The FAA’s Hiring Scandal(tracingwoodgrains.com) |
The FAA’s Hiring Scandal(tracingwoodgrains.com) |
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.
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.
DEI is actual racism.
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.
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.
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.
> 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.
You're not disputing my core point.
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".
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.
Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?
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.
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!
for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.
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.
Yeah, fair enough
Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's culture-war narrative.
Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was clearly being overused.
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.
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.
i wonder if/when AGI becomes real, could it help with writing better policies/laws since it would have a broader understanding of issues and (hopefully) no bias so it would be able to predict outcomes we can't
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?
* 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.
So, the candidates who were not members of some racially based association also got access to the answers to the first test?
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.
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.
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.
(And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)
Just to be clear: you think that air traffic control is fully automatable?
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.
Everything is easy when you don't know about it.
How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into account, if it even thought about that edge case.
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.
So if we take a random assortment of preschool age children and give them all the the same resources and education we are still going to find when they come out of the other end of the pipeline as adults and ready to work those from historically marginalized groups are still going to be underrepresented unless we lower hiring standards?
>predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.
Thats not '3% of the applicants are black'. It's '3% of black applicants pass the test'
Starting there alone would yield meaningful results - at the end of the day, you gotta pass the test. Changing the test so more people pass is illogical and dangerous.
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!
Which involved doingwhat exactly?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
The belief, whether you agree with it or not, is that diverse teams produce better results. If your natural applicant pool is all dudes then your job as a headhunter is to find a woman who you think can beat them on merit.
The other way you do it is you hire them on as juniors where everyone's resumes might as well be written on toilet paper and "most qualified applicant" is a bit of a joke and train them up.
If I'm contacted by a recruiter and encouraged to apply for a position, I would expect to at least get a phone screening if not a full interview. Are you really reaching out to minority candidates individually only to sometimes send back a message that you have decided not to proceed with them a few days later? I think that would leave a bad taste in my mouth and make me less inclined to apply or encourage anyone else to apply with your company.
Do you try to get an approximation of society with that selective net you're casting? Of the field? Or is it more according to own preference with something like an equal amount of the subsections you can think of?
That’s a very strange reading of what I said. I need to remind you that the vast majority of applicants were white men. This headhunting merely added more minority (from a European perspective) candidates into our pipeline.
I was going to be their manager, so yes, I knew the process.
Try again.
"Target candidate" = those in minority groups, yes?
> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.
Your outrage against our hiring practice is 100% performative. So no, I'm not going to engage with you any further.
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.
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.
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.
The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
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%20OSI-M%20and%2...
Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion = Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.
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.
It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.
Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".
And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.
"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."
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.
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.
Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
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.
I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?
I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.
> 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.
Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Ergo we should test for ability, not some arbitrary representation of race, sex, or other non-task related metric.
Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than others.
Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something exceptionally simple.
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.
> 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).
The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.
After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
A. A PUBLIC NOTICE OR MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT +5 B. A FRIEND OR RELATIVE 0 C. COLLEGE RECRUITMENT +3 D. WORKING IN SOME OTHER CAPACITY FOR THE AGENCY +3 E. SOME OTHER WAY 0
Wow … I get points for this. No surprise, that this is going south. I m shocked.
How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.
This gives examples of the test format and questions:
https://pointsixtyfive.com/xenforo/threads/atsa-compilation....
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
Do you really, honestly believe that the FAA was using these practices to hire less people and not just hire the people they want to hire in the limited positions?
Why would they go to such absurd lengths when they could just say "we can't hire more people because we can't afford it"...
Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.
we should just drop means testing of services
> extra resources for schools in poor areas
more funding != better outcomes. Parental involvement is what drives outcomes. If you don't have parents around, nothing matters.
That’s a lot of logic, but resources for schools is a lot more than free food, better books, etc. schools are one of the best ways to distribute community resources. The alternative (read: kids who got expelled from normal schools) near me hosts adult job fairs, has family counseling, etc.
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.
Wow.
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.
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.
And just like Agile, it can be poorly implemented when the person implementing it does not understand its purpose, or hates the framework and cynically implements it under protest.
In both cases, the poor implementations should not justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but so it goes.
America desperately needs more air traffic controllers
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.
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...
Having a workforce the is purely white men is sub optimal and needs to be addressed. But it needs to be addressed carefully and with good management.
It does not need to be addressed like this
If you want to see a good example of DEI in action look to New Zealand. Forty years ago there were almost no Māori lawyers in New Zealand.
The deans of the law schools got together and decided to do something about it.
It worked, now there are many. Now it is much much harder for the state to accomplish the systematic impoverishment of Māori people and things are turning around
It takes decades done properly, but creates huge improvements in society
This story is a story of doing it catastrophically wrong
That's exactly what providing the grounds means. It's like how the no-fly list provides a convenient way to trap your estranged wife outside the country. You can do a whole lot of racism, call it a DEI initiative and use the right terminology, and no-one bats an eye.
