[HN Gopher] The FAA's Hiring Scandal
___________________________________________________________________
The FAA's Hiring Scandal
Author : firebaze
Score : 451 points
Date : 2025-02-05 05:25 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tracingwoodgrains.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tracingwoodgrains.com)
| widowlark wrote:
| This is a great read - thanks for sharing. This provides valuable
| context to this whole situation that I was wholly unaware of.
| wand3r wrote:
| > I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was
| lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge.
| The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The
| whole thing is as explosive as any I've seen, and it touches on a
| lot of long-running frustrations.
|
| This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides
| grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am
| sure this was not the only government agency that did something
| like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of
| success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled
| down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our
| constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off
| the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much
| even for these groups.
| scott_w wrote:
| I don't think DEI itself provides the grounds. It's simply a
| case of DEI either being implemented in a lazy or stupid way to
| tick boxes OR it being used as cover by a small number of
| activists to engage in discrimination of their own. If DEI
| didn't exist, the above things would still happen, just for a
| different reason and possibly different group of activists.
| ars wrote:
| How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious
| attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at
| higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the
| actual needed skills.
|
| And they did it because they were pressured to "increase
| diversity".
| scott_w wrote:
| As I've said twice now: it was the actual thing that was
| done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing
| qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid,
| not the umbrella "DEI" itself. That's because the actual
| work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is
| difficult and takes time. It's things like outreach,
| financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of
| that, they took the lazy option and just threw out white
| candidates from the pipeline. I also include "setting
| hiring targets" as a lazy and stupid way of "achieving
| DEI," just for clarity.
| wand3r wrote:
| This is kind of like the argument that communism is great
| but no one has been able to implement it correctly yet.
| "Setting targets" having highly paid DEI consultants, and
| identity based hiring is what DEI is. Lowercase diversity
| and inclusion are good ideals, which I think is what you
| are saying. Uppercase DEI are the exact policies we are
| talking about here.
| scott_w wrote:
| I've provided a list of DEI hiring policies that don't
| fit into your list here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302
|
| I said at the top of my thread that the refusal of people
| in power to engage with criticisms like this thoughtfully
| has allowed the far right to toxify these debates and I
| think the downvotes and responses to my comments are
| minor, but perfect, examples of my point. Instead of
| discussing the issues and how they should be fixed, the
| "debate" breaks down into "DEI bad" on your side and
| "saying DEI bad is racist/sexist/etc." on the other side.
| dbspin wrote:
| Blind reviews (and even interviews) are great ways of
| making hiring more fair. They are explicitly the inverse
| of DEI approaches. DEI is predicated on outcome
| diversity, rather than treating applicants equally
| irrespective of background. That's the E and I part. The
| entire premise is that certain groups require special
| support (fair - e.g.: blind people, wheel chair users),
| and have been historically excluded because of bias
| (sometimes true, often wholly false - much of the time
| differential hiring is path dependent with fewer
| qualified applicants from a given group).
| scott_w wrote:
| > They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches.
|
| This is essentially a No True Scotsman fallacy. If it's
| DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by definition, not
| part of DEI.
|
| > DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than
| treating applicants equally irrespective of background.
|
| The first part of this is incorrect. Good DEI is about
| creating a level playing field (as you correctly point
| out for blind people or wheelchair users). Obviously,
| this isn't possible in all cases: I think everyone agrees
| we wouldn't want a blind taxi driver.
|
| > The entire premise is that certain groups require
| special support
|
| This is correct. Fair criticism of DEI initiatives can be
| levied at those which don't do this effectively and
| instead shortcut by using, say, hiring quotas. I've said
| multiple times that things like this are lazy and stupid
| because they don't address the lack of opportunity for
| disadvantaged backgrounds.
|
| > and have been historically excluded because of bias
| (sometimes true, often wholly false
|
| This is an inaccurate stating of the situation. Some
| groups (e.g. black people in the USA) are excluded due to
| bias. Some have been excluded due to situational factors
| (young white men in the UK have worse outcomes due to
| poverty). Good DEI initiatives attempt to counter these,
| with varying levels of success.
|
| Let me take the article as an example. They identified an
| advantage for people on CTI programmes, which also
| happened to turn out good ATC operators. This may have
| advantaged people who could afford to attend the
| programmes, which could have skewed white male. A good
| DEI initiative might have been to put the work into
| outreach in under-represented areas to get more people of
| colour into CTI programmes. Instead, the FAA banned CTI
| programmes, threw the students there to the wolves, and
| seemed to sneak in a test designed to hit hiring quotas.
| Not only was this discriminatory, it also actively
| reduced the number of qualified ATC operators.
|
| Nowhere in this scenarios did I need to fall back on "DEI
| bad," because I tried to discuss the specific issues
| within the article.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| These are really good points, it's depressing as hell to
| see the the quality of discussion around this stuff.
| Obviously DEI is great when it's trying to fix things on
| the input side.
|
| Perhaps I can simplify this argument. If you have a lift
| heavy things job, which we can agree that women on
| average are worse at, you shouldn't hire more women by
| quota, but you could provide free weight training for
| women. Both things are DEI, the latter is the kind of DEI
| we want.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think in your example, you shouldn't hire by quota, but
| you also shouldn't exclude women or introduce obstacles
| that exclude them. It's so weird that this has turned
| into such a controversial statement!
| dbspin wrote:
| To expand my point. DEI is explicitly designed not to
| make hiring fair, but to make unfair hiring policy.
| Making accommodations for people who need special help (I
| work with the blind community so that was where my mind
| immediately went), but who are otherwise capable could
| hypothetically be part of DEI. But it also predates the
| term and connects to initiatives like UNCRPD Article 27
| and the Americans with Disabilities Act. In other words -
| helping disabled people or ethnic or sexual minorities
| gain equal access to work could be described as DEI, but
| it's not what DEI usually is. You can't simply reframe
| good initiatives that help these groups as DEI and then
| wear the glow of that history with reference to what has
| in practice been an entirely different set of initiatives
| rooted in ideas like privilege theory, capital A
| 'Antiracism' and the like.
|
| Explicitly in the American context DEI is primarily about
| hiring more members of minority groups at the expense of
| members of majority groups, based primarily on race and
| sexuality. This is perfectly exemplified in the FAA
| scandal.
|
| In the context of DEI 'helping' the disadvantaged is
| never _never_ done by expanding access to educational
| opportunities in order to find equally talented people
| who have been financially excluded or barred entry by
| prejudice. It is always a matter of lowering the bar for
| certain protected groups, and often also a matter of
| removing opportunities altogether for members of
| perceived privileged groups.
|
| This is especially visible in the arts and education here
| in Europe - where funding and employment opportunities
| are overwhelmingly based in exclusion. Primarily of
| straight, white, cisgender men. You site the example of
| young white men in the UK having worse outcomes. Please
| point me to a DEI initiative that targets employing them
| over other groups. What happened at the FAA is what
| always happens under the banner of DEI, capital A
| 'Antiracism' and other successor ideology initiatives.
| The goal is never fairness, and always power.
|
| The issue with these approaches is simple. They are
| massively divisive. Rather than aiming to address
| prejudice, hiring bias or systemic barriers to entry -
| they actively create them, with the justification of
| historic prejudice. I heard a joke once in college -
| whats the difference between an activist and a social
| justice warrior? An activist sees a step and builds ramp,
| a social justice warrior tears down the stairs.
|
| DEI is a bad idea, rooted in bad ideology and the stolen
| valour of movements towards genuine equality. As is any
| ideology that privileges members of one group over
| another - however 'noble' its adherents pretend to be.
|
| If you're advocating for approaches like blind hiring, or
| addressing poverty, or providing educational aids to help
| neurodiverse or disabled people, or free school meals, or
| free university, or increased arts and community funding
| or any of a thousand other initiatives that help people
| based on real need rather than perceived privilege,
| you'll find me and many others whom you presume to
| disagree with support you. But the entire brand and
| practice of DEI and associated initiatives and
| terminology is beyond saving.
| scott_w wrote:
| Your entire argument can be boiled down to:
|
| > If it's DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by
| definition, not part of DEI.
|
| The FAA scandal, among other things I've seen, like Matt
| Walsh's "Am I Racist?" show there's plenty of DEI
| initiatives that are simply bad, stupid and lazy. As
| you've seen elsewhere in this topic, I've also
| highlighted DEI hiring policies that have thought behind
| them and attempt to improve diversity without engaging in
| discrimination.
|
| Bitching about DEI only panders to such divisiveness and
| does not solve any of the problems with the bad
| initiatives. Neither does ignoring the problems, or
| calling genuine criticism "racist." Both lead us to the
| place we're at today where Trump blames people with
| "severe mental and psychological issues" for a plane
| crash.
| dbspin wrote:
| Here's another way to think of it... Very real
| substantive criticisms of the whole DEI project and
| identity politics have been rubbished for years. It was
| in fact impossible within the liberal left either in the
| academy or journalism to criticise this stuff without
| being labelled racist or misogynist.
|
| Meanwhile countless people have experienced being
| excluded from funding, employment opportunities etc.
| Countless more have sat through (demonstrably
| ineffective, and even counterproductive) mandatory
| reeducation in the form of diversity workshops,
| antiracism training and so on. This is absolutely a major
| part of why we got Trump in the first place. The lefts
| complete unwillingness to address the failure and
| unpopularity of these policies. It's not a case of Trump
| demonising otherwise good initiatives. Quite the
| opposite. Rather, Trump an opportunistic populist, seized
| on valid criticisms to promote himself as the sane
| alternative.
|
| Policies that served to derail opportunities for
| substantive change (Bernie in the US, Corbin in the UK)
| in favour of shiny new posts in HR at every university
| and corporation. Vivek Chibber is brilliant on this
| stuff, I'd recommend you check him out for a more cogent
| critique.
|
| https://jacobin.com/2025/01/elite-identity-politics-
| professi...
| scott_w wrote:
| > Very real substantive criticisms of the whole DEI
| project and identity politics have been rubbished for
| years.
|
| That's a fair point, I've certainly seen aspects of this.
| I see similar criticisms coming from the left being
| thrown at the current Labour government as well as the
| unhinged people calling Harris "Killer Kamala" and Biden
| "Genocide Joe" (ironic given what Trump just proposed in
| Gaza). I don't think the far right has the monopoly on
| idiots and lunatics.
|
| I should counter, however, that many of the criticisms of
| DEI were also masked racism/misogyny/ableism. Trump's
| rhetoric should make that blindingly obvious. We'll now
| get countless people being discriminated against by a
| hostile federal government and the people who voted for
| that also need to take accountability for their vote.
|
| This isn't to excuse the poor engagement from the left
| (especially whilst in government!), merely to point out
| the nuance of the debate and why "DEI bad" isn't a useful
| framing.
| lordloki wrote:
| Your entire argument is the No True Scotsman fallacy, so
| it's rather ironic for you to accuse others of it.
| scott_w wrote:
| At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not "DEI,"
| since they clearly fit under the umbrella of DEI. I
| simply say they're bad initiatives.
|
| You might be confused by me saying "DEI isn't the core of
| the problem," but that's not the same thing as saying
| "these bad things are not DEI." I hope this clarifies
| things for you.
| thijson wrote:
| Your mention of blind reviews reminds me of a social
| experiment I read about several years ago. All of this is
| anecdotal though. The article was written by someone that
| administered a web site that paired candidates with
| employers. Employers would conduct a phone screen via the
| web site to choose candidates. The web site saw that
| females had a lower chance of being selected, and based
| on the assumption that it was their gender being the
| reason, decided change the pitch of voices to mask their
| gender. This experiment actually backfired and lowered
| the chance of women being hired though. The author's
| conclusion in the end was that women had a lower chance
| of being hired because they gave up too easily, they
| couldn't handle rejection as well as men.
| thijson wrote:
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/06/30/2035225/women-
| inter...
