from international candidates and give them every opportunity to keep paying.
> 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.
Absolutely. They may even have washed out at higher numbers. The applicant pool described in the complaint definitely isn't representative of US CS majors nationwide, so you can't use it to draw inferences about the quality of students overall.
I'm rather shocked by this as well. I understand not knowing the latest frameworks and such, but I have close personal friends that say my name should be in parenthesis next to theirs on their diplomas. A lot of CS courses can be passed by getting help on take home assignments and rote memorization on tests. At least for your typical state schools.
> 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.)
I would expect that the project they work on to utilize the knowledge in the courses. With 4 projects a year at 4 years, there's got to be something learned!
I got a BS in CS, graduated in 2006. What 4 projects? We had one project that lasted an entire semester, in one class; the rest was mostly one-off homework assignments that were very much topic-of-the-week. And most of them didn't really require coding.
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.
> ..assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge
This is bizarre to me. It's like someone signing up for a music degree having never played an instrument. Maybe you'll cram enough to pass a test on the theory, but it's useless knowledge. It's unanchored and will float away.
Or a medical student who never did an operation before? Arts are the exception, not the rule. In other areas it is fully understood that the whole purpose of the program is to teach you everything, so actually saying "you have to know this before" would be weird.
Medical students are expected to have a strong science background, and well before they commit to being a surgeon they'll have units where they need to wield a scalpel. If they find out it's not for them there are plenty of other paths which don't involve surgery.
Engineering students are expected to have a strong maths background. If you can't do algebra and basic calculus then there's no chance of getting in.
It's completely reasonable to expect a CS student to have experience programming.
> It's completely reasonable to expect a CS student to have experience programming.
If you say so. I neither see the reason nor the advantage. Don't get me wrong: I had experience in programming before entering a CS program, but I had fellow students who never did any programming before and they did just fine, while others with programming experience failed. And I'm pretty confident that all of them who managed to stay through the introductory year were/are able to do FizzBuzz.
Computer science programs, even at very prestigious schools, don't really require you to know anything about programming or practicality using computers. The amount of real hands-on work I did for classes in my entire undergrad career is less than I do in a good week at work.
The question is if the questions asked are really "FizzBuzz level" questions, or algorithm questions that are easy to consider of similar complexity when you know the expected algorithms.
When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester.
That's the last time we were tested on a long range of algorithms, except indirectly if we happened to need a given algorithm to complete our work later. In the 22 years since, I've probably needed e.g. a depth first search once, and many of the algorithms I learned I've never touched on since.
So for many, it boils down to whether or not you cared about and liked that course. I happened to love it - I read the set texts the first weekend of the course, and spent a lot of time reading up on algorithms in the years before and after. But for a lot of my class mates it was a course they had to endure to get to more interesting stuff. Many of them would go on to do very well in other subjects.
If they can't figure out a problem like FizzBuzz given a complete description, then that's a deeper problem. But a lot of algorithm questions can sound like they are on that level because we expect people to know a catalogue of algorithms that most developers don't actually need through most of their careers.
same here - almost 20 years of dev, last time I needed to implement basic cs algorithms were in college and grad school classes (and some idiotic corporate interviews where preferred way of coding is apparently using a white board).
basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed - however asking developers actually implement them in front of you is pointless, at least as far as job performance goes.
Why do you bundle fizbuzz with some legit algorithms that require some knowledge? Fizzbuzz is a gimmick, deliberately picked as something very simple to filter out clowns. I can't imagine a more simple programming task. Any suggestions? ;)
> basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed
FizzBuzz is not some arcane algorithm. You don't need to study it.
It's literally writing a loop, testing equality, and printing some output. I don't know how you could program professionally and not be able to solve FizzBuzz.
People should be able to solve FizzBuzz provided it is explained properly and fully.
This is the same for a lot of the basic algorithms we learnt and forgot.
This, to me is the big caveat. Just as there are a lot of people who are horrible at solving stuff they should easily be able to, I've conversely seen so many horrible interviewers that under-specify the problems they ask about because they assume people should understand algorithms that would make it easier to understand, or just assume people will infer things most people wouldn't.
A lot of people are pushing back on you, but I've seen the exact same thing. I think everyone who hasn't interviewed developers would be surprised by the general incompetence, but everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible.
For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 15 minutes.
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?
It's through a combination of:
1. Tests being based on memorization, not actual knowledge or programming. If you manage to stuff enough keywords into answers, it's possible to pass.
2. Lots of group work. The 20% of students who actually know how to program finish the project while everyone else slacks off and asks for help "with this one thing."
3. Outright cheating. There's a thriving market in recycled homework and exam answers.
> everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible.
No, 80% of people in the 'currently looking for a job developer pool' are terrible. But you have to consider that the worse a candidate is, the longer they stay in that pool. So judging developers as a whole based just on interviews makes them look much worse than they are.
Maybe. With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should also be similar. This assumes a normal distribution for the metrics that you are hired for, something that may not be in fact true, ie. Poisson or exponential distributions are reasonable. What you can take away from this: Your own developers may not be as good as you think they are OR they may be much better, same for the candidates. That particular day you interviewed them they may have been exceptional or they may have been ill and they failed, or a million other reasons. I think Google came out a while ago and said that their initial hires had no correlation to the really successful people in the company after...5(?)... years. I can't find the citation, sorry. The interviewing process is known to be broken, so trying to extrapolate to say that the job-seekers are less good at these metrics than the employed is erroneous. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that using a binary decision like this to determine these things is wrong.
IIRC Google said that their interview scores didn't correlate with how successful people were in the company. But you have to remember that obviously they're only talking about people who made the cut, so people who had at least moderately high scores to begin with.
> With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should also be similar.
You're right that the actual population of all job applicants over time is equally qualified to the employed developers.
However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job. In that sample, incompetent developers are much more likely to be present because a competent developer only sends out <15 applications before getting a job while the incompetent ones can send out hundreds.
At any given moment, a competent developer is more likely to be employed than an incompetent one. Hence the incompetent ones are constantly generating job applications at a much higher rate than their actual presence in the population would suggest.
For the record, this isn't merely theoretical. The last time I was looking for a job, I was able to get an offer from the second company I applied to. Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50 places before getting a single offer. If you were to pull a random sample of our applications, his would be way over-represented.
> think Google came out a while ago and said that their initial hires had no correlation to the really successful people in the company after...5(?)... years.
Sure, but Google still spends a lot of time and money on interviewing because anyone they hire has to be better than the average applicant. They get huge numbers of job applicants, the majority of whom are grossly unqualified.