And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
"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.
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.
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?!
It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that’s no hyperbole.
The scandal was coaching people how to pass the personality test. That's just a waste. You end up getting people who are a bad fit for the job, and will ultimately not be successful long-term
For instance, I will ace any aptitude test at 99.9%+ percentile easily (I always do at any standardized test, SAT, GRE, MCAT etc). Yet I would be a terrible terrible fit for ATC. The level of detail-orientedness it needs day to day for me would be a challenge. I can do it for short periods of time of absolute concentration, but my god, there is no way I would last at the job long-term. Training me would have been a waste of scarce resources. But I know several people that such tasks energize them and may not score as high on the aptitude test, but would be a better fit for that job long-term
If done well, including personality test could have been a good way to produce better outcomes, and increase the early part of the pipelines by opening it up to more people than just CTI grads.
I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.
The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.
You can also do things to remove stereotypes about your industry - "I'm not going to work in industry X because it's all posh people."
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.
e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.
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?
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
> If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting
These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.
A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline.
I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.
The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
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.
Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.
Draw from that what conclusions you may.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
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.
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.
A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...
For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?
And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.
Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.
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.
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.
Also answering answer A to 23 (>20 hours/week paid employment last year of college) would logically conflict with answering A to 56 (Did not attend college).
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.
> The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
Separate from the above posts, the FAA continued their discriminatory policies. For example, setting several DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...
And yet, although this is a fact, the choice and the phrasing paints a particular story.
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.
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.
Except it was demonstrably of the opposite of this. The bigraphical questionnaire rejected 90% of applicants for no justifiable reason.
In practice, diversity is much easier to achieve by reducing the opportunities of the undesirable demographics. This is one such example.
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3283570/
Downvote if you like, but kids' community values are typically enforced with antisocial behavior
They didn't seem to have good publicists...
Far too many people believe in the myth of pure meritocracy. Instead, what most people really see as meritocracy is actually just something reinforces built-in un-meritocratic advantages.
For real meritocracy, the best approach is to nurture all people with ability, not just device some "test" of meritocracy and demand that fidelity to that test result is the answer.
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.
See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this
I get your point, but to be clear this is already what they were doing since 1989 up until 2013.
Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective.
> 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
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.
Also, I have a very hard time believing these "correct" answers are representative of the already hired candidates. Worst subject in school was science, worst in college was history, and participated in four or more high school sports, but no correlation on whether they believe it is important to be fast or accurate in their work? Applied to five or six jobs in the last three years? Is bothered "more than most" by criticism from others? [1] I almost find it easier to believe that they were blatantly playing into negative stereotypes of certain minority demographics than that this survey was fit to describe already hired ATCs.
[1] https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
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.
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.
> the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Looking at [1], the difference between planned and actual hires in 2013–2015 was 1362, much higher than during 2020–2022 when it was just 384 (and this is using the pre-COVID target).
I don't know what happened in 2013–2015, but whatever it was, it seems to have had a 3.5 times bigger impact than COVID.
Well, we do know one thing that happened: this scandal.
[1] https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...
> The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a hiring freeze to help blunt the sequester’s impact, but that threatens to disrupt the pipeline of new air traffic controllers needed to replace the thousands of workers eligible for retirement.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/air-controllers-caugh...
We know that happened as well.
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/3859761.html.
Biggest issue with Republicans is learning that "People are born with different abilities."
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.
However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.
It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. This is a deeply unpopular idea, so it gets hidden behind various labels. Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).
I draw a line between "need explicit racial references in hiring" and the "biographical questionnaire" in the article. The later was explicit deception, what I want to call fraud though maybe dose not fit the technical definition, and was correctly labeled cheating since the answers were apparently handed out. I can not lump all this activities together and label it as one thing at least due to the line I drew above and likely other lines I would draw as digging in to more details.
> Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).
I think you are simplifying too much here. The way this reads is that everyone on the other side of the issue to you is either masks off and is like Ibram Kendi, or is masks on and hiding it how they are like Ibram Kendi.
I do not buy it is that simple, the world is more complex than that with people that have a wide variety of motivations and goals.
I’m not oversimplifying it. A lot of people want explicit racial preferences to achieve racial diversity. That’s both unpopular and (now) illegal, so you get lots of different workarounds.
Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial preferences. But in practice DEI programs turn into racial preferences and quotas because those people won’t stand up to the ones who want preferences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...
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.
"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...
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.
"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)"
The choices for both were Science, Math, English, History/Social Sciences and Physical Education, plus did not attend college for the second.