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Where do you think communism has been implemented
| correctly?
| RIMR wrote:
| China is an economic giant that strongly competes with
| the the supremacy of the United States.
|
| "Correctly" is a hard test to pass, because everyone is
| going to have a different opinion of what is "correct",
| but it's impossible to honestly say that China's
| government hasn't been effective and successful, policy
| disagreements notwithstanding.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Yes, but is China actually communist? That's the point
| that needs to be contended with, and you seem rather
| intent on avoiding it instead.
|
| Everyone does in fact have a different opinion on what
| communism is or should be. That means that we should not
| pretend that China has exhaustively implemented the
| entire subject!
|
| Yes, we can point to China as an example of what _can_
| happen when a _specific_ group of people implements
| _their specific idea_ of what communism means. No more,
| no less. That is literally the point you brought up.
| subpixel wrote:
| > That's because the actual work to get more candidates
| from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time
|
| On the demand side (where placement or acceptance or
| hiring is contingent upon qualifications) the "actual
| work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds"
| cannot be done equitably.
|
| Selective institutions are a reflection of the society
| from which they draw candidates. As society produces more
| kinds of qualified candidates, the makeup of selective
| organizations will change.
|
| Change 'at the top' is a trailing indicator, it is the
| result of a process and not the start of one.
|
| I don't even know what 'outreach' and 'financial support'
| mean in this context, but I disagree that societal
| attitudes must change more than they already are
| changing. In the US, people expect the most qualified
| candidates to get the job, and they (increasingly) reject
| discrimination on the basis of race and background. That
| is why they cry foul when systems and programs are put in
| place that discriminate against qualified applicants.
| scott_w wrote:
| I put together some more concrete examples here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302
|
| None of them are "programs that discriminate against
| qualified applicants."
| adolph wrote:
| > As I've said twice now: it was the actual thing that
| was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing
| qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid,
| not the umbrella "DEI" itself.
|
| _No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal
| fallacy in which one modifies a prior claim in response
| to a counterexample by asserting the counterexample is
| excluded by definition. Rather than admitting error or
| providing evidence to disprove the counterexample, the
| original claim is changed by using a non-substantive
| modifier such as "true", "pure", "genuine", "authentic",
| "real", or other similar terms._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
| scott_w wrote:
| Copied from another comment:
|
| At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not "DEI,"
| since they clearly fit under the umbrella of DEI. I
| simply say they're bad initiatives. You might be confused
| by me saying "DEI isn't the core of the problem," but
| that's not the same thing as saying "these bad things are
| not DEI." I hope this clarifies things for you.
| spectraldrift wrote:
| The bar wasn't lowered at all. What happened was that the FAA
| stopped giving preferential treatment to a separate group--
| namely, CTI graduates--by replacing their streamlined path with
| a flawed biographical screening. Every candidate still has to
| pass the same rigorous training and certification.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, the FAA also leaked the official answers to the
| biographical screen to black interest groups so that they
| could teach black applicants to cheat on the screen.
| spectraldrift wrote:
| That's not exactly what happened. The article shows that an
| FAA employee leaked guidance on answering the biographical
| questionnaire to members of the NBCFAE. This wasn't an
| official FAA policy but a rogue action.
|
| Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous
| training and certification process, which is extremely
| difficult and selective.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous
| training and certification process, which is extremely
| difficult and selective.
|
| According to the post, candidates who weren't capable of
| passing the training were promoted into management
| positions instead.
|
| > This was [...] a rogue action aimed at reducing
| competition, not at giving any specific group an undue
| advantage.
|
| I'm honestly curious whether you think that sentence
| means something.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| It's hard to defend it as a rogue action, given:
|
| > The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of
| doing anything wrong in an internal investigation.
|
| They don't seem to have overlooked what he did either,
| they just determined that it was okay
| ars wrote:
| That's not an accurate way of describing this.
|
| The biographical screen was not flawed, it was designed to
| try to pass minority students at higher rates than non
| minority (for example that question on "your hardest topic"
| needing to be science). And it did exactly what it was
| designed to do.
|
| Which had the effect of dramatically reducing the available
| candidates.
|
| CTI never had preferential treatment, they simply were
| students who learned the skills needed to pass the actual
| ability test. That's not preferential treatment, that's
| exactly what school is meant to do.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| You created this account 1hr ago, and are already 3 comments
| in on this topic. In all your comments you're doing mental
| gymnastics on a pretty clear-cut case. _they have tapes_.
|
| Imagine, for a second, having tapes on someone saying "Our
| organization, he said, "wasn't for ~~Caucasians~~ <insert
| minority here>, it wasn't for, you know, the ~~white~~
| <insert minority here> male, it wasn't for an alien on Mars,"
| and he confirmed that he provided information "to minimize
| the competition."
|
| Would you still argue this the way you are doing? Would this
| still have been buried? Are you actually trying to argue this
| isn't a blatant case of racism?!
| spectraldrift wrote:
| Let's focus on the article and evidence rather than
| personal details or dismissive labels. Personal attacks
| don't add to the discussion and go against HN guidelines
| for civil and substantive debate.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| You are right. My bad. Please disregard the first line.
|
| The tapes thing still holds, tho. They have tapes. Care
| to comment on those?
| spectraldrift wrote:
| I disagree with the actions of the rogue employee who
| leaked those instructions, that's clearly wrong and
| illegal, and it's right to call that out. However, I
| believe there is some misunderstanding because sharing
| those answers doesn't mean the FAA lowered the bar. What
| happened was akin to someone unethically telling people
| how to cheat to get an interview referral at google- yet
| the actual subsequent qualification process, the rigorous
| training and certification, including the AT-SAT remained
| unchanged. The FAA still demands the same high standards
| from all candidates once they enter the pool.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| What if corporation A wanted to fill their CFO position.
| They put out an ad, but decided to interview folks only
| from ethnicity W. They then hired a qualified person from
| ethnicity W. When challenged about excluding from the
| process non-ethnicity W folks, they respond "but they
| still had to be qualified." Are you fine with that?
| arkh wrote:
| Ok, let's focus on the article. Directly from it:
|
| > they concluded the following:
|
| > Snow was the one in the recording Reilly obtained. He
| explained to people how they should answer the
| biographical questionnaire. He advertised the telephone
| conference process via text, emphasizing that it was for
| members only, and saying things like "If you don't answer
| that your friends feel you are well respected you can
| cancel yourself out of this announcement." He instructed
| people to mention that they were NBCFAE members, as he
| explained it, "so the FAA would know [...] this applicant
| is being groomed [...] by an [...] FAA-approved and
| recognized association." Our organization, he said,
| "wasn't for Caucasians, it wasn't for, you know, the
| white male, it wasn't for an alien on Mars," and he
| confirmed that he provided information "to minimize the
| competition."14
| wbl wrote:
| CTI graduates had a much better rate of actually becoming ATC
| professionals. So why should the FAA ignore that instead of
| spin one up at Howard?
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm in two of those groups and I feel like they ignore me and
| take me for granted.
| itronitron wrote:
| It's a myth that the bar is lowered for DEI hires.
| mistermann wrote:
| It isn't possible for you to know this.
| djohnston wrote:
| You should RTFA before making such an obviously disprovable
| assertion.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Yeah? Tell me how avoiding hiring a better qualified
| white/asian person, in order to hire a less qualified black
| one, isn't lowering the overall quality of the job being done
| by the company/agency in question? Logic be dammned right.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Why are you (and many others) just assuming the black
| candidate is less qualified?
| d1str0 wrote:
| That's literally what this whole article was about.
| Removing a high correlation performance test, that black
| candidates didn't pass as frequently, and replacing it
| with a very low correlation questionnaire that provided a
| more diverse applicant pool while weeding out highly
| qualified individuals.
| kalensh wrote:
| They still had to pass the performance test. It was just
| no longer the first step in the process. I want to be
| clear, that doesn't mean the questionnaire was a good
| thing. It just means that the questionnaire did not lower
| the bar.
|
| Instead it reduced the applicant pool in a sudden and
| unfair manner, which is it's own issue.
| squigz wrote:
| Was it replaced, or was the questionnaire an addition?
| tradertef wrote:
| Exactly. From the article: "As originally scored, the
| test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but
| predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would
| pass"
| MisterTea wrote:
| And you are backing this claim up with what exactly?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| There are methods of practicing DEI that don't lower the bar.
| There are methods of DEI that do lower the bar. There's no
| single answer to that question, it depends on how DEI is
| implemented in that particular case.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| You should listen to what Harj, a YC partner and former CEO
| of TripleByte an objective software engineer competency test
| for hiring, has to say about what many companies were trying
| to do in lowering the bar. He only admitted companies were
| doing this in the past week.
|
| https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
| adolph wrote:
| > it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the
| future
|
| "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
|
| Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining
| this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.
| navtoj wrote:
| wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding
| social issues
| motorest wrote:
| > wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect
| regarding social issues
|
| I don't agree. You're reacting to a one-sided, very partial
| critique of a policy change that no longer benefitted a
| specific group and the only tradeoff was a hypothetical and
| subjective drop of the hiring bar. This complain can also be
| equally dismissed as members of the privileged group
| complaining over the loss of privilege.
|
| The article is very blunt in the way their framed the problem:
| the in-group felt entitled to a job they felt was assured to
| them, but once the rules changed to have them compete on equal
| footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.
|
| To make matters worse, this blend of easily arguable nitpicking
| is being used to kill any action or initiative that jeopardizes
| the best interests of privileged groups.
|
| Also, it should be stressed that this pitchfork drive against
| discriminate hiring practices is heard because these privileged
| groups believe their loss of privilege is a major injustice. In
| the meantime, society as a whole seemed to have muted any
| concern voiced by any persecuted and underprivileged group for
| not even having the chance of having a shot at these
| opportunities. Where's the outrage there?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The undisputed facts at hand are:
|
| * The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which
| screened out 90% of applicants.
|
| * The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to
| members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation
| Employees.
|
| * Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers
| to other people, to reduce competition for admission.
|
| This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT
| were leaked.
| motorest wrote:
| > I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this
| takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are:
|
| This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed
| out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the
| "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way
| applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege
| of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e.,
| anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're
| trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation
| process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of
| this evaluation.
| cakealert wrote:
| [flagged]
| LightHugger wrote:
| Is "eliminated the privilege of" some kind of dogwhistle
| for being racist against white people? You're
| intentionally using circuitous language but that appears
| to be the message. People are individual human beings,
| discrimination on the basis of skin color is evil. Not
| sure why this is so hard to understand for some people.
| theossuary wrote:
| This is the fundamental issue. White people will perceive
| having their privilege taken away as racism.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| But "having their privilege taken away" is a vastly
| different thing than "answers to a multiple choice test
| are leaked to an ethnic affinity group".
|
| Furthermore, this also negatives impacted Latin and Asian
| people. And also Black people that weren't part of the
| aforementioned affinity group.
| theossuary wrote:
| I simply responded to the above comment saying
| eliminating the privilege of white people is a dogwhistle
| for being racist against white people. It's not. I said
| nothing about the post, and don't know why you're
| bringing it up. Please try to keep context in mind so you
| don't make halfbaked statements.
| albedoa wrote:
| > You purposely decided to omit the fact that the
| "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way
| applicants were evaluated
|
| Man, you are now losing audiences that are sympathetic to
| your position. Are you accusing Manuel_D of edit-sniping
| you? Or are you claiming that the comment as it is
| currently written omits the above fact?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| For transparency, yes, I did remove that first sentence a
| few minutes after posting (but before the reply was
| posted). I felt it was too harsh in tone. I don't
| remember changing "biological" to "bigraphical"
| arkh wrote:
| > equal footing
|
| So, the candidates who were not members of some racially
| based association also got access to the answers to the first
| test?
| Duwensatzaj wrote:
| > once the rules changed to have them compete on equal
| footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.
|
| It wasn't on equal footing, so your entire post is based on
| either a misunderstanding or you're just blatantly trolling
| in which case well done, I totally bit.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I can't comment on DEI, I'm not qualified there. I can comment
| on software eng culture the past twenty years, however.
|
| My take is we, collectively, pride ourselves on staying up-to-
| date with the latest and best practices. However, that staying
| up to date tends to be a rather shallow understanding at best.
| It's as if we read a short summary of the best practice, then
| cargo cult it _everywhere_ , fully convinced that we're right
| because it is the current best practice.
|
| The psychological intent is to outsource accountability and
| responsibility to these best practices. I'd argue that goal
| isn't always consciously undertaken. I'm not asserting
| malevolence, but more a reluctance to dig into the firehose of
| industrial knowledge that gets spewed at us 24/7.
|
| I suspect this is not just confined to software dev. It's a
| sort of anti-intellectualism, ultimately. And it's hard to cast
| it as that, because I don't think we should tell people they're
| wrong for triaging emotional energy. But it also isn't right
| that we're okay with people generally checking out as much as
| possible.
| spectraldrift wrote:
| The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA
| deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the
| traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It's clear
| from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI
| schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the
| applicant pool, and there's documented evidence of a cheating
| scandal that casts further doubt on the process. However, the
| reality is nuanced. Although the new process may have altered who
| got to start the journey, every candidate still had to pass the
| FAA's rigorous and extremely selective training and
| certification-- which remain the true measure of an air traffic
| controller's capability. In an ideal world, we could put everyone
| through this process to see who passes.
|
| Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity
| goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the
| pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria
| remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult
| and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control,
| such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range
| of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the
| qualification bar.
|
| This isn't a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it's
| about how changing the initial screening affected a well-
| established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool,
| and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual
| directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it
| doesn't translate to less competent controllers.
| mik3y wrote:
| A very well-written and persuasive critique, thank you for it.
|
| (And god I hope you're not a state-of-the-art summarization
| LLM.)
| gundmc wrote:
| It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially
| disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their
| race.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| if people who have been historically quantifiably
| discriminated against and disqualified based on that
| discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?
| widowlark wrote:
| By helping to make them qualified to pass the tests.
| squigz wrote:
| How, exactly? Perhaps by encouraging schools to accept
| more people from those groups?
| drawkward wrote:
| But but but I was told that DEI lowered standards
| jsnell wrote:
| How many people (in absolute and relative terms) from each
| cohort passed/failed the training program and how long did they
| take to do so? Did the numbers change with the two policy
| changes described in the article?
|
| If there was no change (or an increase) in the absolute numbers
| of passing graduates, that would support what you're saying. If
| there was a drop in the absolute numbers, it implies that
| there's at the very least _fewer_ competent controllers. (And
| changes in the relative numbers tell us about whether the
| efficiency of the program changed.)
|
| Given the litigation and FOIA requests around this, it seems
| like this data should be floating around, and should be fairly
| conclusive for one side.
| gedy wrote:
| > This isn't a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards;
| it's about how changing the initial screening affected a well-
| established pathway
|
| It seems like you are mincing words, similar to my previous
| company that wanted to hire more women. They started attending
| the women-only hiring convention and we could only interview
| from those candidates (HR filtered out the rest). So while we
| hired the best candidates we could, on average they weren't
| that great, they just passed a minimum bar.
| drawkward wrote:
| the average engineer is not 10x.
| scott_w wrote:
| This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real
| problem and how it affects people in a real way. It's an example
| of something that I'd seen rumblings of in left leaning media:
| that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest
| possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing
| efforts by corporations).
|
| A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness
| and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks
| ago who'd left software engineering to become a paramedic around
| 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter
| reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a
| software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably
| irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed
| missing before reaching out.
|
| I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left
| in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way
| has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it
| into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar
| in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning
| media for taking positions to address the public's concerns in a
| way that's more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it,
| as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's an example of something that I'd seen rumblings of in
| left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the
| laziest and stupidest possible ways
|
| That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There
| isn't another legal way to do it.
|
| The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet
| hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites
| and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those
| separate groups.