> The interviewing process is known to be broken, so trying to extrapolate to say that the job-seekers are less good at these metrics than the employed is erroneous.
There are lots of problems with the interview process, but I'm really including anyone who managed to get to an interview (past the phone screen) in the "competent" category. There are seriously huge number of job applicants who can't program a basic loop without extensive help.
> However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job.
Actually, you only have the sample of developers you interviewed for the job. How many didn't get an interview? Are you confident that your resume filter is good and that the resumes rejected were actually bad?
> Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50 places before getting a single offer.
Following up my previous point, how many interviews did that yield? The discussion here is over developers who look like idiots in the interview. Confusing that with applications clouds the discussion.
> Actually, you only have the sample of developers you interviewed for the job. How many didn't get an interview? Are you confident that your resume filter is good and that the resumes rejected were actually bad?
More specifically, I have the sample of developers who I did a phone screen with.
I'm reasonably confident that my resume filter is "good" in the sense that it's not rejecting people prematurely. If your resume shows any hint that you'd be able to do the job (ie. any amount of programming job experience and/or a CS degree) then I'm willing to give you 15 minutes.
> Following up my previous point, how many interviews did that yield?
A dozen or so. I'm deeply skeptical that the pool of applicants would be better than the pool of interviewees.
Does Palantir make US citizenship a requirement for most of its job positions? My understanding is that this is common place for most US military contractors but I was wondering if this applies to government contractors at large.
US citizenship is a requirement if you are going to do something related to the US government. I've worked for them in a position not related to the US government(not a US citizen myself) and the number of technical people who also happened to be US citizens were quite low.
If that is the case, and the records show that, then the company is probably ok. But you have to show that all of the people you hired could pass FizzBuzz right? Google gave one of the best hiring training lectures I've ever attended on eliminating personal bias from interviewing questions. A lot of it was thinking about the question and the response and putting it in the context of someone you knew, what would you think then? Would you still consider it so highly? Or as such a deficit? They said, although I didn't experience it directly, that they did data analytics on interviewer write ups to identify bias. That could have been to sort of encourage due diligence but given how data driven that company was when I was there I would not put it past them to do exactly that.
How does personal bias factor in to FizzBuzz? It's literally what I'm hiring you for -- I should be able to describe some process to you, and you should be able to write it out in code. Communication is a huge part of software engineering, and I don't understand why anyone would be expected to hire employees they cannot communicate with.
Personal bias potentially factors in the moment your evaluation of the solution goes beyond "works" or "doesn't work" and into subjective evaluation of the code quality.
Personal bias also potentially factors into how you describe it (so consider presenting it written, in the same format for everyone). E.g. let's say the interviewer goes into extra detail or ask for confirmation of understanding from candidates they favour.
In addition to vidarh's excellent response, FizzBuzz is a great example that personal bias should not interfere. So if you did data analysis of your candidates and everyone you hired could do FizzBuzz and everyone you didn't hire could not do FizzBuzz then you could objectively state that failure to do FizzBuzz disqualified the candidates and it was blind to personal bias or discrimination factors. However if you hire whites who couldn't do FizzBuzz in the interview and you didn't hire asians who could, then you can't really say that "not being able to do fizzbuzz is a disqualifier" because it only disqualified some candidates.
Generally if you are hiring on work product skills (coding for software folks) and can show that your test is unbiased and you hire to the test, then you can avoid being found guilty of discrimination even if you hire a disproportionate number of a certain group. To be rock solid you also need to show that your applicant pool is highly diversified and has representation from all groups. Sometimes that means going out and seeking out candidates (like women or hispanics) who are self selecting to not apply. And why you really do better if you blind the resumes your HR staff sees before they sort them into phone screen and skip piles.
> However if you hire whites who couldn't do FizzBuzz in the interview and you didn't hire asians who could, then you can't really say that "not being able to do fizzbuzz is a disqualifier" because it only disqualified some candidates.
This is a great point and it's why I always include FizzBuzz in any interview—no matter how they were referred, how impressive their resume is, or their confidence level.
Having consistent benchmarks helps give you legal cover, but it's also essential to running a solid interview process. If you're not applying the same tests to all candidates, it's impossible to detect problems in your filters and you can easily end up making biased decisions or hiring the wrong people.
Yes, I understand that it can be annoying to have to solve such a basic problem in an interview, but it only takes a few minutes—just get it over with, it's not meant as an insult.
Too bad it didn't stop the bias in my Google interview :/
Passed through all the on-site interview problems and then they silently dropped me. No "we're sorry, you're not a good match." No emails, no phone calls. Nothing.
Both sides of this issue are wrong. On the one hand, If I knew, based on online articles about the interview process, that there is a set of 100 questions out of which I might get asked 20, I'd prep on those 100 questions. It seems like the interviewees are underpreped for interviewing. That's sloppy. Maybe that's a reason not to hire them, but it probably isn't the best way to select hires.
On the other hand this process makes about as much sense as requiring that I know how to shift a non-synchronized manual transmission in order to pass a driving test. Nobody is implementing most of these algorithms from scratch, and if they did it would be a bad practice without having a good reason to do it.
You'd have a good point in your second paragraph if we were talking about implementing a Fibonacci Heap or an AVL tree. But the comment you're responding to is about people failing FizzBuzz.
Good point, FizzBuzz should take a couple minutes. AND it's the sort of thing a prepared interviewee should nail. I'd hope the rest of the interview would focus more on real-world considerations.
I met Mr. X who earns over $10K in cash each month. Job ? Answer interviews on other people's behalf. The setup is sophisticated. Screens shared, Headphones with two inputs and what not.
Visas are faked, resumes are complete rubbish and it is my suspicion that the hiring managers/committees are bribed directly or indirectly.
I know people with 0 years of experience drawing salary of $110K from a large company by showing fake 8 years of experience.
Sadly all people involved are from my home country India. It really saddens me that we arrive here as economic refugees and destroy the very system that is so welcoming to us.
A few paragraphs in: "The accusation that Palantir discriminated against Asians is an oddity in Silicon Valley, where big companies including Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. have been criticized for hiring too many white and Asian engineers, and too few blacks and Hispanics."
Your organization is almost certainly not like Palantir so I'm not sure where your sympathy is coming from.
They are cash cows and can produce good results on paper at least. Also, they come from an education system which focuses on memorization, so memorizing a bunch of interview questions and answers is nothing to them.