Math is highly predictive of ATC performance. English is a key requirement due the communication-heavy role. Physical Education is linked to confidence which is a strong predictor of graduation rates.
That leaves History/Social Sciences and Science as oddballs. If you did poorly in Science or History/Social Sciences in high school, that likely didn't change in college, so you would have gotten at least 15 points by answering it the same way for both questions.
I'm not sure there was an expectation that someone would get them both right. Rather having different answers get 15 points ensures people answering both the same way didn't which likely would make the test a bit too easy to pass.
This test just looks like a big five personality test mixed with some socioeconomic and academic questions.
Or infinitely better than being an active ATC, which earned 0?
I don't think you can take questions in isolation. Active military ATC would likely pick up full or close to full points on several other questions like recent unemployment (#26), expressing views (#27), formal training (#30), formal suggestions (#36), knowledge of job (#46) and probably coursework (#54).
With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards.
Do you have a source for this.
I have worked for dozens of enterprise companies with DEI policies and not a single one dropped standards to attract "minorities".
If GitHub attempted to anonymize applications and resulted in a biased selection, can that not be a result of them failing to eliminate the bias they set out to?
Same with the blind auditions for orchestras, if they found that they weren't actually eliminating bias with the stated methods, why is it bad that they're not doing it anymore?
If the resulting distribution is not what you expected it to be, then there are two simple explanations: either your model was wrong, or the bias that causes the deviation is happening on an earlier stage in the process.
At the same time, if going from non-blind to blind changes the result, it means that there was bias that had been eliminated. The second article pretty much openly admits it and then demands that it be reinstated to produce the numbers that they would like to see.
The only way to do that is compare results with expectations, no?
As another sibling comment previously stated, this forum is mainly for employees of US tech companies. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that this forum could do more to keep the number of polarizing non-tech topics to a minimum - there are plenty of other forums where those discussions can and do happen. It's not like there's a tech twist to the political discussions here anyway, it's just poop flinging like everywhere else.
As someone who is not from English speaking country, I get that you may expect forum in English language to be neutral / international, but usually (as with any other language) it is not.
This is what always happens to politicians. Their mumbles become coherent. Shyness fades. Vague dithering words transform to bold calls to action. Infirm display vitality.
This is what politicians do. Otherwise they would be school teachers and programmers.
Around 1994 I was interested in Trotskyism and Anarchism and wasn't sure if we needed to get the 4th international back in the US or start a 5th international.
I believed in this really stupid kind of vanguardism where if you put up the biggest and most radical flag you would get everyone to rally behind it. I reformed because I got tough love from black nationalists who told me in no uncertain words they wanted to decide things for themselves and not get bossed around by some white guy.
A modern form of this involves the adding of random stripes to the rainbow flag which means that when you really do put that flag up you won't have anybody under it, at least not when the going gets tough, when it rains, etc.
For one thing left-wing movements have this divergent character where they feel they have to follow all these people who are subaltern for different reasons. Right-wing movements have this convergent character that moves towards something which makes it much easier form them to manage inconsistencies.
what on earth does this mean?
The tapes thing still holds, tho. They have tapes. Care to comment on those?
> 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
> “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/faa_biographical_assessment/
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that this was just "buzzwords".
> 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
Why would you want to filter for applicants who report that their worst high school subject was science and their lowest college grades were in history?
Here's a comparison of school meals in Korea vs. the US. There are similar comparisons with Japan, France, and Germany. Somehow the US is uniquely unable to feed kids healthy food. I blame political corruption and food industry marketing.
https://www.allkpop.com/buzz/2024/04/what-are-they-feeding-t...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/how-french-s...
I think it is damaging when hiring outcomes are skewed as well as it undermines the credibility of those who got hired under easier conditions fabricated by the company.
I too agree with the grandparent post that we should try to be scrubbing PII from applications as much as possible. I do code interviews at BIGCO and for some reason recruiting sends me the applicants resume which is totally irrelevant to the code interview and offers more opportunities for biases to slip in (i.e this person went to MIT vs this person went to no name community college).
I would disagree for the most part. As mentioned above, there are roles where you'll see gender bias that may not be addressable. In the OB/GYN example, I understand some women would only be comfortable with a doctor that is also a woman. That's not necessarily addressable by shoe-horning in male doctors. But again, that can be accounted for in DEI programs.
It's also more understandable to non-remote jobs. Some areas have staggeringly different demographics that could only really be changed by relocating candidates, which isn't feasible for all business. Mentioning this specifically as my company is fully remote.
Otherwise, in my opinion, a candidate pool that is 95% some demographic shows a severe deficiency in the ability to attract candidates.
If the job in question is 95% one gender it does not at all show a deficiency in attracting candidates. 87% of pharmeceutical technicans are women (in the uk) as per: https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...