|
| That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead,
| you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites,
| but you have to pretend that they're all available to
| everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to
| hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota.
|
| And you have to call Asians "white".
| scott_w wrote:
| You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by
| equating DEI to "hiring quotas." That's a lazy and stupid
| approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for
| people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is,
| unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across
| society to achieve it.
| ars wrote:
| In theory sure, in practice DEI = hiring quotas.
|
| The definition you _want_ DEI to have: Extra training for
| DEI students, does not exist in the real world. And if it
| did no one is complaining about it.
|
| > That's a lazy and stupid approach
|
| Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term.
| You want a different definition, but that's simply not how
| it's used.
| scott_w wrote:
| To avoid repeating myself:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302
|
| > Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative
| term. You want a different definition, but that's simply
| not how it's used.
|
| No, the reason has been the refusal of people in
| positions of power to engage thoughtfully with the
| genuine criticism.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| You're imagining that there's ever been a meaning of DEI
| other than quotas, but there hasn't. That's the way it
| began and the only thing it's ever done or wanted.
| scott_w wrote:
| Then maybe you should see how it's done in other
| countries and companies. I've worked on hiring and we've
| never once lowered our standards just to get in a black
| candidate. What I've seen done is conscious outreach to
| increase diversity of applicants, changing language to
| increase applications from women, blind reviews where you
| can't see the name or details of the applicant (to
| minimise subconscious bias).
|
| All of these actually happen and, to a greater or lesser
| extent, do help without discriminating against white
| applicants. How do I know? I ended up only hiring two
| white men in that particular round!
| modo_mario wrote:
| >conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants
|
| Which involved doingwhat exactly?
| scott_w wrote:
| In our case, the recruitment team started by only
| headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that
| pool, they would headhunt any candidate.
|
| Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job
| position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did,
| put in applications. They were assessed the same way
| target candidates were.
| lordloki wrote:
| So you started out your hiring practices focused solely
| on one race...and you don't think it's racist?
| scott_w wrote:
| Weird how I knew performative outrage would be the
| response, just as night follows day.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| It's not performative outrage, it's a statement of fact.
| You didn't merely widen the net, you spearfished
| candidates of the right race and ignored those of the
| wrong ones. Regardless of your intentions, how is that
| _not_ racist?
| scott_w wrote:
| > Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job
| position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did,
| put in applications. They were assessed the same way
| target candidates were.
|
| Try again.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| > In our case, the recruitment team started by only
| headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that
| pool, they would headhunt any candidate.
|
| "Target candidate" = those in minority groups, yes?
| rayiner wrote:
| Except that's what it becomes in practice. As soon as you
| inject race into these decisions, it becomes de facto
| racial quotas and preferences:
| https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-
| acti...
|
| It took like five minutes for Biden to start deploying SBA
| loans whites weren't eligible for and for NASDAQ to create
| diversity quotas for boards. Racial gerrymandering is
| always the ultimate goal of this stuff.
| flocciput wrote:
| > there isn't another legal way to do it
|
| The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for
| qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups
| is to increase their representation in your hiring pool.
| That's fundamentally it.
|
| This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs
| for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in
| addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income
| high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in
| poverty that there is a path to success for them.
|
| The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for
| qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups
| is to increase their representation in your hiring pool.
| That's fundamentally it.
|
| Except that that won't actually improve hiring outcomes, if
| by "improve hiring outcomes" you mean "hire more
| individuals from historically marginalized groups".
|
| You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's
| true. But every prior stage of the process, including the
| stage where children are too young to enroll in
| kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem.
| There is no point at which there are enough "qualified
| individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet
| demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only
| thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse
| on-the-job performance.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest
| possible ways
|
| This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but
| it's also something that a lot of people are lying about. It's
| become increasingly difficult to find out what actually
| happened once it's been filtered through media, social media,
| activists, and algorithmic propaganda.
|
| What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is
| overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?
|
| > slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address
| the public's concerns in a way that's more thoughtful that how
| the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country
| has toxified the issue for them.
|
| Again, something a lot of people are lying or selectively
| reporting about. Which is why it's become toxic in the first
| place. You could occasionally see the same people who were
| complaining about Rotherham not being investigated complain
| when other allegations of sexual assault _were_ being
| investigated ( "cancel culture"). Or not investigated, such as
| the Met police rapist.
|
| Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who
| was actually responsible, what should have been done
| differently, and what could be done differently in the future"
| simply get _destroyed_ by very loud demands for racially
| discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn
| people alive in a hotel.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's absolutely not being over reported. In the last four
| years, we have had the Supreme Court smack down Harvard for
| blatantly discriminating against whites and Asians (granting
| admission to black and Hispanic applicants with similar
| academic credentials at 3-10x the rate). A federal court
| smacked down Biden for racially discriminating in granting
| SBA loans. Another federal court smacked down NASDAQ for
| diversity quotas for board seats.
|
| Just personally, in the last four years:
|
| 1) The acting Dean at my law school held a struggle session
| where white people declared they were "white supremacists"
|
| 2) My kids' school adopted racially segregated affinity
| groups. My daughter was invited to go to the weekly "black
| girl magic" lunch once a month (because I guess half south
| Asian = quarter black in the DEI hierarchy). Following that
| lead, a kid tried to kick my daughter out of a group chat for
| her circle of friends by making it black-kids only.
|
| 3) I've had coworkers ask if I count as "diverse" for
| purposes of a client contract and have had to perform
| diversity jigs during client meetings.
|
| I'm not even going to list all the alienating behaviors from
| overly empathetic but deeply ignorant white people--the likes
| of which I never encountered living in a nearly all white
| town in the 1990s.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| In the UK Black was an umbrella term that included South
| Asians. In the US pre 1965 era Bengalis especially tended
| to integrate into the black community (cf. Vivek Bald's
| book). My Punjabi great grandfather married a light skinned
| mixed-race woman in the 1920s.
| scott_w wrote:
| > This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but
| it's also something that a lot of people are lying about
|
| For the avoidance of doubt, I 100% agree that right-wing
| media is telling a lot of outright lies and you pointed out
| some good examples. However, I have seen left-leaning
| criticise tokenism in companies' DEI efforts. Philosophy Tube
| and Unlearning Economics are 2 examples off the top of my
| head.
|
| > Investigations of the form "what actually happened here,
| who was actually responsible, what should have been done
| differently, and what could be done differently in the
| future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for
| racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters
| trying to burn people alive in a hotel.
|
| I disagree with this because I feel it misrepresents the
| riots this summer as a genuine expression of rage. It was
| not. It was organised violence by hardcore Nazis and football
| hooligans bussed in from Stoke to smash up a job centre in
| Sunderland and attempt to murder women and children.
| account42 wrote:
| > What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is
| overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?
|
| DEI _is_ actual racism.
| bena wrote:
| > I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the
| left in power to critically engage with this topic in a
| thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like
| him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters.
|
| You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the
| opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully. They
| just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.
|
| I don't think critical thinking and thoughtfulness from the
| left, or lack thereof, is the issue here.
|
| I think the issue is simple, rhetoric beats nuance, every time.
| Rhetoric is the rock to nuance's scissors. We need to find the
| paper.
| mistermann wrote:
| The paper "is pedantic" and rejected by everyone except
| "pedants".
| scott_w wrote:
| > You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the
| opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully.
| They just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.
|
| I don't disagree with you, however I singled out the USA
| because, over the period of this article, both Obama and
| Biden were both president. Ultimately, the people arguing
| against my point _can_ point to kernels of truth and of
| things that did happen. While I disagree with their
| diagnosis, I _can 't_ point to the fact that the issues were
| recognised and attempts made to address them. And,
| ultimately, Trump _did_ win the presidential election
| partially off the back of this!
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Is your friend interested perhaps in getting back in at the
| intersection of EMS and software engineering? She is welcome to
| contact me at my HN handle at gmail or my LinkedIn from the who
| wants to be hired post. We might have an opportunity for her
| she might find agreeable.
| scott_w wrote:
| Unfortunately not. She soured on the profession quite badly
| quite a while ago and she's never expressed a desire to go
| back.
| michaelteter wrote:
| > the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing
| before reaching out
|
| 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.
| This began 20 years ago and has gotten increasingly worse.
|
| It has nothing to do with your topic.
| scott_w wrote:
| >> the laziest and stupidest possible ways
|
| > 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.
|
| You're not disputing my core point.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| > left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012
| after experiencing misogyny
|
| Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how
| do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?
| scott_w wrote:
| You're exhibiting all the behaviours that push women out of
| Software Engineering right in this post.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Got it, millennia old "listen to the other side" principle
| pushes women out of software engineering. Such a pity.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes, many DEI practices are discriminatory in nature, but if you
| pointed that out before Trump's election, you were called a
| sexist racist and most likely cancelled. In other news, water is
| wet.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> if you pointed that out before Trump 's election_
|
| This article is an expanded version of the author's reporting a
| year ago: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-
| scandal-...
|
| While it didn't make the same splash then, I saw it and didn't
| see people responding by trying to cancel the author.
| Khaine wrote:
| Famously this guy James Damore tried to explain why the
| approach to diversity at google was not going to work. How
| did that work out for him?
| jefftk wrote:
| I'm not arguing the obviously false "no one has been
| cancelled for arguing an approach to increasing diversity
| is counterproductive". I'm arguing "Trace wouldn't have
| been (and in fact wasn't) cancelled for writing about this
| pre-Trump"
| sschueller wrote:
| I don't have a problem with hiring qualified people instead of
| meeting quotas but the fact that the ones pushing this are them
| selves the most unqualified people is just beyond me.
| justonceokay wrote:
| That's because it isn't actually about qualification. It's
| actually about a lack of accountability. Trump wants everyone
| to be able to hire their friends just like he does, optics be
| damned. I think a lot of people actually agree with this at a
| visceral level.
|
| Left leaning people are more concerned with power controlled by
| nepotism and "unfair" connections. To me that is a kind of sour
| grapes view fueled by too many participation trophies.
|
| A government full of cronies sucks but we can at least hope to
| get our own cronies in at some point. A
| meritocratic/technocratic government sounds like a dystopian
| novel.
| solfox wrote:
| In your view, is that how all businesses should be run as
| well? Hiring your least qualified friends? Surely, cronyism
| exists in corporate America, but I'd venture a guess that a
| company run in this way would fail almost immediately. No,
| this style of management and hiring is more like that of a
| crime boss - and it's not about friendships - it's about
| LOYALTY.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| They don't "fail" as such. They burn through the money,
| spread it around, and then declare bankruptcy while
| everyone involved is somehow wealthier. It's kleptocracy.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| This is kinda becoming a thing with VC based startups.
| But beyond that, where does the money come from?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Most of Trump's money always came from investors that
| bought in his enterprises.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| >A government full of cronies sucks...
|
| >A meritocratic...government sounds like a dystopian novel.
|
| So nepotism + networking = bad, but meritocracy also =
| bad...?
|
| >...we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some
| point.
|
| OR you reduce the risk vector and limit the size & scope of
| government. Most people agree with your earlier premises, so
| why would I support adding powers to a structure where folks
| I strongly disagree with will lead that structure ~50% of the
| time?
| cratermoon wrote:
| > So nepotism + networking = bad, but meritocracy also =
| bad...?
|
| The downsides of meritocracy invalidate the almost
| idolatrous worship of the idea seen in the tech field.
|
| Tolstoy wrote "It is principally through this false idea of
| inequality, and the intoxication of power and of servility
| resulting from it, that men associated in a state
| organization are enabled to commit acts opposed to their
| conscience without the least scruple or remorse."[1]
|
| See also:
|
| Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit : What's Become of
| the Common Good?. [S.l.]: Penguin Books, 2021.
|
| Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study
| in Ethics and Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
| https://archive.org/details/moralmanimmorals00nieb_0.
|
| [1] Tolstoy, Leo,. 1894. "'The kingdom of God is within
| you' Christianity not as a mystic religion but as a new
| theory of life;" New York: Cassell Pub. Co. /z-wcorg/.
| 1894. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/385976
| 1.html.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Biggest issue with Democrats is learning that "People are
| born with different abilities."
|
| Biggest issue with Republicans is learning that "People
| are born with different abilities."
| cratermoon wrote:
| Thank you for your analysis. It is both penetrating and
| diffuse.
| sollewitt wrote:
| Sour grapes rather than valuing fairness?
|
| Elementary school kids are huge on fairness and injustice. It
| seems like it's built in to facilitate group social dynamics
| in great apes. It takes a lot of sophistication to be able to
| frame valuing fairness as a character flaw.
| drawkward wrote:
| elementary kids are also some of the most violent people
| per capita.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3283570/
|
| Downvote if you like, but kids' community values are
| typically enforced with antisocial behavior
| paulddraper wrote:
| Well then it demonstrates their sincerity I suppose.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I'm not sure about most unqualified but I will say that it's
| people the bubble who are most impacted by these policies.
|
| The elite are getting hired no matter what. It's the average
| person who was just barely above the bar that gets bumped to
| make room for a quota based hire that really feels the impact.
| K0balt wrote:
| Working effectively in ATC without burnout hanging over your head
| constantly favours a certain amount of neurodivergence. A certain
| kind of delight in detail, delight in predictable progression of
| system. The overload needs to invigorate , not fatigue.
|
| This doesn't make ATC professionals better people. It doesn't
| make them smarter. It doesn't make them superhuman. It makes them
| better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits
| probably make them worse at many others.
|
| We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it's a scale from
| good to bad. It's just a kind of diversity.
|
| Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person
| better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds
| make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other
| work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more
| comfortable and easier.
|
| Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at
| different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and
| neurological development. is there really any difference, or is
| neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity?
|
| Different is not a value judgement.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| In case you [need citation] of this analysis, please see the
| 1999 "documentary" Pushing Tin, starring John Cusack. :)
| timewizard wrote:
| Not all people are the same.