This account seems to have been created to post only unsubstantive comments in this thread. Creating accounts is fine, as long as you contribute meaningfully to the discussion.
In the UK, 'asian' tends to refer to people from India or Pakistan. In other primarily-English-speaking countries, it tends to mean people from eastern Asia.
(yes, technically anyone from Asia is Asian, but when someone says 'asian', it doesn't evoke the mental image of a caucasian Russian who lives in Novosibirsk.)
Yeah, in some cases "Asia" extends far into the Middle East - Football / Soccer, there is an Asian club championship with teams from the *stan's and Australia.
You are comparing Apples and Oranges. The Asian student applicants on whose behalf the DoL filed the lawsuit have to be U.S citizens.
If you read the suit itself, there is a lot of wiggle room for Palantir. Here is the threat (paragraph 14 B) "An order permanently enjoining Palantir and its officers, agents, successors, divisions, subsidiaries, and those persons in active concert or participation with them... "
Here is how they can easily wiggle out: (paragraph 14 D.) "An order requiring Palantir to provide complete relief to the affected class of Asian applicants.." and (paragraph 14 E.) "An order requiring Palantir to hire Asian applicants from the affected class list."
I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these "Asian" candidates are playing the race card, and actually have not so good intentions with Palantir which deals with highly sensitive information. I would be wary, and if I was Palantir, I would bite.
The candidates don't file a complaint with the DoL. DoL already has information on ethnicity. All Govt. contractors are required to collect this information. The applicants of course can refuse to divulge that information I believe.
It is foolish to create one bucket called "asian" and throw in people from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia Philippines in addition to those from China, Japan and Korea. I personally do not think that the students have time to sit around and play the "race card". They've probably moved on to other things.
I've also noticed the lack of diversity in startups that is disproportionately affecting minorities. Software being what it is is usually a trade off between many solutions that actually work in the short term. So it is actually pretty easy to hire friends of friends and so on and if they can get something to work, you'll convince yourself that you've hired the right person for the job.
Friends being friends will easily pass the "culture fit" test.
Anyway I see a lot of direct and veiled comments against interview candidates from Asian countries with reference to their accents etc. I don't think HN should be the place for such comments. Having worked in the Bay Area, I can say that an accent is the last thing on anybody's mind once you've proved competence.
> I'm not sure how they got in or are able to graduate
I can't speak for elsewhere, as I went to university in Australia, but down here we have a MASSIVE foreign student population as a percentage - International education is currently Australia's third largest export overall - mostly from India and most parts of Asia (kinda our closest neighbours).
My personal, very anecdotal experience is that Indian students were either amazing, or very much not very good. The route seemed to be do ANY degree in India, followed by a (one year?) Masters in IT in Australia. This then legitimised their IT bonafides.
The Indian culture also has a different attitude to cheating - it is seen as much worse to fail than to be caught cheating - and I saw this play out a fair few times, to the point that in one exam 5 Indians had to be physically separated for passing paper back and forth. We also had one girl who said to her lecturer "I don't see why it matters, I'm never going to work. I just need a degree so I can go home and marry a good man".
On the flipside, the very best students in my year were foreign, and often Indian, so this was not a one-size-fits-all situation.
YMMV, but the Australian universities need for foreign student $$$ has lead to MUCH lower standards for foreign students passing than locals, at least in the past.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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!"
> 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.
It's abnormal, sure, but that doesn't imply that the abnormality is Palantir's "fault." It might be that, say, one department of one major University, which happens to have an outsized Asian student population, heavily encourages its grads to apply to Palantir.
As a result, Palantir would see one "general" applicant stream, from all walks of life, but with a self-selection effect filtering for people who are (in their own opinion) good matches for working at Palantir; and then one applicant stream of people who happened to go be in the Maths program at University X and didn't want to say no to some advisor's strong recommendations.
The self-selected stream would be better hires than the "coerced into applying" stream for obvious reasons; and the "coerced into applying" stream would also likely be much larger than the self-selected stream. If the people in the "coerced into applying" stream, then, fit a certain profile, it would appear in the resulting data that people who fit that profile are worse candidates than you'd expect.
Doing a causal factor analysis to the applicant graph, though, would immediately show that the contributing factor of being Asian (or whatever else) is "screened off" by the contributing factor of being an alumni of University X.
Given that Palantir is full of the very people who can do this sort of analysis, though, I fully expect that if this is the case, they'll end up attempting this argument on a judge. Probably with amusing results.
That's definitely not true. In many cases, corporations realize that settling is cheaper than fighting and winning -- and government agencies bank on that.
That's definitely not true. Can you name many cases where the government filed frivolous suits? If you can't provide a list then have you thought about where that opinion came from?
Government agencies are afraid of having a reputation like this so they don't touch questionable suits. Otherwise, agencies would receive even more frivolous complaints. Agencies are political. Settling weak cases looks bad to the voters. However, agencies are required to investigate every claim no matter how stupid. The people who hope to settle are ones with failed investigations. Those have to pay for their own lawyers, eg Pao vs Klein Perkins. On the other hand, companies have more incentive to settle when government agencies are suing because the case is tight.
> However, the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian.
My question is how the government is determining the "qualified applicant pool."
Not everyone with a CS degree is qualified to develop software. In my experience, only a minority of CS graduates are qualified to program.
I'm guessing there is some confounding variable here which predicts both ethnicity and poor qualifications. Perhaps being a master's student looking for a visa sponsor.
An “Internet Applicant” is an individual who satisfies all four of the following criteria:
* The individual submitted an expression of interest in employment through the Internet or related electronic data technologies;
* The contractor considered the individual for employment in a particular position;
* The individual’s expression of interest indicated that the individual possesses the basic qualifications for the position; and
* The individual, at no point in the contractor’s selection process prior to receiving an offer of employment from the contractor, removed himself or herself from further consideration or otherwise indicated that he/she was no longer interested in the position.
The “basic qualifications” which an applicant must possess means qualifications that the contractor advertised to potential applicants or criteria which the contractor established in advance. In addition, the qualifications must be:
* Noncomparative features of a job seeker (e.g. three years’ experience in a particular position, rather than a comparative requirements such as being one of the top five among the candidates in years of experience);
* Objective (e.g., a Bachelor’s degree in accounting, but not a technical degree from a good school); and
* Relevant to performance of the particular position.
Thanks for linking. Do you know what the specific qualifications were in this case though?