If I'm interviewing for pharmaceutical technicians, and my goals is to give all candidates equal opportunity for employment, why would I expect something vastly different from 87% women? If the candidate pool for pharmaceutical technicians was somehow 50/50, then it'd indicate a severe deficiency in attracting female candidates on account of the massive underrepresentation relative to the workforce of pharmaceutical technicians.
We track these, but don't establish guardrails on that fine grained of data.
In your example, it would be balanced by a likely over-representation in urology by male doctors. But when looking at doctors overall, the demographics tend to balance out, with the understanding that various factors may affect specific practices.
To give you a more solid answer, in our data we see that men are a bit overrepresented in our platform engineering roles, while women are within our data science and ML roles. General backend/frontend roles are fairly balanced. Overall engineering metrics roughly fit out guardrails. We look at the same for management, leadership, sales, and customer support.
I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen. I can also say that of those dozens, I think I've only advanced 2 candidates to the hiring committee. So we seem to err on sending a candidate to interview vs trying to prematurely prune the pool down.
So you have a slightly more than 50% women in data science, a field that's 15-20% women [1]. Likewise, software development is ~20% women. But your frontend and backend roles have 50/50 men and women. You're achieving results representative of the general population but you're obtaining a very large overrepresentation of women relative to their representation in the workforce. We're talking overrepresentation by a factor of four or five.
All of the fields you listed ~80% male. This isn't like a hospital that's equally comprised of urologists and OB/GYNs. It's like a hospital exclusively comprised of urologists, but somehow hires 50% women.
> I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen.
Discrepancy is a relative statement. What is the gender breakdown of the candidates you've interviewed? Remember, if the software developers you're interviewing are 50/50 men and women, that is representative of the general population but it's a 4x overrepresentation of women relative to their representation in the field. If by "no discrepancy" you mean "no discrepancy relative to the general population" it sure sounds like female applicants have a much better shot at getting interviewed. If you're seeing 50 / 50 male and female interviewees in a field that's 80% male, you really ought to question whether recruiters are using gender as a factor in deciding which applicants to advance to interviews.
Is your company's goal to achieve representation equitable with respect to the general population, even if it means applicants from one gender are significantly disadvantaged in interviewing? Or is it to give equal employment opportunities to candidates, regardless of their gender? It sure sounds like your company is pursuing the former. I would highly suggest pushing for more transparency in the application to interview pipline if you care about gender equality.
1. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/women-in-computer-data-scie...
I see leadership wanting to move with current politic climate and when they go to implementing things not really caring who they hire other than who is going to make their lives easier. That then results in hucksters, con artists, selling their services, quick fixes, cookie cutter solutions, to those leaders who then get what they wanted, fitting in with the current political climate, not real fixes which are often hard, can have unknown risks and timelines.
Blame bad leadership, blame hucksters, and con artists, that is where I lean.
serves the role of "pakistani child rape gangs"? Right now the analogy does not makes sense to me. "pakistani child rape gangs" are reprehensible, nothing that extreme comes to mind when I think of James Damore's memo or similar.
On the other hand leftists are always telling Hispanic people that they have to have solidarity with black people, telling trans people they have to have solidarity with animal rights people (or the animals?), etc. And... crickets. The people never quite tell you that they don't agree with you but they don't really give money, they don't really listen to you, they don't really turn out at your march, they don't really vote for you, etc.
I've been there, done that, and lived it. If you listen to people you make a little more progress than you make by just flying a really big flag. The antipattern is common in articles from Trotskyite papers which you will find collected here:
https://www.wsws.org/en?redirect=true
Often there is some issue that the people involved see as an isolated issue, but the Trotskyite always wants to smack it together like a Katamari Ball [1] with other issues and conclude a socialist revolution is necessary and the answer from most people is [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(Beatles_song)
[3] "But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao: You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow"
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.
Which would mean entirely different things if (a) that were true (b) that were not true.
It sounds as if you are completely convinced that it is not true, but what is your conviction based on, and why do you think they believed the opposite (or perhaps you take the position that they did not, in fact, believe this) ?
> This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.
So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist.
Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to equity. So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?
Company A: Our equity policy is to only hire white men! We are proud of how we are striving towards equity with our new DEI policy.
observer: Damn those DEI policies ruining everything.
To me it is obvious you do not blame 'DEI policies' but the leadership and corruption in Company A.
Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.
There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."
This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.
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.
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.
I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.
(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).
Sharing the answers wasn't someone going rogue, it was the whole point.
I was shocked at how long it took Labour to beat the Tories in the the UK in the last decade. I mean the Tories kept screwing up over and over and it had to go really far before voters finally gave up on them.
It's easy to conclude that politics in the US are like professional wrestling and the Democrats are getting paid to lose.