|
| Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than
| others.
|
| Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something
| exceptionally simple.
| barbazoo wrote:
| What's a better word?
| ironmagma wrote:
| Autism...
| Aurornis wrote:
| Neither the FAA situation nor the article are about
| neurodiversity.
|
| > We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it's a scale
| from good to bad. It's just a kind of diversity.
|
| In the situation of hiring people for specific jobs, filtering
| for a perceived "neurodiversity" would have no scientific
| basis.
|
| Fortunately, hiring doesn't work this way. The idea is to hire
| for people who are qualified for and capable of the job, not to
| try to evaluate questionable proxies like neurodiversity.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| So we want to make sure that ATCs are well qualified for their
| jobs; considering the severity of the position, I 100% agree that
| should be the primary (only?) consideration.
|
| But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate --
| just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of
| the US, to run the most powerful military in the world?
|
| (Not to mention other cabinet nominees -- this is just the most
| egregious one. Well, besides Gaetz for AG.)
|
| Call me when we're appointing qualified people to top positions
| in the government (including President) that impact the lives of
| millions of people in the US and abroad. Then we can talk about
| ATCs.
| jtgverde wrote:
| I suppose it shouldn't be but it's stunning to me the level of
| cognitive dissonance it takes to maintain that Trump is
| bringing back "meritocracy" while putting a weekend Fox News
| host with ZERO experience leading a large organization in
| charge of our military and DoD of 3 million people.
|
| "but he served in Iraq!!" is the go-to defense of this. I was
| unaware that the hundreds of thousands of troops who served in
| Iraq are all equally qualified to lead the entire military.
| Seems...problematic
| mistermann wrote:
| Your reductionist, pejorative mischaracterization of the
| details of this situation is also problematic.
|
| But don't worry, there's no requirement for you to improve
| your cognition, only other people are obligated to do that.
| tclancy wrote:
| If anything, I think the characterization of the
| candidate's qualifications is kind, as it fails to mention
| any of the obvious disqualifying issues.
| ailun wrote:
| Your post added nothing to the conversation except insults
| though. I would have been interested in hearing an
| alternative perspective on why GP's post was reductive
| because as far as I know it's accurate.
| mistermann wrote:
| >Your post added nothing to the conversation except
| insults though.
|
| You are describing your experience, but stating it as if
| it is a universal fact.
|
| A relevant post from this morning:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946854
| ailun wrote:
| I guess I'll save a click for other readers. The post
| linked is completely unrelated to the subject of this
| thread. This person isn't interested in real
| conversation.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Well, he's also an alcoholic sexual abuser, both of which
| would have DQed him 20 years ago. But, then the guy that
| hired Hegseth is a felon and rapist, so here we are, as a
| nation, mostly totally ok with the current state of
| affairs.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate
| -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history
| of the US, to run the most powerful military in the world?_
|
| For some context, in the last fifty years, one nominee was
| rejected (Towers, for drinking), one was 'close' (Hagel,
| 58-41), but everyone else:
|
| > _Aside from that vote and Mr. Tower's rejection following
| accounts of his excessive drinking, no other secretary of
| defense nominee in the past 50 years has gotten fewer than 90
| votes, with Leon Panetta being confirmed 100-0 in 2011. Three
| others -- Harold Brown in 1977, Les Aspin in 1993 and Donald
| Rumsfeld in 2001 -- sailed through on voice votes._
|
| *
| https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/pol...
|
| For Hesgeth, four GOPs voted against him, and so the VP in his
| role as President of Senate had to break the 50-50 tie.
|
| Getting >90 votes for SECDEF is the norm. The picks are
| regarded as competent and the votes have generally reflected
| that.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| >But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate --
| just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of
| the US...
|
| I'm old enough to remember when Biden nominated someone with no
| aviation experience to lead the head of the FAA, and also had
| corruption charges while acting as head of the LA transit
| system....AND Democrats were in _favor_ of that lack of
| experience:
|
| "Democrats...spinning his lack of direct involvement with
| aviation as a positive, theoretically making him less likely to
| be aligned or swayed by any of the many interest groups or
| companies in the industry."[1]
|
| I'm also old enough to remember when Pete Buttigieg was
| appointed Transportation Secretary, despite having virtually no
| experience in mass transit (no, a McKinsey deck doesn't count)
| and whose highest office was mayor of a small Indiana town.[2]
|
| So can we stop with the hyperbole? Yes there are many good
| candidates, but the US could do much worse than a guy with
| experience in Iraq/Afghanistan/Guantanamo + 2 Bronze Stars +
| Joint Commendation + 2 Army Commendations + Expert Infantryman
| Badge + degrees from Harvard & Princeton.[3]
|
| [1]https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/faa-nominee-quizzed-
| on-a... [2]https://www.the-
| independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
| [3]https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article-
| Display/Article/4042297...
| jwkpiano1 wrote:
| Dude, none of that has _anything_ to do with being able to
| run a huge organization. Nothing. It's undeniable that
| Hegseth, even if you ignore all of the white supremacist
| shit, is completely unqualified to run a large organization.
| Noting other folks that aren't super qualified doesn't change
| that one bit, and it's insulting to others' intelligence to
| suggest it does.
| AdamN wrote:
| We would call those qualifications to be a Sr. Principal
| Engineer or higher even ... not an SVP in charge of 1M+
| people. Hegseth is way out of his league.
| jwlake wrote:
| I love how people think managing 1M people and 100 people
| are different. In both cases it's all delegation. You can't
| oversee more than 10 people in any realistic sense.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > SVP in charge of 1M+ people
|
| it's more like CEO in charge of 3M+ people and a $850
| billion annual budget (of your money)
|
| not to mention global repercussions
| refurb wrote:
| Least qualified according to who? The Democrats?
|
| It's politics. These are political roles. It's organizational
| leading and having people in place who are aligned with your
| goals, not splicing DNA.
|
| And we've had the qualified one who got 90 Senate votes in
| confirmation and what did that get us? The Iraq War and the
| Afghan departure with abandoned locals falling off airplanes.
|
| It's laughable when the idea of checking the same boxes that
| always get checked is "qualified".
| jwkpiano1 wrote:
| He has zero experience running a large organization. The
| Secretary of Defense, while a political appointee, also
| requires some ability to manage a large organization, which
| again, he doesn't have. And suggesting that we didn't get the
| desired outcomes from another qualified candidate doesn't
| mean we should switch to literally unqualified candidates.
| Take your partisan hat off for a few minutes and think about
| what qualities are necessary in a SecDef, and think about
| whether Hegseth meets them or not.
| refurb wrote:
| He was a major in the US Army, typically leading a
| battalion, and while not a government department, saying he
| has "no experience" is false.
|
| What does a battalion leader need? Organizational ability,
| the ability to motivate.
|
| He is preceded by a guy who decided to hide a serious
| health issue from his own boss (must have though nobody
| noticed Biden's issues, so no biggie), to the point he was
| _unreachable for days_. So as long as he doesn't do that,
| he's already an improvement.
|
| But I get it. It's "it's not my team so it's bad" and then
| find the justification after. If the situation was flipped
| the Democrats would be talking up "fresh ideas" and
| promoting their lack of experience (Buttigieg). So I'll
| just take this as politics and no actual, well thought out
| criticism.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| He has experience in a number of positions, but I don't
| think it should be controversial to point out that he has
| little to no leadership experience leading large
| organizations. Hegseth left active duty the same year he
| was promoted to major. He was only a captain in active
| duty for less than three years. Captains can lead at most
| a company, which often have at-most 200 members, but can
| have less than 100. The department of defense supervises
| over a million.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Maybe you should read this quote from McConnell, arguably
| the person who did more to defeat the Democrat agenda in
| the past 20 years than anyone else, who, coincidentally,
| voted not to confirm Hesgeth.
|
| > "Effective management of nearly 3 million military and
| civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1
| trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world
| is a daily test with staggering consequences for the
| security of the American people and our global
| interests," McConnell said in the statement. "Mr. Hegseth
| has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this
| test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of
| failure are as high as they have ever been."
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > It's organizational leading and having people in place who
| are aligned with your goals, not splicing DNA.
|
| We're talking about the DOD here, not Transportation
| Secretary.
|
| And this conversation is in the context that these are the
| same people who are "rooting out the disease of DEI", Red
| Scare style, in order to "promote meritocracy".
|
| As for whether qualified leaders got us into wars we should
| never have gotten into (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.)
| that's a whole other conversation.
| legitster wrote:
| This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this
| whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it
| was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only
| recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.
|
| Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war
| paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a
| popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra
| wary of stories like this being massaged.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant
| regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements
| because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred
| cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category
| became a successful attack vector against capitalist
| structures, and supported by Democratic leadership.
|
| This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but
| rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise
| concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda,"
| but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was
| otherwise concealed.
|
| Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes
| perching_aix wrote:
| Asserting "it's not that but this" is not "showing the
| full picture" like you say (said), but borderline spam
| that belongs to kindergarten. Which your edit perfectly
| captures.
|
| And since you appear to be missing the reference:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-
| their-ba...
| legitster wrote:
| > and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored
| the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology
|
| In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying
| the DEI elements because of their ideology.
|
| The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time
| machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back
| in time and attributing them to people is always going to be
| wild speculation.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > using current cultural agenda items and going back in
| time and attributing them to people is always going to be
| wild speculation.
|
| I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words.
|
| This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was
| designed by idiots and/or racists.
|
| Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't
| need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that
| the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so
| a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage
| them.
|
| When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash,
| about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up
| bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a
| significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during
| the crash.
|
| I really wish that our party was better at calling out
| crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do
| stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the
| country just based on if "their worst subject in school was
| science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race
| they come up with.
| legitster wrote:
| The difference between this and the college scandal is
| that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so
| to putting in an underqualified white student meant you
| had to pull an overqualified Asian student.
|
| The situation here was the ATC was chronically
| understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort
| for them to boost applications makes sense even under
| non-DEI principles.
| jtbayly wrote:
| If they wanted _more_ applicants, then they shouldn't
| have been _disqualifying_ good applicants on the basis of
| their biography.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense whatsoever given the facts on
| the facts on the ground. Have you read the article at
| all?
|
| What we are talking about here is people who already
| finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude
| test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which
| was explicitly designed to filter out people of
| undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense
| to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to
| being short staffed. Rather, it's more likely they are
| understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible
| and eager people in order to meet race quotas.
|
| It's hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI
| policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too
| insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss
| it as just another instance of crazy Republican
| screeching.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this:
|
| Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another
| thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The
| democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence
| in addition to making some noises about diversity.
|
| Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no,
| he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-
| century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning
| politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd
| particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever
| Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think
| they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't
| capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they
| don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect
| it has on their constituents.
|
| When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested
| election for which she had to serve the whole community she
| went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to
| "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty
| constituency and rightist donors went away.
|
| Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in
| the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running
| against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's
| nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to _speak_
| for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last
| minute against Trump and his replacement lost.
|
| Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but
| shows of competence increase the conflict between being a
| party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has
| mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the
| easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
| techapple wrote:
| I would more likely say that the qualities that make one
| popular or wanting to deal with the bullshit of managing
| Americans disputes are in opposition to the qualities that
| make one qualified. See: almost every politician that's not
| a Democrat. Incompetence is staggeringly bipartisan.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| But you also have MTG who literally believes "they" control
| the weather so I'm not sure exactly why you single
| democrats out here or even the it to any kind of ideology
| specific consequence.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was
| too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.
| legitster wrote:
| Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA
| happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama
| administration, but well before the bulk of the really
| controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current
| administration is largely attacking.
| Covzire wrote:
| It's all connected, DEI(B) is just the latest revision of
| the beast.
| aikinai wrote:
| DEI quotas have been around for decades. We just used to
| call it affirmative action and it was far less aggressive
| and blatant.
| SR2Z wrote:
| It was MORE blatant and transparent, which IMO is the
| bare minimum for government-sanctioned racism. If we are
| going to do AA, we owe it to EVERYONE to make it clear
| exactly how and when we will do it. Sneaking it in
| disingenuously will rightfully piss people off.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| > to call a spade a spade
|
| intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from
| the worst of DEI.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Yes. It was also often career suicide to criticize DEI
| indicatives.
| adolph wrote:
| Even if the criticism was intended to be constructive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cha
| m...
| fallingknife wrote:
| From an internal US pov, yes you are correct that's exactly
| what the culture is here. Call out the obviously lowered
| standards for women and minority candidates and expect severe
| consequences to your career.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for
| state-sponsored propoganda,
|
| I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in
| state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do
| this too without any state sponsorship.
| legitster wrote:
| Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that _this_ was state-
| sponsored, just highlighting that it 's known to be a super
| effective way to manipulate stories.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Taking old, resolved scandals
|
| The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
| legitster wrote:
| No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated
| by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's
| _current_ recruitment problems.
| stackskipton wrote:
| ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that
| mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.
| clutchdude wrote:
| COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current
| issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though.
|
| I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and
| don't mention it:
|
| https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-
| transport/2024-0...
|
| > When training at the academy resumed in July 2020,
| after the four-month shutdown, class sizes were cut in
| half to meet the Centers for Disease Control and
| Prevention's social distancing guidelines.
|
| > The pandemic hit controller hiring and training hard
| with on-the-job training for developmental controllers
| significantly dropping at facilities, resulting in
| delayed certification. In fiscal year 2021, the
| controller hiring target was dropped from 910 to 500.
|
| > Since then, the FAA has been working to restore the
| training pipeline to full capacity. The agency's
| Controller Workforce 2023/2032 Plan had a hiring target
| of 1,020 in FY 2022 (actual hires were 1,026) and 1,500
| in FY 2023. The is set to increase to 1,800 in the
| current fiscal year.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Yep, COVID didn't help either.