The problem is that you could find literally thousands of developers with a CS degree and 3+ years of experience who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
It's pretty sparse. It looks like a CS degree is not necessary. Granted, those qualifications also seem vague. That could be bad for Palantir, because it could be argued that most of the people applying met the minimum qualifications. Conversely, it could be bad for the OFCCP because it could be argued that the applicants really did NOT meet the minimum qualifications. It's pretty subjective.
If you go to the apply page, the only thing that is absolutely required is a resume, a full name, and an email. Could it be that some people applied thinking that this was all they needed to apply? Maybe Palantir expected everyone to put some kind of proof they had coding experience.
Anecdotally, I knew a Chinese guy who had a big Chinese mailing list to talk with other Chinese people across the country. They really helped each other out - ones with great writing skills would write testimonials for Linked Ins. It could be a case that Palantir was shared in a community like this and it was noted that not very much is required to even apply.
The OFCCP could be exploiting the same facts: Palantir did not define very many minimum qualifications, so it can be assumed that anyone who applied was qualified.
I really think we need better statistics here. Palantir should definitely be making moves to make sure race isn't the dividing line, using something like more rigorous online tests and bias training for interviewers, but there are plenty of plausible explainations for this difference of Asian applicants vs Asian hires based on how they defined "Qualified".
What if the job involved frequent client contact and you needed to asses a high English ability? That would no doubt discriminate against a lot of non native speakers who might have the requisite degree, but would they be qualified?
There is also the issue of degrees or other certifications being usually useless to assess real world coding ability, and certainly useless to assess interview whiteboarding questions.
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.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] thread"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.
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.
If the ratio of those hired matches the ratio of applicants how does anyone make a complaint of discrimination?
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.
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.
They'd complain that the company wasn't doing enough to attract resumes from underrepresented groups. That's the usual thing, anyway.
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.
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?
As far as I understood the whole discrimination and quotas fiasco for minorities always talk about the general population to be compared with.
I have seen some companies preferring certain race of applicants to maintain diversity in teams even though there are plenty of qualified applicants.
What in the world does that alleged statistic mean?
Left unstated was what
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%).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...
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.
https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/aboutof.html
In this case I'd assume based on resumes.
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#...
[2] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...
[3] https://www.palantir.com/careers/
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.
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.
In this case, I can see how "increased cohesion"—although decreasing the "jobs project" value—would be extremely helpful for increasing tax-dollar ROI.
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.
You are not an investor. You are not a consumer of services. This is not a business, and we don't need a CEO.
You're a CITIZEN of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, and don't you dare forget it.
Why are you trying to shut down debate? It's a good point. I want my tax dollars to be maximized and not used to somehow enforce your idea of racial justice.
I guess you didn't get downvoted because people agree with you. I agree with you also. And yet, being right is not an excuse for the overly antagonistic way you made your point.
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.
simple math
YYYEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
I highly doubt Palantir did any kind discrimination based on race.
The initial demographics of the founders and the early team has a large impact on the rest of the hires in my experience at previous startups. Main reason being that the early people are more prone to hire from referrals in their network of people they know.
Some things to consider:
P(qualified | referral) > P(qualified | all applicants)
P(same race | referral) > P(different race | referral)
and thus:
P(hire | referral applicant) > P(hire | all applicants)
I don't see any evidence of malicious or specific racial discrimination.
There are a lot of things that a government does that can't be measured as a direct monetary benefit.
Currently, we seem to just think of the government as a machine that turns dollars into achieved consensus goals at some fixed (very low) efficiency. We never seem to say "what if we measured [metric] out per dollar in, and then tried to make that ratio increase?"
And that's part of the problem with government doing things. It does not handle intangible considerations very well.
This is almost certainly because they're using recruiters, and the recruiters are funneling them candidates who aren't representative of the broader CS-degreed candidate pool.
I don't care who you are or what you look like. I don't care how old you are, your gender, sexual preferences, citizenship status, and so forth. I'm certain that having a large mix of these will make my work environment more productive and interesting, but for each candidate I have much more important things to think about.
The job is to make technology do stuff for people. This means you must have technology skills and people skills. Folks can argue about the ratio, but as a first approximation, for the vast majority of commercial software development work, it's about 10 percent tech and 90 percent people skills. We aren't building the next Google. We're going down the hall to talk to the CSRs about why the IVR system is acting up.
I have interviewed devs. I found them almost universally atrocious both in tech and people skills. I found no correlation between certifications and actual ability to perform (except a positive correlation between advanced degrees and feelings of self-entitlement.)
Do whatever tech tests you want, and for sure capture a ton of metrics. But the only process that has made any sense to me over the years is the team audition process. It's a play. We have try-outs. For a few folks we pick some candidates and backups. Everybody shows up for a sprint or two and the rest of the team sees how it works out.
I don't see that universe as being anything close to the universe the government allegation seems to assume, where ratios of one category of candidate should translate into the same ratios of successful applicants.
How do you hire people without 2 weeks vacay to burn on this process?
(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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
Being a government contractor, this 100% happened at some point or would.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
"The current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form the countries of South Asia."
If it's about hiring non-citizens, then I think there's a legitimate procedural issue around employees needing clearance levels, but I'd find it hard to believe that there would be a lawsuit over racial biases if it's driven by clearance requirements making non-citizens ineligible.
Who would be more likely to be compromised by last year's OPM database hack by the Chinese (supposedly) which contained info on most of the cleared government and contract workers in the US?
* A guy of European ancestry from Anywhere, USA who has no family, friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
* A naturalized US citizen from China whose friends, family, and associates still live there, and who often travels back for visits.
Even if the naturalized American - Chinese citizen was not corrupted himself, countries like China would not be above threatening his relatives still there.
There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems:
1. You should be filtering for foreign connections in general, not for ethnicity. That test already happens in the process of getting security clearance.
2. You can leverage people in plenty of other ways that do not involve threatening friends or relatives. Both the US and China have teams in government agencies that do that for a living.
3. Oh man this is a huge can of worms when it comes to civil rights, equality, and constitutional issues in general.
That makes for a not-very-accurate filter that is ethically suspect that is also not hard to bypass for the seemingly valuable intel underneath. Seems like bad ROI.
Perhaps I really am naive as you say, but on the second order of analysis it seems to me like an ineffective policy if it were actually a policy.
