17 ms·

The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

739 points by firebaze 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840
widowlark 2y ago
This is a great read - thanks for sharing. This provides valuable context to this whole situation that I was wholly unaware of.
wand3r 2y ago
> I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations. This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.
- scott_w 2y ago
  I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds. It’s simply a case of DEI either being implemented in a lazy or stupid way to tick boxes OR it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own. If DEI didn’t exist, the above things would still happen, just for a different reason and possibly different group of activists.
  - ars 2y ago
    How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills. And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
    - scott_w 2y ago
      As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy option and just threw out white candidates from the pipeline. I also include “setting hiring targets” as a lazy and stupid way of “achieving DEI,” just for clarity.
      - wand3r 2y ago
        This is kind of like the argument that communism is great but no one has been able to implement it correctly yet. "Setting targets" having highly paid DEI consultants, and identity based hiring is what DEI is. Lowercase diversity and inclusion are good ideals, which I think is what you are saying. Uppercase DEI are the exact policies we are talking about here.
        scott_w 2y ago
        I’ve provided a list of DEI hiring policies that don’t fit into your list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302 I said at the top of my thread that the refusal of people in power to engage with criticisms like this thoughtfully has allowed the far right to toxify these debates and I think the downvotes and responses to my comments are minor, but perfect, examples of my point. Instead of discussing the issues and how they should be fixed, the “debate” breaks down into “DEI bad” on your side and “saying DEI bad is racist/sexist/etc.” on the other side.
- spectraldrift 2y ago
  The bar wasn’t lowered at all. What happened was that the FAA stopped giving preferential treatment to a separate group—namely, CTI graduates—by replacing their streamlined path with a flawed biographical screening. Every candidate still has to pass the same rigorous training and certification.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Well, the FAA also leaked the official answers to the biographical screen to black interest groups so that they could teach black applicants to cheat on the screen.
    - spectraldrift 2y ago
      That’s not exactly what happened. The article shows that an FAA employee leaked guidance on answering the biographical questionnaire to members of the NBCFAE. This wasn’t an official FAA policy but a rogue action. Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective.
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        > Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective. According to the post, candidates who weren't capable of passing the training were promoted into management positions instead. > This was [...] a rogue action aimed at reducing competition, not at giving any specific group an undue advantage. I'm honestly curious whether you think that sentence means something.
      - ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
        It's hard to defend it as a rogue action, given: > The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation. They don't seem to have overlooked what he did either, they just determined that it was okay
  - 2y ago
- fortran77 2y ago
  I’m in two of those groups and I feel like they ignore me and take me for granted.
- itronitron 2y ago
  It's a myth that the bar is lowered for DEI hires.
  - djohnston 2y ago
    You should RTFA before making such an obviously disprovable assertion.
    - itronitron 2y ago
      [flagged]
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  - mistermann 2y ago
    It isn't possible for you to know this.
  - kikokikokiko 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Why are you (and many others) just assuming the black candidate is less qualified?
      - d1str0 2y ago
        That’s literally what this whole article was about. Removing a high correlation performance test, that black candidates didn’t pass as frequently, and replacing it with a very low correlation questionnaire that provided a more diverse applicant pool while weeding out highly qualified individuals.
- adolph 2y ago
  > it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.
navtoj 2y ago
wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues
- motorest 2y ago
  > wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues I don't agree. You're reacting to a one-sided, very partial critique of a policy change that no longer benefitted a specific group and the only tradeoff was a hypothetical and subjective drop of the hiring bar. This complain can also be equally dismissed as members of the privileged group complaining over the loss of privilege. The article is very blunt in the way their framed the problem: the in-group felt entitled to a job they felt was assured to them, but once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem. To make matters worse, this blend of easily arguable nitpicking is being used to kill any action or initiative that jeopardizes the best interests of privileged groups. Also, it should be stressed that this pitchfork drive against discriminate hiring practices is heard because these privileged groups believe their loss of privilege is a major injustice. In the meantime, society as a whole seemed to have muted any concern voiced by any persecuted and underprivileged group for not even having the chance of having a shot at these opportunities. Where's the outrage there?
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    The undisputed facts at hand are: * The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants. * The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees. * Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission. This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.
    - motorest 2y ago
      > I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are: This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.
spectraldrift 2y ago
The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the process. However, the reality is nuanced. Although the new process may have altered who got to start the journey, every candidate still had to pass the FAA’s rigorous and extremely selective training and certification— which remain the true measure of an air traffic controller’s capability. In an ideal world, we could put everyone through this process to see who passes. Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control, such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the qualification bar. This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool, and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it doesn’t translate to less competent controllers.