|
| However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers
| because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so
| hard to find.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I'll never find it, but a few days ago someone here
| posted an anecdotal story that class sizes were between
| 10-20 and failure/drop rate was ~50%.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I probably read the same thing, the most galling to me
| wasn't the failure rate it was that once you've failed
| you can never reapply.
| robocat wrote:
| For some jobs, your aptitude should matter. If a test has
| some discriminating power between people with aptitude
| and those without aptitude, then perhaps failing that
| test should really matter. For ATC staff perhaps OCD-
| adjacent traits are good and ADD-adjacent traits are bad.
| Maybe you don't want someone with epilepsy in ATC even
| though that's unfair.
|
| Maybe we all want to be Olympic athletes and a few work
| hard to become so, but what should happen if we lack some
| necessary skill?
| briandear wrote:
| It wasn't "Covid" -- it was the vaccine mandate.
| hitekker wrote:
| Yes, the scandal is not over because the FAA continued to
| conflate diversity with performance.
|
| In 2023, the FAA set several, major goals for DEIA
| initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic
| controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FY23%20O
| SI-M%20and%2...
|
| Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion =
| Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/a
| bout/office_org/hea...
|
| Too many examples. Compared to 2016, the FAA of the 2020s was
| better at hiding their written bias. Nonetheless, they failed
| to attract the talent they needed.
| bz_bz_bz wrote:
| The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents
| in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI
| discrimination issue from the get-go.
| legitster wrote:
| With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is
| going to be a discrimination case.
|
| The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around
| DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of
| the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have
| a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in
| other ways.
| oremolten wrote:
| Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination?
| Is hiring based on someone's RACE _ever_ not
| discrimination?
| dingnuts wrote:
| if this question is in good faith, you can read about
| this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X
| Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory
| that answers your question.
|
| It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et
| al
|
| > The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist
| discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is
| present discrimination. The only remedy to present
| discrimination is future discrimination. As President
| Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, "You do not take a person
| who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate
| him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then
| say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and
| still justly believe that you have been completely fair."
| As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in
| 1978, "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take
| account of race. There is no other way. And in order to
| treat some persons equally, we must treat them
| differently.
|
| - Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
| armitron wrote:
| This is not a serious answer. IMO the fairest but not
| necessarily most accurate characterization for Ibram X.
| Kendi would be charlatan (others could say he's
| deliberately inducing racial hatred and stoking
| division). Additionally, according to recent news Boston
| University fired him and closed down his "antiracist
| research" center.
| dingnuts wrote:
| He's an academic with multiple publications in the field.
| How am I, a lay person, supposed to tell if he's a
| charlatan? He certainly takes himself seriously and has a
| successful academic career.
|
| Any example could be a false Scotsman. If my example is
| bad, please provide some that are better. I tried to
| educate myself on this five years ago and I looked up the
| people who were recommended to me by DEI practitioners.
| At the time, Kendi and DiAngelo were held up as icons of
| the movement.
|
| In American public school twenty years ago we also read
| Why Do All The Black Kids Sit Together In The Cafeteria.
| That would also be a good place to start learning about
| this ideology. Or is that book written by a charlatan,
| too?
|
| This kind of goalpost moving is as predictable as it is
| disappointing. You cannot argue with an ideology if it
| can't be defined, so the practitioners of this one --
| descended from Deconstructionism so no wonder they are
| happy to play word games -- won't allow opponents to
| define the ideology in the first place!
|
| Well good job, folks, because the reaction to this
| movement is MAGA.
| some_random wrote:
| As soon as they "fired" him he was hired by Howard to
| direct a new institute there.
| e44858 wrote:
| That just leads to an endless cycle where each group
| tries to avenge discrimination by the other group.
| legitster wrote:
| DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination
| in the workforce. There's nothing that implies exclusion
| unless you are intentionally bad faithing the meaning.
|
| Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white
| parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job
| fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would
| suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white
| people!
|
| There's a difference between forcing a white person to
| give up a seat, and letting a black person sit anywhere
| on the bus. But both of these are being labelled "DEI" in
| this thread.
|
| Again, nobody is arguing that the FAA didn't shoot
| themselves in the foot by introducing a dumb assessment
| that threw out good candidates. But I think there should
| be nothing scandalous or wrong with the FAA trying to be
| available to more candidates.
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a
| loose label for having less discrimination in the
| workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to
| use it for more forceful discrimination.
|
| It would serve those who truly just want to make sure our
| society all starts from the same starting line to come up
| with a new term, one that encompasses meritocracy as the
| goal along with generous helping hands along the way
| (training programs, tutoring programs, outside-the-class
| mentorship opportunities). And to focus on helping lower
| _class and income_ folks get a leg up, not on including
| or excluding people by characteristics that are a
| circumstance of birth (skin color).
| jmye wrote:
| > The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a
| loose label for having less discrimination in the
| workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to
| use it for more forceful discrimination.
|
| Nah. The problem is dishonest hucksters who want to
| broadly label _everything_ , regardless of applicability,
| as bad in an effort to provide their supporters with an
| easy "anti-X" bumper sticker.
|
| DEI advocates _came up_ with DEI to do precisely what you
| suggest - the right wing _rebranded_ it as "everyone
| hates white men" and "be afraid of black pilots". Almost
| like they just did the same thing with "woke" and "CRT"
| before it.
|
| It's extremely tiring to have people like you waltz into
| conversations to complain about terms you're busily
| redefining, being used in their original context, because
| you don't like what your own redefinitions imply.
|
| > _class and income_
|
| Yes, part of my company's DEI effort was to ensure that a
| JD didn't, for instance, specify a college degree if it
| wasn't really needed. Thank you, again, for restating
| things that are already occurring because you're not a
| part of those conversations or are unaware of those
| conversations.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| > DEI advocates came up with DEI to do precisely what you
| suggest - the right wing rebranded it as "everyone hates
| white men"
|
| Ironic that you're posting this on a story that shows DEI
| was applied in exactly the opposite way you're claiming,
| because certain people passed the AT-SAT at higher rates
| so they had to be eliminated from consideration before
| they could even take it.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The DEI label has indeed been placed on overtly
| discriminatory practices. At 3 out of the 4 companies
| I've worked at carried out explicit discirmination under
| the banner of DEI. One such DEI policy was reserving a
| segment engineering headcount for "diverse" candidates.
| Quite literally forcing white and Asian men to give up
| their seat.
|
| You're not in the position to unilaterally declare what
| DEI is and is not. I don't deny that there are plenty of
| non-discriminatory DEI programs that genuinely do aim to
| reduce discrimination. I don't think it's a good move to
| try and deny that DEI encompasses exclusionary and
| discriminatory practices, when so many people have
| witnessed exclusionary and discriminatory DEI programs
| firsthand.
| briandear wrote:
| That isn't what happened though. What happened was they
| intentionally turned down highly qualified white
| applicants. It wasn't like they found new "diverse"
| applicants -- they actively didn't hire people that were
| qualified and happened to be white. They weren't being
| "available" to more applicants, they became outwardly
| hostile to white applicants. They didn't grow the pie,
| they moved the pie.
|
| Huge difference.
| ImJamal wrote:
| If I deliberately hire whites more than other races nobody
| would deny that is discrimination. If I deliberately hire
| more minorities than whites, that is not discrimination?
| riskable wrote:
| That depends: Are you underpaying them? The question,
| "why" matters here a lot.
|
| "I tend to prefer minorities because I can underpay and
| get away with more" is a thing that exists in the real
| world. See: Immigrant farm workers and H1B visa holders.
|
| Is that discrimination against white/majorities or is it
| a kind of discrimination against minorities? It's
| injustice, for sure but I point it out because DEI
| policies, discrimination, racism, and sexism come in
| many, many forms. There's a ton of nuance and grey areas.
| ImJamal wrote:
| I think specifically hiring somebody because of their
| race is not just problematic but outright racist. I don't
| care if you are doing it because you want to underpay
| them or because you just dislike their race.
|
| If somebody decided he wanted more white people because
| he prefers whites, that would be discrimination. Nobody
| denies that, but when the races are swapped, suddenly it
| is nuanced? Give me a break!
| tremon wrote:
| If your candidate pool is 80% white and you hire 25%
| minorities, is that discrimination? I have seen people
| argue (rabidly!) both ways on that question.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Discrimination involves deliberately factoring the
| applicant's class into hiring decisions.
|
| Discrimination isn't determined by looking at single
| digit percentage differences in aggregate statistics.
| ImJamal wrote:
| That is not deliberately hiring whites? That is just
| hiring whites by happenstance. I am talking about
| choosing the white candidate because he is white.
| hitekker wrote:
| That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just
| "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side
| of "Equity". To quote the facts:
|
| > The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with
| its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black
| Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs.
| After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure
| from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a
| multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they
| could strike "an acceptable balance between minority hiring and
| expected performance"--a process they said would carry a
| "relatively small" performance loss. They openly discussed this
| tension in meetings, pointing to "a trade-off between diversity
| (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,"
| asking, "How much of a change in job performance is acceptable
| to achieve what diversity goals?"
|
| This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the
| spirit did not.
|
| That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized
| everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and
| now to a memory hole.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political
| pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that
| vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"
|
| I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest
| possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding
| people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's
| how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like
| everything, the term has become politically charged, and
| everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things
| they simply don't like.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| DEI: Diversity Equity Inclusion
|
| Diversity of race (encouraging racism), equity of income
| (encouraging envy), inclusion of "the marginalized"
| (discouraging free association)
|
| Except, as a government program, this turns from mere
| encouragement to forcing the issues, under threat of fines,
| imprisonment, and ultimately death.
|
| In the words of famous actor Morgan Freeman; "If you want
| to end racism, stop talking about it." (1)
|
| 1) https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-
| doubl...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >including instead of excluding people who have
| traditionally been shut out
|
| I think that is the crux of the issue right there. It's
| taken as a "sky-is-blue" level fact that everyone is equal
| in all regards, and therefore any inequality in outcome is
| a function of bigoted policy at some level. This is despite
| a mountain of evidence to the contrary, which kind of
| elevates DEI to an ideological position rather than a
| logical one, and arguably undermines the confidence of
| people who would ostensibly be considered "DEI Hires".
|
| Companies have largely side-stepped this however, because
| underneath it all, they still want the most productive
| workers, regardless of their labels. So they implement a
| farcical DEI to keep up appearances, while still allowing
| hiring of whoever is deemed the most productive for a team.
| gr3ml1n wrote:
| I'll try to assume good faith, but this is the sort of
| framing often used in the waning days of unpopular ideas.
|
| That's not what DEI ever was. It fundamentally came down to
| evaluating disparate impact and then setting targets based
| on it. The underlying idea is that if a given pool (in the
| US, generally national- or state-level statistics) has a
| racial breakdown like so: 10% X 30% Y
| 60% Z
|
| But your company or organization had a breakdown of:
| 5% X 25% Y 70% Z
|
| You are institutionally racist and need to pay money to
| various DEI firms in order to get the right ratios, where
| 'right' means matching (or exceeding) the population for
| certain ethnic minorities. The 'certain ethnic minorities'
| value changed over time depending on who you would ask.
|
| The methods to get 'the right ratios' varied from things
| like colorblind hiring (which had a nil or opposite
| effect), to giving ATS-bypassing keywords to minority
| industry groups (what the FAA did here).
| jquery wrote:
| I think it's helpful to distinguish between botched DEI
| efforts and the broader intent behind DEI. Just because
| certain organizations implement it clumsily or rely on
| simplistic quota-filling doesn't mean the entire idea is
| inherently flawed--any more than a poorly executed
| "merit-based" system would mean all attempts at measuring
| merit are invalid. If anything's really losing
| credibility right now, it's the myth of a pure American
| meritocracy.
|
| At its best, DEI is about recognizing that systemic
| barriers exist and trying to widen the funnel so more
| people get a fair shot. That doesn't have to conflict
| with a desire for genuinely skilled employees. Of course,
| there are ham-fisted applications out there (as with any
| policy), but that doesn't negate the underlying
| principles, which aren't just about numbers--they're
| about improving access and opportunity for everyone.
| coderc wrote:
| Can you provide an example of what you would consider a
| good implementation of DEI efforts, as opposed to a
| "botched" one?
| jquery wrote:
| For me, the best DEI successes are the ones that reduce
| bias without relying on clumsy quotas. Blind auditions in
| orchestras led to a big jump in women getting hired.
| Intel's push to fund scholarships and partner with HBCUs
| broadened their pipeline in a real way. And groups like
| Code2040 connect Black and Latino engineers with mentors
| and jobs, targeting root causes instead of surface-level
| fixes.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Hilarious that you mentioned the blind auditions in
| orchestras because now the DEI goons want to get rid of
| them! They say it hasn't got enough minorities in.
| Absolute proof that these people care only about race and
| don't give a damn about fairness. Source https://www.goog
| le.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
| ryandrake wrote:
| The article you linked discusses how problematic the
| _other_ non-blind parts of the audition are: leaving
| people out ahead of the blind audition, pre-advancing
| people, and so on. One of the conclusions was that if the
| whole process was actually blind, the outcome would be
| better.
| jquery wrote:
| That article is not "absolute proof" of anything, it's
| just a discussion if blind auditions are the be-all end-
| all. Your comment is very low quality and unnecessarily
| hostile. Referring to Black people discussing how to get
| more minorities interested in orchestras as "DEI goons"
| is one step removed from a slur.
| Khaine wrote:
| Yes, famously the Australian Government tried that and
| undid it as pesky white men were being hired at a greater
| rate because of them[1].
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-
| recruitment-tri...
