The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Can you provide an example of what you would consider a good implementation of DEI efforts, as opposed to a "botched" one?

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.