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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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739 points firebaze | 4 comments | 05 Feb 25 05:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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wand3r ◴[05 Feb 25 06:24 UTC] No.42944621[source]▶
> 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.

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scott_w ◴[05 Feb 25 06:49 UTC] No.42944818[source]▶
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.
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ars ◴[05 Feb 25 07:21 UTC] No.42945046[source]▶
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".

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scott_w ◴[05 Feb 25 07:39 UTC] No.42945220[source]▶
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.
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wand3r ◴[05 Feb 25 07:58 UTC] No.42945399{4}[source]▶
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.
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scott_w ◴[05 Feb 25 08:10 UTC] No.42945493{5}[source]▶
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.

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dbspin ◴[05 Feb 25 14:53 UTC] No.42949253{6}[source]▶
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).
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1. thijson ◴[05 Feb 25 19:47 UTC] No.42954066{7}[source]▶
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.
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2. thijson ◴[05 Feb 25 19:49 UTC] No.42954098[source]▶
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/06/30/2035225/women-inter...
3. derangedHorse ◴[05 Feb 25 23:03 UTC] No.42956630[source]▶
I like this method of interviewing. If it results in more men initially then that's fine. As long as the mechanism for hiring is such that it reduces discrimination for everyone, then it's one worth pushing. If there are traits employers reject candidates on en-masse, then at least this data would help us analyze what these traits are.

Once we know what the determining traits for hiring are, we can either debate whether their importance in the job at hand (if there are doubts) or find ways to encourage these traits in underrepresented communities.

4. fwip ◴[05 Feb 25 23:47 UTC] No.42957058[source]▶
Simply pitch shifting somebody doesn't make them sound like a normal male/female speaker. There's a lot more to it, including musicality of speech, word choice, resonant frequencies, etc.

If you pitch shifted the average American woman, you'd probably get a voice that sounded like a gay (camp) man.