- mik3y 2y ago
  A very well-written and persuasive critique, thank you for it. (And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)
- gundmc 2y ago
  It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their race.
  - garbagewoman 2y ago
    if people who have been historically quantifiably discriminated against and disqualified based on that discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?
scott_w 2y ago
This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago who’d left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out. I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it. The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups. That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota. And you have to call Asians "white".
  - scott_w 2y ago
    You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by equating DEI to “hiring quotas.” That’s a lazy and stupid approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is, unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across society to achieve it.
ars 2y ago
[flagged]
- garbagewoman 2y ago
  this is the first opinion piece you've read and you're convinced? good grief
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Trump was also likely referring to the female pilot of the military helicopter. His new head of the military doesn't think women should be in active duty roles, so this would make sense.
  - p3rls 2y ago
    Are you thinking of frontline roles? No active duty women would be absurd, but I am not familiar with this Hegseth or whatever his name is I suppose it's possible
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      He seemed to mostly talk about combat, flying a VIP person out of the white house during an attack would be some form of combat IMO.
    - gedy 2y ago
      Hegseth has stated on record that he doesn't think women should be in physical, in-person combat roles like infantry. He has stated he has no problems with women pilots, etc. so the GP is exaggerating.
- scott_w 2y ago
  Like many things Trump claims, there's a kernel of truth wrapped in a pack of lies. It's likely people in Trump's orbit knew about this (as the article highlights, it was visible to Congress), however what Trump claimed was pretty much nonsense: the crash was obviously not caused by someone with "severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities" in ATC. I think the end of the article clearly sums things up: when Democrats had power, they didn't take deliberate, thoughtful action to resolve the real issues being raised. Because of that failure, we get to watch Trump take a wrecking ball after making DEI a thoroughly toxic issue during the election.
deleted 2y ago
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anal_reactor 2y ago
[flagged]
- jefftk 2y ago
  > if you pointed that out before Trump's election This article is an expanded version of the author's reporting a year ago: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... While it didn't make the same splash then, I saw it and didn't see people responding by trying to cancel the author.
  - Khaine 2y ago
    Famously this guy James Damore tried to explain why the approach to diversity at google was not going to work. How did that work out for him?
    - jefftk 2y ago
      I'm not arguing the obviously false "no one has been cancelled for arguing an approach to increasing diversity is counterproductive". I'm arguing "Trace wouldn't have been (and in fact wasn't) cancelled for writing about this pre-Trump"
sschueller 2y ago
I don't have a problem with hiring qualified people instead of meeting quotas but the fact that the ones pushing this are them selves the most unqualified people is just beyond me.
- ihsw 2y ago
  [dead]
- justonceokay 2y ago
  That’s because it isn’t actually about qualification. It’s actually about a lack of accountability. Trump wants everyone to be able to hire their friends just like he does, optics be damned. I think a lot of people actually agree with this at a visceral level. Left leaning people are more concerned with power controlled by nepotism and “unfair” connections. To me that is a kind of sour grapes view fueled by too many participation trophies. A government full of cronies sucks but we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point. A meritocratic/technocratic government sounds like a dystopian novel.
  - solfox 2y ago
    In your view, is that how all businesses should be run as well? Hiring your least qualified friends? Surely, cronyism exists in corporate America, but I'd venture a guess that a company run in this way would fail almost immediately. No, this style of management and hiring is more like that of a crime boss - and it's not about friendships - it's about LOYALTY.
    - TehCorwiz 2y ago
      They don't "fail" as such. They burn through the money, spread it around, and then declare bankruptcy while everyone involved is somehow wealthier. It's kleptocracy.
      - throwaway7783 2y ago
        This is kinda becoming a thing with VC based startups. But beyond that, where does the money come from?
K0balt 2y ago
Working effectively in ATC without burnout hanging over your head constantly favours a certain amount of neurodivergence. A certain kind of delight in detail, delight in predictable progression of system. The overload needs to invigorate , not fatigue. This doesn’t make ATC professionals better people. It doesn’t make them smarter. It doesn’t make them superhuman. It makes them better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits probably make them worse at many others. We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity. Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more comfortable and easier. Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and neurological development. is there really any difference, or is neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity? Different is not a value judgement.