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
5% X
25% Y
70% Z
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).
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.
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/blindaudi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It only became a myth when we were forced to consider factors beyond merit in hiring.
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.
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...
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."
That's what the questionnaire was designed to do. The other steps in the hiring process take a lot of time and resources (proctored exam, referrals, medical testing) so they wanted to put a rough filter in front of that to reduce the numbers to something manageable.
As to why they would give a higher weight if you said your worst high school subject was science - that's the part that I think was just an overfit model producing nonsensical results. That kind of statistically-significant-but-nonsensical parameter is exactly what Freedman's Paradox describes.
You just completely made this up. There isn't even evidence that a "model" exists or was fitted to.
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?"):
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.
It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.
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:
You might be confused by this line:
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
That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.
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?
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.
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.
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.
They did.
Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.
I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.
> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.
I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.
The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.
The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.
"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.
The law is crystal clear on this:
https://x.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/1752006517761421719?t=v...
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!
You can still delete this.
Discrimination isn't determined by looking at single digit percentage differences in aggregate statistics.
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.
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.
Huge difference.
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).
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
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.
In this example, before it was CTI schools that were providing most of the candidates. There's a lot of potentially qualified minorities who absolutely have no clue such schools or opportunities even exist, and a few who even if they knew were so financially disadvantaged to take care of the opportunities. Outreach in this case, will be combing high schools and making more people aware of the opportunities, and providing financial assistance for those who may be qualified but are too poor.
None of them are “programs that discriminate against qualified applicants.”
Go to a predominantly black school/neighbourhood and hand out flyers with "hey, we have this great programme you should consider applying for!"
Provide financial support for candidates who cannot afford to go through the programme on their own means (which will be disproportionately, though not exclusively, from minority groups).
And generally, "most qualified candidate" doesn't really exist. Usually what you have is something like "50% clearly unqualified, 25% maybe, and 25% seems qualified" and that's it. Numbers vary and there are exceptions, but by and large, that's basically how it works. So you need a "tie-breaker", which is usually "person I got along with the best", which is just as biased as "person from $minority_group" as a tie-breaker.
Obviously things didn't go well at the FAA, but it really doesn't take that much imagination to come up with some basic measures that are reasonable and don't discriminate anyone.
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.
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.
From rich to poor I see as ethical, but there are current programs that are gated on race. This is taking from all to give to a chosen race, all DEI practices should be eliminated from government actions.
The problem cases are after that, when people get upset the numbers didn't change as much as they hoped, and decide to go do fiddle with the hiring process.
Does a government carry any moral responsibility to right its previous wrongs? If so, what sort of policies would that look like?
DEI has only one cause, and that is avoiding discrimination on non-germane axes, particulalry by subtle, non-obvious means, such as relying on biased funnels.
Yes, it’s lazy and stupid for the FAA to believe they can fix inequality by biasing hiring practices.
The fundamental problem is that the US has severe wealth inequality, which for historical reasons is correlated with race, and for structural reasons (property taxes fund schools, meaning poor kids get worse education) is made even worse.
All of the “wholistic evaluation” doublespeak and weird qualification exams in the world can’t fix that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What they didn't appear to do, at least it is not discussed, is targeted advertising towards underrepresented groups.
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.
The current people and their representatives did not do those things, so acting as if you are doing the right thing by implementing policy that advances one group over another is immoral. It's just inventing a fictional justification, no better than dark skin being a mark of sin.
In addition, this is a diversion from the elephant in the room, which is that right after some dramatic executive action, many people died within a short amount of time due to a crash that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with chaotic governance.
The fundamental issue is that due to upstream inequalities (e.g. worse schools) there are downstream inequalities you can’t smooth out. There are literally fewer black people who know how to read or have graduated high school. So the correct solution is to concentrate resources upstream.
Diversity isn’t just about skin colour. Getting more women in expands opportunities for women, who still suffer pay gaps, and this would help close that.
Even black people who do have enough education suffer discrimination (conscious or not), so working to improve things is a net good.
That’s not to say the FAA did the right thing (it appears not) but it’s important to not just throw our hands up and keep saying it’s someone else’s problem!
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.
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.
> At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not “DEI,”
I highlighted the relevant points where I addressed your criticism. I hope this helps but feel free to copy-paste from Wikipedia again.
Table 5 does the more apples to apples comparison. The critique notes that sample size is too small, but it captures 445 blind women, 816 blind men, 599 non-blind women, and 1102 non-blind men auditions. That's certainly sufficient for a study like this.
The study also does reflect how when a population feel like there is less bias against them in a system they are more likely to participate -- even if that means on average the level of "merit" might go down, but those that make it through the filter will better reflect actual meritocracy -- and that's what this study showed as well.