Section 703(g) exceptions are somewhat tricky from a HR perspective because they can edge into territory that would normally be an EEO violation (I mean, obviously, since it's an exception to the rule) and there's very little precedent on them. AFAIK, there's only one court case around about it, where a guy was not hired for a cleared position on account of having family in Cuba. [1] The decision not to hire him, based on the reasonable belief that he would not be clearable, was considered acceptable. "Example 3" on that page also gets into another common scenario, which is declining to hire someone based on the belief that their clearance process would be long, and the company has an immediate need. (IMO, this is the most common scenario. Someone with a lot of family in China or Russia might well be clearable, but their clearance might be likely to take too long for them to be a viable candidate, particularly at a company that doesn't have non-cleared work for them to do in the meantime.)
[1]: https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/national_security_exemption...
The U.S. government decides who gets clearances. Contracting companies submit prospective employees for contractor positions based off of their qualifications. This is done by a worksheet considering the essential skills for the position and points for education, previous experience, etc. Contracting companies have no business pre-screening based off of anything more than U.S. citizenship.
Chinese espionage actions have not been about coersion; they've been about incentives and appeals to heritage. The only notable Chinese-linked espionage cases in recent history have been first-generation immigrants, with nationalism and loyalty appeals, not threats against family members.
I haven't seen any denials of clearances in the Industrial Security Clearance Decisions [1] based off of simple national origin claims.
1. http://www.dod.mil/dodgc/doha/industrial/2016.html
The odd thing is that there are fairly straightforward ways to write position descriptions such that the "qualified applicant" pool is as small and well-defined as you want it to be. This is practically a subspecialty within HR. That they are getting sued would seem to imply that they didn't do any of the normal procedural stuff that most companies have their HR departments doing to head off such accusations, meritorious or not.
I used to run an import/export business......Pakistan guys would try to connect online to score a business visitors visa. Some were upfront, others had no problem wasting 5 hours of your time with a fake business deal in hopes you'll sponsor a visitor visa at the end.
That's the sort of thinking that led to japanese internment camps.
A very good question: What does any company, or any person, have to gain by discriminating?
Yet, many do.
But for a company Palantir's size, I would expect the law of large numbers to push hiring preferences towards being more or less representative of the industry, after controlling for things like security clearances and other domain specific issues.
The missing piece of information to me is whether there really is something wrong with their company culture that would cause hiring preferences to deviate away from "generally average in the aggregate."
"Culture fit" is a notorious discrimination problem in startup-land, but it often just comes from wanting to hire people who share similar interests and socio-economic factors rather than race -- but it can have the same effect. For example, if somebody started a company that hired people overwhelmingly on their music preference, and that preference was Blue Grass, the employee pool would probably not well represent the racial makeup at large.
Alternatively, they trashed resumes with south east asian names and schools becuase they usually arent even usa citizens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ya think? Sorry man I wouldn't be profiled as a cheater like that due to race or citizenship.
[0]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-m...
On a more anecdotal level one of my fiancee's friends was dating a guy who sold SAT answers for a while.
I have a couple of friends who teach at international high schools here in Shanghai. It takes quite a long time to get through to the students that plagiarism is not okay and is taken seriously.
By the way no one brought up race in this thread until you did.
If it is widespread it's especially unfortunate considering there's already some controversy around the high numbers of asian applicants.
Btw, I only mention race because it is a central topic of the article.
Indians cheat. A lot. It is just a different culture. Students in three different groups would turn in the exact same solution to a coding assignment, and they'd all get the same grade. I was baffled at first, then furious, and finally just learned to laugh about it, while understanding that they were only screwing themselves by not learning the material.
However, it did mean that the training programs would push out a ton of students that did not know a thing about programming, and definitely should not be in the industry. But it is understandable in a place like India where a software engineer can make a lot more money and earn far more respect than many of the alternatives.
I was friends with some of them who engaged in this. After being straight up asked for help during one exam, I warned them not do it, and that this behavior would get them kicked out of school here, but it didn't matter. Most were very smart and talented, and really didn't need to cheat. But they did anyway. Cultural thing, I guess.
Twice we hired someone based on the phone interview and it was someone else who showed up.
The third time it was someone reading interview answers off a chat client window.
I'm mostly annoyed because it reduces the value of the phone screen and requires more face to face interviews.
I imagine quite many would be upset if they found out they were not being held to equal standards, and would probably point to foreign students paying more as the reason.
Of course not. You find out when the head of school tells you that it is your fault that all the masters students failed the subject and that you need to fix the situation. If you are dumb enough to ignore the hint the head of school gets someone else to re-mark the exams - either way the cash keeps flowing.
Anecdotally, in European universities, bachelors are the "get in as many people as we can for the tuition fees", while masters are the "let's be as selective as we can get away with".
I assume there's an upper limit on the number of students an university can take in for the first year, determined by staff and classroom availability.
33% of all American, Asian, or Southeast Asian programmers suck (hard). Since China or India has 3 times the population of US. The absolute number turns out to be higher.
Don't act surprise. I could easily challenge you on a simple algorithm and mathematics problems, and see your American ass turn yellow. Get it.
Somewhat related anecdote, I do computational physics. I once attended "training seminar[0]" put on by the funders for using DOD supercomputers, and there was this soon-to-be-minted computer science PhD student who was also an intern. Most of the systems have pbs[1], a batch system that prioritizes jobs from users based by amount of requested time, number of nodes, etc. The seminar leader (and I have before) referred to it loosely as a queue, because it sort of is, and the CS guy kept interrupting the talk (may be two or so times) to point out that PBS really wasn't a "queue" because it didn't respect FIFO in a strict sense... I mean, sure, he did know what a queue was, but I'm pretty sure that isn't the most interesting problem you could have.
[0] there was one fact I found useful, which was where to find their docs online. Other than that, it was the sort of stuff you can find by just reading man pages and such. Waste of time but checked off a box for the internship which made the funders happy, I suppose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Batch_System
The point of schedulers is much more complicated than a straightforward queue, as they seek to project how best to utilize system resources into the future.
Strange he would be so pedantic. Everyone in HPC certainly does call it a queue, as you noted.
The HPC people are referring to a "job queue", rather than a "ADT queue". Those are distinct things, the ADT queue is a much more restrictive defintion, but it's not an exclusive one. HPC queues are more like priority queues with complex ranking functions (and queues of queues), just like real-life queues where people can cut by paying more money (first class airline ticket).
DFS for an acyclic graph is about five lines of code and shows me that you A. know a programming language B. can figure out a data structure. I would argue both are needed to perform a dev job.
I hate brain teaser interviews as much as the next guy, but being able to do basic operations on basic data structures is pretty much the minimum to be a developer.
In ten years of full-time professional development I have never needed to recursively walk a graph. Hell, the only data structures in the software I worked on for the first six (real-time signal processing code) didn't use any data structures other than lists, arrays, and C structs. I would not be able to answer the interview question that started this subthread, despite my track record of efficient and well-designed code.