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think the vast number of small and medium sized
| companies who quietly opened their hiring funnel up to a
| wider audience, would be considered good implementations.
| Not all companies reached for quotas and other hamfisted
| efforts that detractors constantly point to.
| vladgur wrote:
| DO you have examples of companies whose funnels were not
| open to "wider audience" prior to DEI? Lets say this
| century.
|
| Tech has been meritocratic for decades with few
| exceptions.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Examples are going to be hard to come by. No company is
| going to publicly admit that they used to be limiting
| their hiring pipeline in such a way. Admittedly, this
| also means that I'm speculating that the number of
| companies are "vast". Surely many have quietly made the
| change.
|
| Sample size of one, I worked in the past for a company
| whose entire staff was white men, 100%. Except for a
| single role: the receptionist at the front desk. There is
| no reasonable biological explanation for this extreme
| distribution.
| cycomanic wrote:
| There are tons of studies that have shown that if your
| name is sounding like you're from a minority your chances
| of being invited for an interview are significantly
| lower. Similar if you include photos.
|
| As a side note, it's quite ironic that engineers often
| tend to complain about performance metrics and that they
| are being gamed, not really a good measure of merit...,
| but the same people turn around and argue that the
| everything should be a meriocracy.
| Khaine wrote:
| DEI was the reason GitHub was forced to remove its
| meritocracy rug. Do you remember that? People questions
| whether it was a meritocracy based on disparate
| impact[1].
|
| It has almost never been about widening the size of the
| funnel, and almost always about putting the thumb on the
| scales for chosen people.
|
| [1] https://www.creators.com/read/susan-
| estrich/03/14/whats-wron...
| gr3ml1n wrote:
| > If anything's really losing credibility right now, it's
| the myth of a pure American meritocracy.
|
| It only became a myth when we were forced to consider
| factors beyond merit in hiring.
| adamrezich wrote:
| The part that always made this obviously insane for any
| systems-thinking person is as follows:
|
| For the sake of the argument, assume that X, Y, and Z all
| have ~100% equal _preference_ for positions A, B, and C
| at a given company or organization, _and_ assume that it
| is merely "historical /institutional discrimination" that
| has led to X, Y, and Z percentages of A, B, and C failing
| to match X, Y, and Z population percentages at any given
| company or organization.
|
| If both of these suppositions were 100% verifiably true,
| then it would stand to reason that, due to
| historical/institutional reasons, there would not _be_
| equal percentages of X, Y, and Z people who are
| _competent_ at A, B, and C positions, relative to X, Y,
| and Z population percentages--because competency at a
| given position at a given company /organization is not
| generally something you are born with, but a set of
| skills/proficiencies that were honed over a period of
| time.
|
| Therefore, the solution in this scenario _should_ be to
| _solely_ focus on education /training A, B, and C
| skills/proficiencies for whichever X, Y, and Z
| populations are "underrepresented"--plus also,
| presumably, some sort of oversight that ensures that a
| given person _of equal competency /proficiency_ is given
| equal consideration for a given position at a given
| company/organization, regardless of whether they are X,
| Y, or Z.
|
| But this would _necessarily_ mean that, for some period
| of time until sufficient "correction" could occur, X, Y,
| and Z percentages for positions A, B, and C would
| _continue_ to fail to match X, Y, and Z population
| percentages... because one doesn 't simply become
| proficient at A, B, or C overnight, in the vast majority
| of cases.
|
| However, the "DEI" proponents wanted to have their cake
| and eat it too. They wanted to claim that not only are
| the preceding assumptions regarding equal population
| group preferences completely, verifiably, absolutely true
| --but _also_ , that this problem should be solvable
| essentially overnight, such that, in short order, one
| could casually glance at a given slice of
| employees/members of a given company/organization and see
| a distribution of individuals that maps ~1:1 with the
| breakdown of the population.
|
| Any systems-thinking person could (and did) rather easily
| realize that this is just not how systems like these work
| --you cannot "refactor" society so easily, such that the
| "tests" (output) continue to "pass", simply by tweaking
| surface-level parameters ("reverse" hiring
| discrimination). If the problems are indeed as dire as
| claimed, then instead, proper steps must be taken to
| solve the _root causes_ of the perceived disparities--and
| also, proper steps must be taken to ensure that the base
| assumptions you started with (~100% equal career
| preference between population groups) were indeed correct
| to begin with.
|
| This is not to say that things were and are perfect, or
| as close to perfect as we can get--nor that attempts to
| improve things and reduce and remove bias and
| discrimination as much as possible are anything but noble
| goals.
|
| But if you want to solve a problem, you have to do so
| correctly, and that is quite clearly not what has been
| done--therefore, perhaps it's time to take a few steps
| back and reconsider things somewhat.
| programjames wrote:
| This is where the "critical mass" argument comes in: you
| (allegedly) need people who superficially look like you
| in the roles to inspire you to learn the skills needed
| for that position. Thus, working to correct poor
| education due to systemic racism isn't enough, you need
| to also temporarily fill role-model positions with less-
| qualified candidates.
| adamrezich wrote:
| And this argument reveals the grotesque truth of the
| matter: it's not actually about ensuring that everyone is
| treated equally and fairly--it's actually about socially
| engineering segments of the population other than one's
| own, to act in accordance with one's wishes, such that
| one feels good about oneself. This is all done utterly
| selfishly and self-servingly, regardless of not only
| whatever said population segments actually desire for
| _themselves_ , but also regardless of potential nth-order
| consequences of these actions for the rest of society.
|
| Additionally, in acting this way, one unwittingly (I
| _hope!_ ) _infantilizes_ these other population segments,
| robbing them of agency and self-determination in the
| process!
|
| The whole thing is a complete mess, top-to-bottom--and,
| as a society, we are _long_ overdue in reevaluating this
| entire line of thinking and how willfully we accept it at
| face value.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > The part that always made this obviously insane for any
| systems-thinking person is as follows [...] if the
| problems are indeed as dire as claimed, then instead,
| proper steps must be taken to solve the root causes of
| the perceived disparities--and also, proper steps must be
| taken to ensure that the base assumptions you started
| with
|
| That's why a smart systems-thinking person kept it to
| themselves.
|
| It's a funny thing. It's one of those issues where
| everyone in the room will publicly always nod and agree
| with at the time, yet everyone thinks "this is not going
| to lead to a good outcome".
|
| So basically everyone could see the train crashing at
| some point but nobody would say anything.
|
| An evidence of this is as soon as the "floodgates"
| opened, all these companies started dropping DEI
| initiatives and closing departments like that. If their
| bottom lines clearly showed they had improved their
| financials due to it, they would adamantly defend it or
| double down. But they are not:
|
| Boeing:
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/boeing-quietly-
| dis...
|
| Meta:
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/10/tech/meta-ends-dei-
| progra...
|
| Not sure how you'd call this phenomenon? Ideological
| prisoner's dilemma? It should have a name, I feel.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > An evidence of this is as soon as the "floodgates"
| opened, all these companies started dropping DEI
| initiatives and closing departments like that. If their
| bottom lines clearly showed they had improved their
| financials due to it, they would adamantly defend it or
| double down.
|
| Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites
| "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the
| reason, not financial performance. The Meta
| representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy
| landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the
| initiative affected the company's bottom line.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites
| "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the
| reason, not financial performance. The Meta
| representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy
| landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the
| initiative affected the company's bottom line.
|
| Of course they won't say it doesn't work. They'll cite
| external pressure or other reason. But they get pressure
| from customers for privacy and other issues, yet that
| doesn't phase them much. So if they saw clear advantage
| to the policy, say it just improved their bottom line,
| stock price, etc, they would have easily brushed away the
| "pressure" and said "sorry, we're here to make a profit
| and this makes us a profit, tough luck".
| ryandrake wrote:
| If the real reason these companies dropped the policies
| was that they were unprofitable, and their bottom lines
| showed it, then why did they wait until exactly November
| 2024 to all drop them at once? Surely they could have
| discovered this many quarters ago. Did the policies just
| suddenly become unprofitable right as the next political
| administration was decided? Why would company directors
| across entire industries just sit there nodding their
| heads, as you say, voluntarily not making more profit for
| shareholders? It doesn't seem like the bottom line was
| the real reason in this case.
| macrocosmos wrote:
| They may have feared the negative PR of dropping the
| policies would be more costly than the policies
| themselves.
| Devilspawn6666 wrote:
| They couldn't drop it as it would have affected their ESG
| rating, which impacts the ability to get loans and raise
| capital, etc.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Looks like you've been getting downvoted, but I think you
| raise perfectly valid points -- and I say this as a
| proponent of DEI, but not of quotas (or this type of
| population matching).
|
| I believe that the best solutions occur when we try to
| address root causes -- sincerely attempt to address them.
| The problem is that even in doing that, you often have to
| introduce inequality into the system. For example,
| mortality rates for black females giving birth are
| multiples higher than white females. To address this will
| likely mean spending more money on black female health
| research. The question is where is the line. Is prenatal
| spending inequality OK? Is early childhood development
| inequality of spending OK? What about magnet HS? What
| about elite colleges? What about entry level jobs?
| Executive positions? Jail sentencing? Cancer research?
| Etc...
|
| The other thing we can do is simply say, "This is too
| much. Lets just assume race doesn't exist." This is
| almost tempting, except outside of government policy race
| is such a big factor in how people are treated in life --
| it seems like we're just punting on a problem because its
| hard.
|
| I think when we as humans can say, "Hmm... there is
| someting impacting this subset of humans that seems like
| it shouldn't. I'm OK overindexing on it." then we will
| make progress. But I think while we view things as "this
| is less good for me personally" it will always be
| contentious.
| kenjackson wrote:
| DEI started as exactly what the original poster stated.
| It then has transformed many times, including through
| quotas (ruled unconstitutional in the 70s), and something
| similar to what you're talking about, to the more modern
| notion which is more about getting the best candidates
| from all populations.
|
| Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or
| opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has
| happened. For example,
| https://www.ashkingroup.com/insights-media/the-power-of-
| blin...
|
| The only place I can think of where the opposite is with
| college admissions, but college admissions is a weird
| thing in general in that I've never understood why
| admissions is tied to a stronger academic record (ties
| into, what's the goal of a given college). In areas such
| as sports, the impact has been even greater -- and there
| it's not even colorblind, but simply opened up the pool,
| and is more metrics driven than just about any
| profession.
| gr3ml1n wrote:
| Not really. Everything is downstream of the pressure on
| organizations to address disparate impact. Some examples:
|
| When a company is under pressure to boost the number of X
| engineers, they quickly run into the 'pipeline problem'.
| There simply isn't enough X engineers on the market. So
| they address that by creating scholarship funds
| exclusively for race X.
|
| When a school is under pressure to have the racial makeup
| of it's freshman class meet the right ratios, it has to
| adjust admission criteria. Deprioritize metrics that the
| wrong races score well on, prioritize those that the
| right races score well on. If we've got too many Y, and
| they have high standardized test scores? Start weighing
| that lower until we get the blend we're supposed to have.
|
| The goal of the college is not to get the students with
| the strongest academic record: it's to satisfy the demand
| for the right ratios.
|
| Repeat over and over in different ways at different
| institutions.
|
| > Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil
| or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has
| happened. For example ...
|
| The study underlying that post is a great example of
| another downstream effect of DEI efforts. That study did
| _not_ show what the headline or abstract claimed.
|
| When you hide the gender of performers, it ends up either
| nil or slightly favoring men. That particular study has
| been cited thousands of times, and it's largely nonsense.
|
| http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blinda
| udi...
| gadders wrote:
| >>I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the
| widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of
| excluding people who have traditionally been shut out."
|
| I don't think anyone objects to that, but the unspoken part
| that seemed to be enforced was "...even if it means
| lowering standards and overlooking the best qualified
| candidates for the job, as long as we get kudos for meeting
| our diversity targets."
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| Right, if you look at the documents there was clear racial
| discrimination involved.
|
| It's bizarre to see people say that since the media initially
| didn't report on the full story, telling people the full
| story is similar to "state-sponsored propoganda." That
| mindset appears to be saying that once the media has made up
| a narrative for the story, people should be hostile to other
| pertinent information, even when it's uncovering major
| aspects of the story that the media didn't report on.
|
| That kind of attitude runs counter to anyone interested in
| finding out the truth.
|
| Edit: Also worth pointing out the author's original article
| on this scandal was written a year ago, and a followup was
| recently written to clarify things in response to increased
| discussion about that article. They're a law student who
| initially wrote about it after coming across court documents
| and being surprised that there had been almost no coverage
| regarding what actually had happened.
| legitster wrote:
| > How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to
| achieve what diversity goals?
|
| The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the
| _job performance_ of diverse candidates they brought in. They
| did not see a trade off between their _staffing levels_.
|
| There are two separate arguments happening:
|
| Did changing their application process create less qualified
| ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.
|
| Did changing their application process create a shortage of
| ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence
| points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too
| many mediocre candidates.
| stackskipton wrote:
| The thing I keep looking for is dropout/failure rate. If
| their change in hiring procedure resulted in higher
| dropout/failure rate, then yes, this impacting ATC staffing
| but it would have been slow burn.
|
| ATC staffing is bottlenecked by the training
| dropout/failure rate. 1000 people a year go in, pretty
| sizable dropout or fail so you are left with 500. If 700
| are retiring, that's -200 overall. At some point, that -200
| year over year becomes impactful.
|
| So, if you need more people, you have two options. Increase
| the class size but obviously that's expensive and makes the
| problem slightly worse up front as you are pulling
| qualified people into instructor roles.
|
| Or try to filter out those who will drop/fail in hiring
| process so they don't occupy class slots. One of the ways
| FAA had done that is CTI college courses because those
| graduates had lower drop/fail rate.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| >Probably not!
|
| The linked article explicitly disagrees with this opinion.
| In fact it comes to almost literally the opposition
| conclusions:
|
| >Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built
| with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an
| air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of
| the most passionate people working to train prospective
| controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear
| relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.
|
| >Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through
| the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average
| candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think
| so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.