If you go down to table 6 (which is also incredibly weak), it shows the opposite: men are advancing at a higher rate than women in blind auditions.
Andrew Gelman reviewed the link as well and agreed:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
And table 6 shows blind auditions significantly increased the chances of women advancing from the preliminary round and winning in the final round. However women were less likely to advance past semifinals when auditions were blind. But still a net win.
Gellman is focused on the “several fold” and “50% claims” it made. But the paper shows 11.6 and 14.8 point jumps, which are supported by the paper.
Academy attrition on page 38.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
I'm aware of this but it leaves attrition to be inferred. https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...
You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers.
That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio.
Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the impact of having a 56% higher attrition rate!
Here's a bunch of plans to comb through for the full numbers. I don't have a spreadsheet off hand.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-11/FAA-Controll...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
Alas - my key point is this: the statement
> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes."
may have been highly attributable in 2018 timeframe but the real culprit is just as likely the 2013 sequester - I'd caution to say any one cause is the reason but rather there is a combination between a shift in applicant pool, having to deal with a slight burst in retirements, recovering from sequester and revamped training processes. Heck - maybe even not having an administrator from 2017-2018 might have caused issues.
In the cold light of 2025 with impacts from COVID still reverberating, I'd doubt hiring practices as much as any other arbitrary reason.
Reading deeper, on page 40 that has historical data, starting FY14 when this survey had been implemented and initial class hired, Academy Training Attrition appears to be much higher though all I can base this on is comparing bar graph sizes. So yes, this change to hiring process did impact staffing levels because academy attrition was higher.
The sequester of 2013 did a number on things and they hired to maximum capacity in the years after to make up for lost time. It stands to reason that by filling training to the max, they'd have more washouts due to lack of more attention during training.
> The sequestration in 2013 and subsequent hiring freeze resulted in the FAA not hiring any new controllers for nearly 9 months across FY 2013 and FY 2014. The effects of this disruption on the hiring pipeline, as well as the FAA Air Traffic Academy’s operations, were substantial.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
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?
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".
I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined—and while this is certainly possible in theory, it's essentially impossible to do under the auspices of what currently qualifies as “political correctness”.
How do you discover deeper-rooted causes if you can't be provided resources to study the distinction? How can you understand why black women are 3x more likely to die at child birth than white women if the funding agencies don't care about the answer?
And the beauty is, the more brackets, the more true this is, and the more can be extracted from the system.
"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.
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.
In fact, no country in the world ever claimed to have been communist in a sense of having a communist society. They were all "building communism", rather, with socialism as "intermediate stage".
Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.
So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics.
Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.
What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.
If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect.
So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.
And no one is going to care if some farmer won’t hire white people for his farm.
Turns out this is a complex topic. Anyone pushing a simplistic viewpoint either doesn’t understand the topic or has ulterior motives.
If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained again.
Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.
If you have a qualification test that feels useful but also turns out to be highly non-predictive of job performance (as, for example, most college entrance exams turn out to be for college performance), you could change the qualification threshold for the test without any particular expectation of losing job performance.
In fact, it is precisely this logic that led many universities to stop using admissions tests - they just failed to predict actual performance very well at all.
No, but it was the best predictor of job performance and academy pass rate there was.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear... (page 41)
There are a fixed number of seats at the ATC academy in OKC, so it's critical to get the highest quality applicants possible to ensure that the pass rate is as high as possible, especially given that the ATC system has been understaffed for decades.
> "The empirically-keyed, response-option scored biodata scale demonstrated incremental validity over the computerized aptitude test battery in predicting scores representing the core technical skills of en route controllers."
I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.
The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.
I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.
There are multiple critical reviews of this paper. It is well-known to be largely nonsense.
http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...
The last two places I've worked (one a university) had DEI goals of hiring the most qualified person for the job, without regard to race, etc. The whole point was to stress the "without regard to" part.
We do collect data and try to correct imbalances by making sure our candidate pools have good coverage (i.e. they aren't discriminatory). But every offer we extend goes to the most qualified candidate, without regard to race, etc., to the very best of our ability.
It's also more comprehensive than just hiring and race.
For example, one goal is that a student in the National Guard with a side job gets the same shot as one unemployed living with their parents. What can you do to help facilitate that without reducing the impact of the program?
There's evidence that spatial reasoning is important for learning Computer Science. There's evidence that men and women can both develop spatial reasoning skills. There's evidence that men in general get more practice than women in this regard, potentially putting women at a disadvantage in the program. What can you do to help level that playing field without weakening the material?
Lastly, coming out against DEI programs whose goal is to hire based solely on merit and not race or other factors... not a good look. So you might want to specify which kind of DEI you're really against.