This very comment thread is a graph which is being printed depth-first.
That's certainly not the case with the NLP code I have been working on for the past 4.5, but I have never personally needed to search the (usually) trees in a structured manner. Most of our code that searches for things doesn't care about the structure of the graph during the search; it just searches a node list. Once the node is found, structure matters. There are some algorithms that use calculations like shortest path and tree height, but I didn't write the code to actually do that.
Sometimes these questions are used to probe the meta understanding of a candidate and using Graphs/Trees/DFS are universally understood concepts that make doing that easy.
As for the algorithms typical of computer science, not really. Searching and sorting has not been much a part of what I have done. My experience is mainly in translating math into code, often into code with real-time deadlines.
http://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/
If so, I would keep the pointers in a set to mark nodes as processed but is there a more elegant solution?
So, no esoteric data structures, but you really do have to know how to use the standard ones. It tends to trip up people who might have some book knowledge of CS but don't know how to apply what they learned. There's also a difference between knowing that a tree might be useful and being able to actually write some code to build a tree.
But the thing is, the next interviewer will have different preferences - there's no standardization here.
Only somebody who doesn't write software for a living would claim that "between 0 and 0.00001% of the time in the real world" should these techniques be readily accessible in working memory.
As for "freezing up during a stressful interview": is that not some indication of what normal workplace stresses will do to your ability to complete technical work? I certainly wouldn't want to work with somebody who is knowledgeable but will wimp out the moment you ask them a tough question on the spot.
I would argue that a workplace that is continuously stressful is not healthy, and optimising your interview process to filter for this is probably not a great idea.
Additionally, I would expect that when asked a "tough question" at work that you would have both the time and resources available to find or determine the answer, things that one likely doesn't have in an interview (and certainly not to the same extent).
On the other hand, I hope you're not saying that the DOM is the only tree you ever use and in 15 years you've never needed to build your own. If so, consider that companies might be interviewing people for programming jobs that aren't like that.
To add to roganartu's very good point about what filtering for that says about your company, you seem to be buying into the pervasive myth that "stress" is some universal and fungible thing. The stress of an interview is not of the same nature as the stress of, say, having a key server go down and take your company down with it. It's a fool's errand to think you can manufacture stressful situations in an interview and get a read on how the candidate would perform in a real situation.
Why is a web developer implementing a DFS by hand every day? I would not hire that person.
Also, in an interview it's perfectly fine to say you'd use a library, if you know one that applies. (They might ask you next how you'd do it without a library, but you still get points for knowing about it.)
The other thing to remember is that everyone is effectively grading on a curve, and with practice you get better at interviews.
This is a serious question. I hate the way interviewing works at tech companies. Though I've generally done well and it helped me break into the industry as an outsider, it's a really time-consuming and wasteful process on both sides. So far, I'm leaning strongly towards Reid Hoffman's suggestion of weighting references much more strongly than interviews but it's hard to say how far one can safely go with that approach.
But on the other hand, no. I can bounce around modelling with basic data structures (hashes, arrays, structs/objects etc) in my head like a good juggler can treat 3 balls.
I think that is normal for quite a large subset of developer work. I assume there will be some jobs that won't need those data structures, but can't think of any. (Graphics and game developers would remember more math, of course.)
The description in the GP sounds more like the (probably false) stories about the Japanese English education: People with a vocabulary of 40K words that are unable to order coffee or talk about the weather.
Now they might have been useful for something, but I suspect they are just playing the numbers game and showing up to a lot of interviews until they get in. So even if say 5% of coders are useless that 5% is vastly over inflated in the interview process.
I've been in situations where those kind of people have been hired too. Their code tends to be quite bad...
I would walk out of the room, but I am happy to walk someone though most of a problem they are not getting. The goal is going from an understood problem to actual code.
Maybe they are nervous and focused too much on the minimum part of this that they lose sight of what they are trying to solve for. But be careful not to spoon feed it to them.
Learning implementation details about a specific programming language is not what CS is supposed to be about (see the quote about astronomers and telescopes). In fact, if you use several programming languages at the time, I'd go as far as to call it a waste of my time - if I'm worried about overflow for a specific problem, I can get the range of data (in which programming language? which architecture?) in 30 seconds online.
I can see it being a valid question if you are working in a problem down to the bit level. But those are getting rarer, and ultimately it's what an Engineer excels at.
The second question does seem fair, though.
You're right about it being engineering, not computer science, but IMO it's reasonable to expect someone applying to a programming job (assuming this is what it was) to have at least some software engineering experience.
I am actually kind of sick of the people that say these details are not important to being a good programmer. They absolutely are, knowing fundamentals of the machine, language, and environment that you are developing in is essential.
Usually, I start off with some behavioral, get-to-know-them type questions. One of these is to ask them to recall the 'best software developer' that they've ever worked with. The great majority of candidates actually say themselves which is unexpected (and a little arrogant to me - weren't we all 'junior' developers once? - didn't we all once look up to someone?). But, surely one of the best would know when to use an array and when not to or know the memory and precision impacts of the variable types that they use.
In C you kind of have to know the size of a double -- you'll call "sizeof(double)" fairly often, you'll notice the number in your code.
In most languages, you don't have a way of knowing the size of a double -- and furthermore the size a double takes in your code won't be sizeof(double) anyway, it will be much more.
Ah! You're in for some surprise down the line. Fizzbuzz almost always clear out large amount of applicants.
It's sad that FizzBuzz is such a "weeding out" tool, but I guess good to know that I can still pass the first round of an entry-level technical interview!
Once you're set on that, you at least know you have a person in front of you who, on the basic level, thinks like a programmer.
So I would say 8+ years doesn't matter so much and you shouldn't worry about that, as long as your mind can still "tick" the right way.
(Identifying such Universities will be left as an exercise to the reader.)
If you cant get into the ivy league of your own country, usa schools are a backdoor prestige option for the wealthy.
ahh, Georgia Tech
It is possible that I'm clueless, and cannot identify clueless people.
Thanks to you, TIL that Tech is a state university. Never knew.
(Oh, by the way, Florida Tech definitely fits the aforementioned stereotype.)
Not being able to recognize cluelessness in other people might just be an understatement.
How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?
I'm sure that there are many more people who could complete FizzBuzz on a homework assignment, with the help of the Googles, than could do so in an interview. And there are many mid-tier MS programs that are happy to take money from international candidates and give them every opportunity to keep paying.