|
| That's not to say that you are wrong and the article is
| correct, but in a discussion that is started by an article,
| and when the article addresses exactly the points you are
| making, I feel that it is helpful to give explicit reasons
| why you think the article is mistaken.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yeah nobody is arguing it because even the FAA admits it's
| true. When you talk about a "tradeoff" between quality and
| diversity that is an admission that DEI lowers quality.
| some_random wrote:
| Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly
| resolved if the racial discrimination element was never
| addressed?
| taeric wrote:
| Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that
| the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does
| it look at performance of hires.
|
| This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers
| over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years
| are the only growth years in the organization going back even
| before this scandal.
|
| Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is
| mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By
| the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even
| the scandal that is focused on.
|
| What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an
| old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by
| Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys,
| I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't
| change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to
| help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly
| being highlighted.
|
| So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous
| court with investigations, we get people carrying water for
| Trump as he blames DEI.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people
| lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you
| frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.
| taeric wrote:
| You are begging the question that they were hired on
| anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that
| the people that were hired did not pass qualifications?
|
| The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment
| funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no
| mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even
| attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept
| people that lacked merit.
|
| That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING
| rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show
| that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar.
|
| There is a begging of the question where we assume that
| they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without
| those, you don't know.
|
| And again, in context of the current debate, realize that
| the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency.
| Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY
| progress on helping understaffed towers.
| bz_bz_bz wrote:
| How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants
| pass (vs. ~60% previously) not "lowering the bar"?
|
| "One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness)
| is to correlate test scores with job performance. After
| reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from
| .69 to .60..."
|
| https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849
| &co...
| taeric wrote:
| That was the recruitment pipeline. You still had to pass
| the hiring one.
|
| This is akin to schools that got rid of testing
| requirements. Agreed it was a terrible choice that should
| get reversed. But, to say that standards went down on
| graduates of the schools, you would look at the scores of
| graduates from said schools.
|
| And to be clear, the expectation of lowering standards
| for admits to a school would be a higher dropout rate.
| More stress on the school and testing protocols. But this
| is not, itself, evidence that graduates are worse.
| kalensh wrote:
| It's valuable to note that this paper is from 2006, and
| states:
|
| "Reweighting was based on data collected from incum- bent
| ATCSs who took AT-SAT on a research basis; some of these
| employees achieved overall scores less than 70 (that was
| one of the reasons for the reweighting effort - a belief
| that incumbent employees should be able to pass the
| entry-level selection test)"
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| > when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a
| cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been
| reframed as a DEI issue.
|
| Respectfully, thats not accurate.
|
| The article actually shows that dei considerations were central
| to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA
| requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs
| performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and
| the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on
| diversity outcomes in 2013.
|
| The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents,
| recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial
| considerations were explicitly part of the decision making
| process from the start. This is documented in realtime
| communications.
|
| The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating)
| AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually
| exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.
|
| > Taking old, resolved scandals
|
| In what way do you consider this resolved?
|
| The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).
|
| The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities
| are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks
| due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)
|
| The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains
| damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since
| 2014.
| alcima wrote:
| Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI
| issue even then - it was pure cronyism.
| aesh2Xa1 wrote:
| The source article includes primary material that strongly
| contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in
| 2013, and there are materials from that same year
| indicating DEI.
|
| For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly
| publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("-
| How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to
| achieve what diversity goals?"):
|
| https://archive.ph/Qgjy5
|
| The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism,
| although I believe you that it could have been relevant to
| your personal experience; it's just false to claim the
| issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.
| intended wrote:
| I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope
| over the zero sum game being fought here.
|
| If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring
| traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people
| would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based
| on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity
| was not between undeserving candidates and ideal
| candidates (the second band section of the article)
|
| Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from
| congress for recruitment?
| skellington wrote:
| If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you
| simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of
| the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize
| it as much as possible. Math.
| intended wrote:
| Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works.
| Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself
| showed that the quota is some fraction of total
| applicants that results in minimal impact to performance.
|
| Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.
| cyberax wrote:
| > AND you are hiring traditionally
|
| And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring
| process to screen against the White applicants. The way
| they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people,
| btw.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a
| moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to
| me. It's my understanding that people who have a family
| line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific
| nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time
| to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a
| family.
|
| I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or
| are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS
| move like this I think that there's probably an opposite
| interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic
| wants to hear.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of
| failure. So, for example, both the pilot and the air
| traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so
| that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it
| up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic
| controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting
| too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course
| correct.
|
| If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning
| the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would
| have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no
| longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of
| time before one of the pilot errors the system was
| designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a
| collision.
| ls612 wrote:
| The problem is it hasn't been resolved, there is a big lawsuit
| about it still working its way through the courts.
| techapple wrote:
| A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power
| is why does it feel like going back and forth between
| ridiculous policies. Like I'm sure 10 years from now, we'll be
| uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were
| racist or sexist or whatever and it won't make any sense!
| You'll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have
| decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe
| there's a New Democrat administration that creates a new
| catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses
| again.
| timewizard wrote:
| > be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
|
| I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't
| "critical analysis" be the default?
| burnished wrote:
| Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was
| interesting
| clutchdude wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air
| traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.
|
| This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up
| with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will
| be in the first few sentences they say.
|
| The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention
| of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to
| place in it.
|
| Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year
| interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that
| take years-to-decades to resolve.
|
| Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy
| reflects on the changes some seek.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > Likely yes.
|
| Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that
| question...
| clutchdude wrote:
| That is the frustrating part - the article had it's lane
| and just had to stick in it.
|
| Instead, we get someone extrapolating and guessing when we
| have actual data from COVID on class delays/size
| reduction(as well as more controllers retiring earlier)
| coupled with lower training intensity while air traffic was
| depressed.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about
| the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged
| qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was
| their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could
| this _not_ have an impact on hiring?
| clutchdude wrote:
| Because COVID happened much sooner and has likely had a
| bigger impact than the hiring practices from a decade ago -
| notice we don't have a concrete number of "disadvantaged
| qualified candidates" from this article. Whereas, I can
| point COVID with actual numbers:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952695
|
| If we're going to say "Did that contribute to a shortage of
| qualified ATC..?" then you have to considering all inputs
| into what is a current conversation rather than extrapolate
| your already asserted points from the article.
| eastbound wrote:
| In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing's airframes was
| commented in Yt as a DEI scandal.
|
| Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn't introduced
| as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly
| understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the
| DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.
|
| Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was
| introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a
| promotion on non-skills criteria. It's just that today, the
| good side has finally won.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university
| admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate
| hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it
| doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes
| and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their
| illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a
| "legal" way.
| dmix wrote:
| It's also still deeply embedded in education. DEI might be
| less popular in the workforce but in primary and secondary
| education stuff like lowering standards, ignoring test
| failures, removing gifted classes, merging special needs
| classes in mainline, changing classroom conflict resolution
| to not remove disruptive kids from classrooms, etc are all
| still going strong and increasing in prevalence. That will
| have a ripple effect in the workforce for decades after the
| Overton window has shifted back.
|
| And in the US the federal government can't stop it as it's
| mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times
| larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would
| only have limited influence there.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Athletes are the original DEI. And Trump (the president!)
| didn't have good grades.
| generationP wrote:
| Resolved? By whom?
| avn2109 wrote:
| > "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then
| selling it as a new scandal..."
|
| Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-
| factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the
| textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very
| beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment
| discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to
| this scandal for decades at a minimum.
| rayiner wrote:
| But it was always a DEI issue-it was precipitated by Obama's
| demand to racially rebalance the FAA.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally
| should be automated by now, they should focus on developing
| technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses
| automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when
| rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and
| now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human
| ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully
| automated ATC model.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation.
| Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would
| soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that
| happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars
| would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases
| that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.
|
| This. Commercial jets have had full auto taxi, take off, fly,
| land capability for a long time at supported airports. A
| human is still in the loop for parts of it due to the
| potential for something to deviate from nominal in a novel
| way at almost any time.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A human is in the loop for all parts. Every essential step
| is done by humans (flap/gear control, throttle up for
| takeoff). The airplane doesn't make decisions, rather it
| does what the humans tell it to. Autopilot is not
| automation.
| JackFr wrote:
| > Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation.
|
| Everything is easy when you don't know about it.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they
| should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on
| people.
|
| Just to be clear: you think that air traffic control is fully
| automatable?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| You think that ATC could be automated with the tools we have
| today?! I knew I'd get some wild takes in the comments but this
| one is absolutely next level. And I'm an AI maximalist!!
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah my biggest concern with any kind of automation is
| handling and recognizing edge cases. There are already manual
| systems like flight levels and patterns for traffic
| management. But what happens if one plane starts deviating
| because of something unexpected? Then you have to respond to
| a specific situation and the reason for deviating matters
| quite a lot. Think about all the ways your car can break
| down.
| empath75 wrote:
| Everything is heavily automated right now up to and including
| autopilot landings. The people are in the loop to cover the
| gaps where automation doesn't exist or when it fails.
| Everything is so tightly scheduled at airports now that any
| kind of failure in automation would pretty rapidly lead to
| catastrophic outcomes if humans weren't constantly involved in
| decision making. Even if you just had humans on "stand by" it
| would take to long to get them up to speed on the context if
| things went sideways.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Sort of. There's like 5 conditions of automation commercial
| planes can be in. The automation mostly functions to make the
| pilots workload manageable, not to make their workload non
| existent. Commercial flights used to have a crew of 3,
| captain, first officer and flight engineer. The automation
| has reduced the workload to eliminate the flight engineer
| role and make flights operable by 2 people.
| empath75 wrote:
| There's a lot of automation, but it's the same situation
| with "self driving" cars. Until you get to nearly 100%
| trustworthy full automation, you need people actively
| making decisions constantly, so automation is mostly in the
| form of assists rather than full automation.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Flights are operable by 1 person, and this is in fact the
| normal state of affairs in general aviation. The second
| person on commercial aircraft is there _mostly_ for
| redundancy, although obviously having another pair of hands
| makes things easier.
| cratermoon wrote:
| We have an automated system to prevent mid-air collisions, it's
| called TCAS, Traffic collision avoidance system. For safety
| reasons, it is inhibited at 1000 feet AGL or below, to prevent
| dangerous descents into terrain.
|
| How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into
| account, if it even thought about that edge case.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| They are, this is supposedly part of the "Nexgen" air traffic
| system. I think eventually airlines will be forced into greater
| automation. When a possible collision scenario arises, the
| plane will take over and evade on it's own. Airplanes will
| increasingly become automated and pilots wait for emergencies.
| boohoo123 wrote:
| There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring
| practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic
| questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and
| attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be
| looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race,
| nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application
| are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.
| a12k wrote:
| So easy. Should we also remove college attended or
| extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic
| details like attending an HBCU?
| malfist wrote:
| For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy
| and wrong solution.
|
| Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to
| recruiters nor interviewers.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown
| to recruiters nor interviewers.
|
| But Recruiters can glean this information from names and
| other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately
| try to use this information to decide who to interview.
| Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US
| census data on the gender distribution of names in their
| onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically
| affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.
| some_random wrote:
| The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit,
| stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to
| discriminate in order to reach Equity.
| drawkward wrote:
| >There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring
| practices that no one seems to notice.
|
| Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified
| work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring
| preferences moot.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest
| people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only
| display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU
| as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they
| are black.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate
| attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.
| AdamN wrote:
| So no colleges and universities on resumes?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| You could share data on the college, like the median SAT
| score of admits or the admissions rate.
|
| And I'm not entirely sure that omitting colleges entirely
| would be such a bad idea. Colleges apply selective
| admission criteria all the time, for athletes and legacy
| admits. Skills based screening would probably work
| better.
| roughly wrote:
| Well, then you have to account for certain jobs and
| hobbies being coded, as well as word choices in the
| personal statement. Once you blank all that out, though,
| we should be good to go.
| healsdata wrote:
| Everything is easy until you account for the real world.
|
| A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the
| application process will immediately be outed for having a
| disability. The same applies for people who speak different
| languages.
|
| Beyond that, the application is only one place in which
| discrimination occurs.
|
| - It also happens during interviews which are much harder to
| anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that,
| while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to
| select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which
| can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for
| some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent
| capable people from becoming qualified.
|
| Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is
| artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous
| resume will fix everything.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| IT's not so simple. Eventually there will be an interview and
| the person scoring the interview may have some bias.
|
| And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have
| names that carry racial coding.
| theossuary wrote:
| This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to
| implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and
| this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as
| pulling from a larger pool.
|
| It just shows how much propaganda there is around DEI, you're
| saying we should get rid of DEI and replace it with the things
| DEI was trying to do. It really has become the new critical
| race theory.
| ndiddy wrote:
| The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their
| demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the
| actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical
| questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely
| weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed
| the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal.
| Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the
| questionnaire to student members of the National Black
| Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact
| that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race.
| Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested:
| https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that
| taking into account a person's race and gender identity is the
| only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly
| regard 'merit' based hiring as racist and discriminatory.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Blind hiring in practice that reduces diversity. [1]
|
| Draw from that what conclusions you may.