The goal of the DEI program in my company was along the lines of:
"Last year, 20% of all PhDs in areas we hire for were women. Yet only 7% of our actual PhD hires were women. Why?"
Whether the actual implementation solved this problem is a different matter. The goal, however, was to reduce bias.
Perhaps anyone pushing doubt with ZERO substance behind their claim has ulterior motives.
How is that a criticism? It is always possible that someone could invent a better test.
In any case, the second citation directly refutes your point in another sub-thread with AnthonyMouse, the assertion that higher-performing applicants above the cutoff do not perform better on the job:
"If all applicants scoring 70 or above on the AT-SAT are selected, slightly over one-third would be expected to be high performers. With slightly greater selectivity, taking only applicants scoring 75.1 or above, the proportion of high performers could be increased to nearly half."
Also:
"The primary point is that applicants who score very high (at 90) on the AT-SAT are expected to perform near the top of the distribution of current controllers (at the 86th percentile)."
You're mistaken, it's the opposite. The first one found that AT-SAT performance was the best measure, with the biodata providing a small enhancement:
> AT-SAT scores accounted for 27% of variance in the criterion measure (β=0.520, adjusted R2=.271,p<.001). Biodata accounted for an additional 2% of the variance in CBPM (β=0.134; adjusted ΔR2=0.016,ΔF=5.040, p<.05).
> In other words, after taking AT-SAT into account, CBAS accounted for just a bit more of the variance in the criterion measure
Hence, "incremental validity."
> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.
You're right, and I can't remember which study it was that explicitly said that it was the best measure. I'll post it here if I find it. However, given that each failed applicant costs the FAA hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can safely assume that there was no better measure readily available at the time, or it would have been used instead of the AT-SAT. Currently they use the ATSA instead of the AT-SAT, which is supposed to be a better predictor, and they're planning on replacing the AT-SAT in a year or two; it's an ongoing problem with ongoing research.
> I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.
Given the limited number of controllers, this is going to be an issue in any study you find on the topic. You can only pull so many people off the boards to take these tests, so you're never going to have an enormous sample size.
This is more not allowing something who dropped out of law school due to academics to be readmitted because law school slots are precious if your goal is to make X amount of lawyers per year.
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.
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.
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.
If you pitch shifted the average American woman, you'd probably get a voice that sounded like a gay (camp) man.
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.
It's very hard to find a company that does real "blind" interviews. And by blind, I mean where networking doesn't positively impact your application.
As long as networking boosts your chances of getting hired somewhere, you've got a very wide open door to biases, because networks are almost always biased. I should not be able to give me resume to a friend to ensure the hiring manager gets to see it. Yet I haven't found a company where that behavior is detrimental.
Equity is actively discriminating, based on measures like race or sex to try to force an ideological outcome.
Equality (of opportunity) is treating people the same irrespective of race, sex, etc...
Equity is clearly racist, sexist, bigotry. Progressives seems to think this is okay, unlike previous examples from history, as their preferred race isn't white and their preferred sex isn't male.
Equality (of opportunity) is the opposite - it isn't racist, sexist bigotry.
Controllers talk like an extra 9 for them is the focus and it is for them, the public acting like their ceremonies are about fixing the majority of the problem is a bold faced lie.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
Tech has been meritocratic for decades with few exceptions.
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.
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.
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...
Yes, academy attrition.
I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.
My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.
But to actually answer the question: while it can absolutely be both, you need to provide proof of the additional claim. "People cheated for DEI reasons" and "People cheated for cronyism reasons" are two separate claims. The article provides plenty of evidence for the former and not much for the latter.
Cronyism is advancing the interests of your personal connections. Friends and family. If you want an explicit cutoff, the Dunbar Number suggests this group should have 100, maybe 150 people in it.
Conversely, there's 40 million black people in the US, and I really doubt anyone is even associated with all of them, much less calling them one of their friends.
You can change who you're friends with a lot easier than you can change your skin color, so the two result in different problems. They're both bad, of course. Similar to how "wage theft" and "shoplifting" are different crimes, even though both of them involve taking money from someone else.
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.
While I agree with the surface evaluation(you have likely lower quality initial candidates(not necessarily race induced) = more academy failures = more pressure on upstream DEV/CFC training) - you'd need to identify a few things such as why the spike didn't occur in 2014-2016 in such large #s compared to 2017, what safety data tells us about this time and how number of flight actions per controller has changed over time after this hiring change.
I find it somewhat disingenuous to consider safety and tie it back to this as you present it as the only cause while failing to mention other inputs.
This is NOT TO SAY you do not have a very valid discussion here - I just am frustrated to see it tied into modern day without hashing through other modern causes - folks who want to point a finger at "disadvantaged candidate hiring." get all the hay they need when nothing else is mentioned.
But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.