Absolutely. They may even have washed out at higher numbers. The applicant pool described in the complaint definitely isn't representative of US CS majors nationwide, so you can't use it to draw inferences about the quality of students overall.
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.)
This is bizarre to me. It's like someone signing up for a music degree having never played an instrument. Maybe you'll cram enough to pass a test on the theory, but it's useless knowledge. It's unanchored and will float away.
Engineering students are expected to have a strong maths background. If you can't do algebra and basic calculus then there's no chance of getting in.
It's completely reasonable to expect a CS student to have experience programming.
If you say so. I neither see the reason nor the advantage. Don't get me wrong: I had experience in programming before entering a CS program, but I had fellow students who never did any programming before and they did just fine, while others with programming experience failed. And I'm pretty confident that all of them who managed to stay through the introductory year were/are able to do FizzBuzz.
When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester.
That's the last time we were tested on a long range of algorithms, except indirectly if we happened to need a given algorithm to complete our work later. In the 22 years since, I've probably needed e.g. a depth first search once, and many of the algorithms I learned I've never touched on since.
So for many, it boils down to whether or not you cared about and liked that course. I happened to love it - I read the set texts the first weekend of the course, and spent a lot of time reading up on algorithms in the years before and after. But for a lot of my class mates it was a course they had to endure to get to more interesting stuff. Many of them would go on to do very well in other subjects.
If they can't figure out a problem like FizzBuzz given a complete description, then that's a deeper problem. But a lot of algorithm questions can sound like they are on that level because we expect people to know a catalogue of algorithms that most developers don't actually need through most of their careers.
same here - almost 20 years of dev, last time I needed to implement basic cs algorithms were in college and grad school classes (and some idiotic corporate interviews where preferred way of coding is apparently using a white board).
basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed - however asking developers actually implement them in front of you is pointless, at least as far as job performance goes.
"Take these two variables, derpyOne and derpyTwo, and swap their values"
FizzBuzz is not some arcane algorithm. You don't need to study it.
It's literally writing a loop, testing equality, and printing some output. I don't know how you could program professionally and not be able to solve FizzBuzz.
This is the same for a lot of the basic algorithms we learnt and forgot.
This, to me is the big caveat. Just as there are a lot of people who are horrible at solving stuff they should easily be able to, I've conversely seen so many horrible interviewers that under-specify the problems they ask about because they assume people should understand algorithms that would make it easier to understand, or just assume people will infer things most people wouldn't.
For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 15 minutes.
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?
It's through a combination of:
1. Tests being based on memorization, not actual knowledge or programming. If you manage to stuff enough keywords into answers, it's possible to pass.
2. Lots of group work. The 20% of students who actually know how to program finish the project while everyone else slacks off and asks for help "with this one thing."
3. Outright cheating. There's a thriving market in recycled homework and exam answers.
No, 80% of people in the 'currently looking for a job developer pool' are terrible. But you have to consider that the worse a candidate is, the longer they stay in that pool. So judging developers as a whole based just on interviews makes them look much worse than they are.
You're right that the actual population of all job applicants over time is equally qualified to the employed developers.
However, the data that I have available to me as a hiring manager is the sample of developers who actually applied to my job. In that sample, incompetent developers are much more likely to be present because a competent developer only sends out <15 applications before getting a job while the incompetent ones can send out hundreds.
At any given moment, a competent developer is more likely to be employed than an incompetent one. Hence the incompetent ones are constantly generating job applications at a much higher rate than their actual presence in the population would suggest.
For the record, this isn't merely theoretical. The last time I was looking for a job, I was able to get an offer from the second company I applied to. Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50 places before getting a single offer. If you were to pull a random sample of our applications, his would be way over-represented.
> think Google came out a while ago and said that their initial hires had no correlation to the really successful people in the company after...5(?)... years.
Sure, but Google still spends a lot of time and money on interviewing because anyone they hire has to be better than the average applicant. They get huge numbers of job applicants, the majority of whom are grossly unqualified.
> The interviewing process is known to be broken, so trying to extrapolate to say that the job-seekers are less good at these metrics than the employed is erroneous.
There are lots of problems with the interview process, but I'm really including anyone who managed to get to an interview (past the phone screen) in the "competent" category. There are seriously huge number of job applicants who can't program a basic loop without extensive help.
Actually, you only have the sample of developers you interviewed for the job. How many didn't get an interview? Are you confident that your resume filter is good and that the resumes rejected were actually bad?
> Meanwhile a friend of mine with barely any experience had to apply to about 50 places before getting a single offer.
Following up my previous point, how many interviews did that yield? The discussion here is over developers who look like idiots in the interview. Confusing that with applications clouds the discussion.
More specifically, I have the sample of developers who I did a phone screen with.
I'm reasonably confident that my resume filter is "good" in the sense that it's not rejecting people prematurely. If your resume shows any hint that you'd be able to do the job (ie. any amount of programming job experience and/or a CS degree) then I'm willing to give you 15 minutes.
> Following up my previous point, how many interviews did that yield?
A dozen or so. I'm deeply skeptical that the pool of applicants would be better than the pool of interviewees.
Personal bias also potentially factors into how you describe it (so consider presenting it written, in the same format for everyone). E.g. let's say the interviewer goes into extra detail or ask for confirmation of understanding from candidates they favour.
Generally if you are hiring on work product skills (coding for software folks) and can show that your test is unbiased and you hire to the test, then you can avoid being found guilty of discrimination even if you hire a disproportionate number of a certain group. To be rock solid you also need to show that your applicant pool is highly diversified and has representation from all groups. Sometimes that means going out and seeking out candidates (like women or hispanics) who are self selecting to not apply. And why you really do better if you blind the resumes your HR staff sees before they sort them into phone screen and skip piles.
This is a great point and it's why I always include FizzBuzz in any interview—no matter how they were referred, how impressive their resume is, or their confidence level.
Having consistent benchmarks helps give you legal cover, but it's also essential to running a solid interview process. If you're not applying the same tests to all candidates, it's impossible to detect problems in your filters and you can easily end up making biased decisions or hiring the wrong people.
Yes, I understand that it can be annoying to have to solve such a basic problem in an interview, but it only takes a few minutes—just get it over with, it's not meant as an insult.
Passed through all the on-site interview problems and then they silently dropped me. No "we're sorry, you're not a good match." No emails, no phone calls. Nothing.