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-
| tri...
| jwlake wrote:
| The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the
| workforce.
| sfteus wrote:
| My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets
| are:
|
| - Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate
| pool
|
| - Don't collect demographic data on applications
|
| - Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring
| committee
|
| - The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview
| results; all identifying info is stripped
|
| - Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is
| blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror
| general population demographics as a result
|
| - If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process
| to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting
|
| The separation allows candidates to request special
| accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that
| being a factor to the committee making the final decision.
|
| Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than
| anywhere else I've worked.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It 's as
| easy as that._
|
| Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were
| graded this way.
|
| Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I
| attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a
| male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to
| the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my
| demographics.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Oh dear, I thought this was going to be about something like when
| Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers for striking. This
| article amounts to a wordy analysis to sneak into your head
| before you realize the author is nothing more than another anti-
| DEI zealot.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and
| Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.
|
| Let's say you have a completely random data set. You generate a
| bunch of random variables x1 through xn and a random dependent
| variable y. Then you poke around and see whether any of the x
| variables look like they might predict y, so you pick those
| variables and try to build a model on them. What you end up with
| is a model where, according to the standard tests of statistical
| significance, some of the xs predict the y, even though all the
| data is completely random.
|
| This is a much more likely explanation for why the answer weights
| on the biographical assessment were so weird than some conspiracy
| between the contractors who developed the test, the FAA staff,
| and the black employee organization.
|
| They had a dataset that was very skewed because historically
| there have been very few black controllers, and so was very prone
| to overfitting. The FAA asked the contractor to use that dataset
| to build a test that would serve as a rough filter, screen in
| good candidates, and not show a disparate impact. The contractor
| delivered a test that fulfilled those criteria (at least in the
| technical sense that it passed statistical validation). Whether
| or not the test actually made any sense was not their department.
| daemonologist wrote:
| I agree that it seems likely that the weird questions and their
| weighting came from over-fitting as you describe. The cheating
| allegation though, from my reading, is that the "correct"
| answers were leaked and then disseminated by the leakee(s).
| (And that this was particularly impactful because it was
| unlikely that you would pass the overfit test otherwise.)
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| When I read the IG report and saw what the guy actually said
| (and that his list of secret buzzwords actually turned out to
| be a photocopy from a resume writing book) it was pretty
| clear that he was bullshitting and claiming that he had
| inside information about the process that he didn't actually
| have.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and
| Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.
|
| The answers to the biographical questionnaire - which screened
| out 90% of applicants - were leaked to ethnic affinity groups.
| If a select group of being being provided with the correct
| answers isn't cheating, I don't know what is.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| No, that's not what happened. The guy from the black affinity
| group CLAIMED that he knew the answers. But he's a completely
| unreliable source who was pretending to know things that he
| didn't actually know. He also claimed to have a list of magic
| buzzwords that would get your application moved to the top of
| the pile, but if you look at the list of magic buzzwords that
| he provided, it was just a list of dozens of generic action
| verbs like "make", "manage", "organize", "analyze", etc. from
| a resume writing book. I'm sure it's the same thing with the
| biographical assessment. He was just telling people what he
| THOUGHT were the right answers.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly's friends
| in the program encouraged her to join the National Black
| Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling
| her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She
| signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she
| became uneasy with what the organization was doing,
| particularly after she and the rest of the group got a
| voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:
|
| > "I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for
| this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you
| will be able to do so....there is some valuable pieces of
| information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am
| going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it
| will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep
| in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities...I am
| going to send it out to each of you and as you progress
| through the stages _refer to those images so you will know
| which icons you should select_ ...I am about 99 point 99
| percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each
| question in order to get through the first phase."2
|
| > The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the
| "first phase" was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates
| were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy
| here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with
| candidates able to answer "A" to all but one question to
| get through.
|
| From the first article on The scandal:
| https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-
| scandal-...
|
| > After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released,
| Snow took it a step further. As Fox Business reported
| (related in Rojas v. FAA), he sent voice-mail messages to
| NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers
| they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to
| avoid failing, stating that he was "about 99 point 99
| percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each
| question."
|
| You can take the bigraphical questionnaire and see the
| question weightings here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/f
| aa_biographical_assessment/
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that this was
| just "buzzwords".
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| I've read it. I've seen all the weightings. My point is
| that after reading the IG report, I think it's most
| likely that when he made the following statement he was
| exaggerating and claiming that he knew the right answers
| when he didn't:
|
| > I am going to send it out to each of you and as you
| progress through the stages refer to those images so you
| will know which icons you should select...I am about 99
| point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to
| answer each question in order to get through the first
| phase
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Do you have the list of answers Snow told candidates to
| pick? It'd be simple to cross reference those with the
| biographical questionnaire weightings?
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| To my knowledge that was not recorded anywhere. However
| there are interviews with participants on the call: https
| ://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG..
| .
|
| One of the reasons why I think he was bullshitting was
| that according to the testimony, he said to answer the
| question about how many sports you played in high school
| honestly, but that wast the wrong information because
| that one of the questions where some answers would give
| you more points than others. The other reason is that
| it's just painfully obvious from the testimony that this
| guy was not reliable - he took a generic resume writing
| guide that he had been given years ago and passed it off
| as inside information.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > he said to answer the question about how many sports
| you played in high school honestly, but that was one of
| the questions where some answers would give you more
| points than others.
|
| That's exactly what is alleged: Snow told applicants
| which answers were worth the most points. This is what
| Snow himself claimed, too.
|
| And the FAA's internal investigation did have witnesses
| say that they were instructed on how to respond to the
| Biographical Assessment:
|
| > One witness said during the call, participants told
| they were looking at questions on the BA test but did not
| know what to enter on the test. According to this
| witness, [redacted] responded with information that
| should be entered on the BA test.
|
| If the voicemails are recorded anywhere, that will put
| this question to rest.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| Right, my point is that instead of providing the answer
| that would get the applicant the most points, he told
| them to answer honestly. That doesn't make sense if his
| goal was to cheat.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I 'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and
| Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating._
|
| Buddy if someone tells you the answers to a multiple choice
| exam and you use them, then you've deliberately cheated. That's
| all there is to it.
| tim333 wrote:
| Have you looked at the info on the test here
| https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/?
| (copied from another post)
|
| To pass the test you have to click A on all 62 questions apart
| from question 16 where you have to click D to say your lowest
| grade in school was in history. The thing's a complete
| travesty.
| gadders wrote:
| This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives
| the rest a bad name.
|
| It should never, ever be about hard quotas.
|
| It absolutely should be about using some contextual information
| (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging
| assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is
| best on assumptions but on evidence.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > It should never, ever be about hard quotas.
|
| And yet, it is.
|
| The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in
| X category.
|
| A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?
| gadders wrote:
| Ish. Yes, if everyone in your company (of a significant size)
| is the same, then that is a fail.
|
| However, the solution is not to force people into roles they
| are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role
| more attractive to different demographics.
|
| And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it
| to NBA teams?
| browningstreet wrote:
| I'll counter this with my experience.
|
| I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large
| tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for
| recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure
| they could post their job openings to affinity outlets
| frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places
| of origin, and racial communities.
|
| It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so
| I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college
| graduates".
|
| Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built
| into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think
| the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.
| saynay wrote:
| Honestly, quotas would probably have been better than what was
| done here. Inventing a test (or 'questionnaire' as it was
| called here) where the goal was to filter out almost everyone
| who did not have the answer key, then only giving that answer
| key to the preferred race is just such a terrible way to do it.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| "Such a terrible way to do it" is a huge understatement.
|
| It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that's
| no hyperbole.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad
| name."
|
| I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the
| rest a good name.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| The "Women in Engineering" group where I worked was
| instrumental in retaining multiple good engineers who
| would've definitely left otherwise after some gendered issues
| (asked out by coworkers, asked whether they were an engineer
| in meetings, etc). I was a mentor for early career engineers
| and I had a woman talking about leaving but the woman in
| engineering group at work helped her immensely and she's a
| top performer.
|
| Systems affect different people differently (which is
| blindingly obvious but bears repeating) so if you want a
| meritocracy based on actual ability you need to do your best
| to nurture _all_ people with ability, which isn 't a one size
| fits all approach. I knew multiple people who absolutely
| kicked ass that benefitted from targeted programs (and from
| their success we've all benefited from these programs),
| there's just also a lot of dumb shit out there for DEI, too.
| hitekker wrote:
| For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller
| test for yourself here:
| https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
|
| After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Wow, how can anyone take that test and defend FAA hiring
| practices. This is dystopia level nonsense
| UberFly wrote:
| Unfortunately this dystopia level nonsense has infected a lot
| lately and I'm glad it's finally getting some sunshine
| applied to it.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
|
| How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads
| should be rolling over this.
| sporkland wrote:
| I look at stories like this and a key moment of failure that is
| obvious to anyone that has ever deployed code is don't make a
| change and roll it out to 100% of all devices/servers
| immediately. Feels like there is just some basic things missing
| from folks brains that gradual release and validation of the
| impacted cohort isn't a built in instinct for us.
| throw7 wrote:
| Exactly what do the liberals (the author) want to happen? He
| seems to still believe that "lowering the bar" is the right and
| good thing to do moving forward?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Complaints about controller shortages and 6-day weeks being the
| norm and whatnot go back into the 00s.
|
| Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and
| onboarding pipeline in the first place?
|
| The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the
| attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable
| if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred
| demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for
| it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is
| egregious.
| khazhoux wrote:
| From what I'm seeing, this program started in 2014 and was killed
| in 2016.
|
| Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's
| culture-war narrative.
| throwaway260124 wrote:
| I don't think a test with R^2 of 0.27 should be used to
| completely reject candidates. It should have weighting
| proportional to its explanatory power.
|
| Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was
| clearly being overused.
| ramblenode wrote:
| The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:
|
| > The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the "first
| phase" was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected
| to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were
| chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer "A"
| to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily
| weighted questions were "The high school subject in which I
| received my lowest grades was:" (correct answer: science, worth
| 15 points) and "The college subject in which I received my lowest
| grades was:" (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
| mhalle wrote:
| Some important points that this article glosses over.
|
| The FAA Academy where all flight controllers are trained is way
| over-subscribed. Recruiting policies aside, I can find no
| evidence that the FAA wasn't training as many controllers as it
| could through its academy. This fact remained true through the
| Trump 1 administration into the Biden admin, except for COVID.
| The pandemic was understandably a huge disruption, as were
| government shutdowns.
|
| We can know this from the FAA Controller Staffing reports from
| 2019 (Trump 1 before the pandemic but after Obama) and 2024
| (Biden). The 2024 report has been scrubbed from the FAA website
| when I last checked, but is available through the wayback
| machine:
|
| 2019:
| https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
|
| 2024:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20241225184848/https://www.faa.g...
|
| There appears to be no urgency in Trump 1 about this issue in the
| report. Things changed in 2023 when an external safety report
| revealed the staffing problem and suggested improvements.
|
| https://www.faa.gov/NAS_safety_review_team_report.pdf
|
| As a result, hiring almost doubled between 2010 and 2024, with
| 1800 controllers hired in the last year. More importantly, the
| FAA followed the report recommendation to use CTI schools as
| additional academies:
|
| https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/10/amid-hiring-surge-...
|
| It seems like the Biden administration took real action to
| address a problem that had been unfortunately present and
| unacknowledged for many years.
|
| See a chatgpt analysis comparing the two reports here:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/679eb87f-c4fc-800a-a883-3b7f79e06d...
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| One of the reasons that these attempts to increase diversity are
| such a mess is because it is illegal to have a straightforward
| quota.
|
| If these agencies could just have a policy like "Group X is %Y of
| the population. This agency must hire at least %Y/2 from group
| X", there would be no need to have these sneaky roundabout
| methods of increasing equity.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing
| anything wrong in an internal investigation
|
| Ah yes, we carefully investigated ourselves and we have not found
| anything wrong. Thank you for your concern.
|
| > Our organization, he said, "wasn't for Caucasians, it wasn't
| for, you know, the white male, it wasn't for an alien on Mars,"
| and he confirmed that he provided information "to minimize the
| competition."
|
| It's like we're talking about a talent show not air traffic
| controllers.
|
| I mean, shit, this just fuels Trump and his supporters' rhetoric
| and validates all the rambling and craziness involved around this
| topic.
|
| Who needs enemies when you got friends doing this kind of stuff
| and shooting everyone in the foot. It's like Biden pardoning his
| son after talking about corruption and nepotism.
| lordloki wrote:
| Or all the people that you assumed were racist are really just
| upset about these racist policies.
| macrocosmos wrote:
| You're upset that reality aligns with the rhetoric? Why not
| just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _America desperately needs more air traffic controllers_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840
| exabrial wrote:
| > Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we
| have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position."
|
| Wow.
| ein0p wrote:
| > In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work
| she's passionate about--not lowering the bar, but inspiring more
| people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to
| reach it
|
| Discrimination by race, gender and sexual orientation (aka DEI,
| jokingly disabbreviated as "didn't earn it") always results in
| lowering the bar. No exceptions. Either the candidate earns a
| position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or
| you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and
| therefore lowering the bar overall. What's ironic is this is
| setting minorities back decades. In 2000 nobody cared what color
| you were or whether you had a penis. In 2025 the assumption is
| that a minority is a "DEI hire" unless proven otherwise. And bah
| gawd there are real exemplars out there to support that
| narrative.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| The one positive "DEI" thing you _can_ do without lowering the
| bar is to widen the net: look harder for qualified candidates
| in places where you didn 't look before.
| default-kramer wrote:
| > Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in
| which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating
| against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the
| bar overall.
|
| False dichotomy. It's possible that in some situations DEI
| could replace cronyism and produce better hires. I have no idea
| how often that actually happens, but I know that cronyism
| happens a lot.
| synergy20 wrote:
| i will prefer driving to taking flights for the coming years
|
| for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.
| silexia wrote:
| "Diversity hiring goals" is the pretty new propaganda word for
| ugly old racism.
| vichle wrote:
| There's a very high amount of political topics lately, and it's
| very uninteresting to non-US readers. Please stop.
| mfkp wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to read this or comment. Go find a local
| news website if you're so displeased with the US content.
| vichle wrote:
| Not every forum needs to be an arena for your polarized world
| views. This used to be a place where all types of scientific
| and tech related content was posted. Not so much right now,
| everyone is just throwing shit at each other but with nicer
| choice of words than on Twitter.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| It is a US based website, mostly about US tech companies. You
| may find it uninteresting but it has large impacts on these
| companies so would not be out of place here.
| vichle wrote:
| I see absolutely zero comments in this thread about how it
| affects tech companies. Please elaborate.
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