1. there is a test that is a decent proxy for job performance
2. the relationship between job performance and test score above some passing score is linear
These both sound "common sense", but I suspect fail for a huge number of real world scenarios.
The second assumption is not required. If people who score a 95 are only 5% better at the job than people who score a 70, all else equal you'd still pick the person who scored a 95 given the choice.
> 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.
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...
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.
Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism, and is the same problem.
In this case, a criteria for joining this ‘fraternity’ is the color of their skin.
Hence double applicable with DEI.
Why do you keep insisting on ignoring half of what you are pasting?
First, the FAA and the NBCFAE are different organizations.
Second, "Associate" does not mean "employed at the same massive organization". It means someone you actually know, on a personal level. You and I are not "associates" just because we both post on Hacker News.
Third, the question is whether you're associated with the individual, not the organization that they're a part of.
> Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism
If you only hire from Harvard or some other prestigious university is that also cronyism?
Are all internal promotions cronyism?
If you only hire people who live in your city, is that also cronyism? Keep in mind that there's plenty of rural towns that have fewer people than a big fraternity does. Does this change if all th qualified workers in the town are black, so you're only hiring black workers?
You presumably have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise "only hiring US citizens" is also cronyism. Where, exactly, are you suggesting that line should be?
Also, going out of your way to hire people of specific skin color where you work, is racism.
Seems like a bunch of folks at the FAA were doing both here, yes?
I'll offer up the Wikipedia definition, since it is perhaps slightly clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronyism defines it as "friends or trusted colleagues".
And what does the political opposite of those initiatives look like in practice?
What does it look like in practice when you don't stop and wonder why women make up 20% of your qualified candidate pool, but only 7% of your workforce? (As another poster observed.)
Do you just shrug your shoulders, assume that your perfectly meritocratic (By whose definition?) system is free of any form of systemic or personal bias, and move on, without wondering why?
If it's a government initiative then it's taking from all to only give to women.
If it's a publicly owned company, then can you actually make a convincing case that it's a benefit to stockholders?
Only in the case of a private company does this lack ethical issues, but at that point it's just some billionaires whim.
As for the article, it's not given me particular solid vibes, a feeling not helped by some of the comments here (both pro and con).
Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".
Also, if you had a better test then you'd use it, but at some point you have 10 candidates and 5 slots and have to use something to choose, so you use the closest approximation available until you can come up with a better one.
Sorry, but I just don't agree. There are "qualifying tests" for jobs that I've done that just do not have any sort of monotonic relationship with job performance. I'm a firefighter (volunteer) - to become operational you need to be certified as either FF I or FF II, but neither of those provide anything more than a "yes, this person can learn the basic stuff required to do this". The question of how good a firefighter someone will be is almost orthogonal to their performance on the certification exams. Someone who gets 95% on their IFSAC FF II exam is in no way predicted to be a better firefighter than someone who got 78%.
The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.
If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.
It doesn't mean that at all.
Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.
There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?
As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?
We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?
Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.
There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.
What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.
But, to me, it would be absurd to suggest that the air traffic controllers should be “diverse” in the sense that a “minority” group should be represented in excess of its representation in the overall population, that there aren’t enough black people the US for a fair hiring process to achieve this, and that therefore an unfair process should be used to increase this sort of “diversity”. That’s all kinds of wrong!
No, this is false. You don't appear to know what you're trying to postulate.
We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10.
That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants.
The Math is missing a third variable.
Alternatively, this is a way for your boss to meet budget targets while not explicitly laying people off, and giving hope to people that help is coming.
Now that's proof that white hiring managers are incompetent! (that's a joke)
Especially since the market of people willing to work the job AND take the pay AND work in the area is not infinite.
We’re talking about a group which went out of its way (apparently) already to recruit folks with the specific colors they wanted + these other criteria.
Don’t forget, everyone else in the country has been having similar constraints and has been trying to do the same thing near as I can tell.
Why do you think they were sharing test answers (it seems), and still only got x candidates in?
And also, doesn’t this entire thing seem actively unfair and racist (albeit to everyone except the chosen minority) instead of what at worst was perhaps a passively unfair and racist situation before? (Albeit to everyone except the majority)
How is that actually any better, except that it pisses off the majority instead of the minority?
Seems like a good way to lose elections, frankly. Or have a majority of the population angry at every minority out there.
You have more spots than you have qualified candidates. Even if you take your second band candidates, its still short the number you need.
Straight from the president up until Trump (for many administrations), affirmative action is required.
And what the gov’t expects is that your workforce composition aligns with the population as a whole, percentage wise.
You have 100 open positions.
You filled 50.
You left the other 50 spots open so that you could have the right composition amongst HALF of the required workforce?
Heck, if you hire everyone, you solve this problem completely.