On the other hand this process makes about as much sense as requiring that I know how to shift a non-synchronized manual transmission in order to pass a driving test. Nobody is implementing most of these algorithms from scratch, and if they did it would be a bad practice without having a good reason to do it.
Visas are faked, resumes are complete rubbish and it is my suspicion that the hiring managers/committees are bribed directly or indirectly.
I know people with 0 years of experience drawing salary of $110K from a large company by showing fake 8 years of experience.
Sadly all people involved are from my home country India. It really saddens me that we arrive here as economic refugees and destroy the very system that is so welcoming to us.
Your organization is almost certainly not like Palantir so I'm not sure where your sympathy is coming from.
(yes, technically anyone from Asia is Asian, but when someone says 'asian', it doesn't evoke the mental image of a caucasian Russian who lives in Novosibirsk.)
If you read the suit itself, there is a lot of wiggle room for Palantir. Here is the threat (paragraph 14 B) "An order permanently enjoining Palantir and its officers, agents, successors, divisions, subsidiaries, and those persons in active concert or participation with them... "
Here is how they can easily wiggle out: (paragraph 14 D.) "An order requiring Palantir to provide complete relief to the affected class of Asian applicants.." and (paragraph 14 E.) "An order requiring Palantir to hire Asian applicants from the affected class list."
It is foolish to create one bucket called "asian" and throw in people from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia Philippines in addition to those from China, Japan and Korea. I personally do not think that the students have time to sit around and play the "race card". They've probably moved on to other things.
I've also noticed the lack of diversity in startups that is disproportionately affecting minorities. Software being what it is is usually a trade off between many solutions that actually work in the short term. So it is actually pretty easy to hire friends of friends and so on and if they can get something to work, you'll convince yourself that you've hired the right person for the job.
Friends being friends will easily pass the "culture fit" test.
Anyway I see a lot of direct and veiled comments against interview candidates from Asian countries with reference to their accents etc. I don't think HN should be the place for such comments. Having worked in the Bay Area, I can say that an accent is the last thing on anybody's mind once you've proved competence.
I can't speak for elsewhere, as I went to university in Australia, but down here we have a MASSIVE foreign student population as a percentage - International education is currently Australia's third largest export overall - mostly from India and most parts of Asia (kinda our closest neighbours).
My personal, very anecdotal experience is that Indian students were either amazing, or very much not very good. The route seemed to be do ANY degree in India, followed by a (one year?) Masters in IT in Australia. This then legitimised their IT bonafides.
The Indian culture also has a different attitude to cheating - it is seen as much worse to fail than to be caught cheating - and I saw this play out a fair few times, to the point that in one exam 5 Indians had to be physically separated for passing paper back and forth. We also had one girl who said to her lecturer "I don't see why it matters, I'm never going to work. I just need a degree so I can go home and marry a good man".
Now, to answer the quote, the reason this continues is due to the Australian need for the foreign $$$. As a result, very few foreign students are (or is it were?) disciplined for these infractions. Several times it has been a massive scandal down here (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mymaster-essay-cheating-scandal-mo... although it seems common: http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-m...), and many locals worry it devalues their own education.
On the flipside, the very best students in my year were foreign, and often Indian, so this was not a one-size-fits-all situation.
YMMV, but the Australian universities need for foreign student $$$ has lead to MUCH lower standards for foreign students passing than locals, at least in the past.
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.
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
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."
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?
It's abnormal, sure, but that doesn't imply that the abnormality is Palantir's "fault." It might be that, say, one department of one major University, which happens to have an outsized Asian student population, heavily encourages its grads to apply to Palantir.
As a result, Palantir would see one "general" applicant stream, from all walks of life, but with a self-selection effect filtering for people who are (in their own opinion) good matches for working at Palantir; and then one applicant stream of people who happened to go be in the Maths program at University X and didn't want to say no to some advisor's strong recommendations.
The self-selected stream would be better hires than the "coerced into applying" stream for obvious reasons; and the "coerced into applying" stream would also likely be much larger than the self-selected stream. If the people in the "coerced into applying" stream, then, fit a certain profile, it would appear in the resulting data that people who fit that profile are worse candidates than you'd expect.
Doing a causal factor analysis to the applicant graph, though, would immediately show that the contributing factor of being Asian (or whatever else) is "screened off" by the contributing factor of being an alumni of University X.
Given that Palantir is full of the very people who can do this sort of analysis, though, I fully expect that if this is the case, they'll end up attempting this argument on a judge. Probably with amusing results.
Government agencies are afraid of having a reputation like this so they don't touch questionable suits. Otherwise, agencies would receive even more frivolous complaints. Agencies are political. Settling weak cases looks bad to the voters. However, agencies are required to investigate every claim no matter how stupid. The people who hope to settle are ones with failed investigations. Those have to pay for their own lawyers, eg Pao vs Klein Perkins. On the other hand, companies have more incentive to settle when government agencies are suing because the case is tight.
My question is how the government is determining the "qualified applicant pool."
Not everyone with a CS degree is qualified to develop software. In my experience, only a minority of CS graduates are qualified to program.
I'm guessing there is some confounding variable here which predicts both ethnicity and poor qualifications. Perhaps being a master's student looking for a visa sponsor.
The problem is that you could find literally thousands of developers with a CS degree and 3+ years of experience who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
Here is one of the jobs in question (I think): https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/12db3e3a-33ca-4896-b4a5-c853e...
It's pretty sparse. It looks like a CS degree is not necessary. Granted, those qualifications also seem vague. That could be bad for Palantir, because it could be argued that most of the people applying met the minimum qualifications. Conversely, it could be bad for the OFCCP because it could be argued that the applicants really did NOT meet the minimum qualifications. It's pretty subjective.
If you go to the apply page, the only thing that is absolutely required is a resume, a full name, and an email. Could it be that some people applied thinking that this was all they needed to apply? Maybe Palantir expected everyone to put some kind of proof they had coding experience.
Anecdotally, I knew a Chinese guy who had a big Chinese mailing list to talk with other Chinese people across the country. They really helped each other out - ones with great writing skills would write testimonials for Linked Ins. It could be a case that Palantir was shared in a community like this and it was noted that not very much is required to even apply.
The OFCCP could be exploiting the same facts: Palantir did not define very many minimum qualifications, so it can be assumed that anyone who applied was qualified.
What if the job involved frequent client contact and you needed to asses a high English ability? That would no doubt discriminate against a lot of non native speakers who might have the requisite degree, but would they be qualified? There is also the issue of degrees or other certifications being usually useless to assess real world coding ability, and certainly useless to assess interview whiteboarding questions.
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