- jeffrallen 2y ago
  In case you [need citation] of this analysis, please see the 1999 "documentary" Pushing Tin, starring John Cusack. :)
- timewizard 2y ago
  Not all people are the same. Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than others. Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something exceptionally simple.
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    What's a better word?
    - ironmagma 2y ago
      Autism...
      - 2y ago
insane_dreamer 2y ago
[flagged]
- jtgverde 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mistermann 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - tclancy 2y ago
      If anything, I think the characterization of the candidate's qualifications is kind, as it fails to mention any of the obvious disqualifying issues.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        Out of curiosity: in your model, can something be kind and unkind simultaneously?
    - ailun 2y ago
      Your post added nothing to the conversation except insults though. I would have been interested in hearing an alternative perspective on why GP's post was reductive because as far as I know it's accurate.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        >Your post added nothing to the conversation except insults though. You are describing your experience, but stating it as if it is a universal fact. A relevant post from this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946854
        ailun 2y ago
legitster 2y ago
This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
- generationP 2y ago
  Resolved? By whom?
- s3r3nity 2y ago
  The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership. This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    > This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
    - s3r3nity 2y ago
      Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes
      - perching_aix 2y ago
        [flagged]
iamleppert 2y ago
Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully automated ATC model.
- thot_experiment 2y ago
  You think that ATC could be automated with the tools we have today?! I knew I'd get some wild takes in the comments but this one is absolutely next level. And I'm an AI maximalist!!
  - throwaway173738 2y ago
    Yeah my biggest concern with any kind of automation is handling and recognizing edge cases. There are already manual systems like flight levels and patterns for traffic management. But what happens if one plane starts deviating because of something unexpected? Then you have to respond to a specific situation and the reason for deviating matters quite a lot. Think about all the ways your car can break down.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.
  - JackFr 2y ago
    > Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Everything is easy when you don't know about it.
  - baby_souffle 2y ago
    > Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation. This. Commercial jets have had full auto taxi, take off, fly, land capability for a long time at supported airports. A human is still in the loop for parts of it due to the potential for something to deviate from nominal in a novel way at almost any time.
boohoo123 2y ago
There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.
- a12k 2y ago
  So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?
- malfist 2y ago
  For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution. Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    > Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers. But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.
- some_random 2y ago
  The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.
- drawkward 2y ago
  >There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.
cratermoon 2y ago
[flagged]
apical_dendrite 2y ago
I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating. Let's say you have a completely random data set. You generate a bunch of random variables x1 through xn and a random dependent variable y. Then you poke around and see whether any of the x variables look like they might predict y, so you pick those variables and try to build a model on them. What you end up with is a model where, according to the standard tests of statistical significance, some of the xs predict the y, even though all the data is completely random. This is a much more likely explanation for why the answer weights on the biographical assessment were so weird than some conspiracy between the contractors who developed the test, the FAA staff, and the black employee organization. They had a dataset that was very skewed because historically there have been very few black controllers, and so was very prone to overfitting. The FAA asked the contractor to use that dataset to build a test that would serve as a rough filter, screen in good candidates, and not show a disparate impact. The contractor delivered a test that fulfilled those criteria (at least in the technical sense that it passed statistical validation). Whether or not the test actually made any sense was not their department.
- daemonologist 2y ago
  I agree that it seems likely that the weird questions and their weighting came from over-fitting as you describe. The cheating allegation though, from my reading, is that the "correct" answers were leaked and then disseminated by the leakee(s). (And that this was particularly impactful because it was unlikely that you would pass the overfit test otherwise.)
  - apical_dendrite 2y ago
    When I read the IG report and saw what the guy actually said (and that his list of secret buzzwords actually turned out to be a photocopy from a resume writing book) it was pretty clear that he was bullshitting and claiming that he had inside information about the process that he didn't actually have.
    - itsdrewmiller 2y ago
gadders 2y ago
This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name. It should never, ever be about hard quotas. It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  > It should never, ever be about hard quotas. And yet, it is. The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category. A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?
  - gadders 2y ago
    Ish. Yes, if everyone in your company (of a significant size) is the same, then that is a fail. However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics. And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?
  - browningstreet 2y ago
    I'll counter this with my experience. I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure they could post their job openings to affinity outlets frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places of origin, and racial communities. It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college graduates". Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.
- saynay 2y ago
  Honestly, quotas would probably have been better than what was done here. Inventing a test (or 'questionnaire' as it was called here) where the goal was to filter out almost everyone who did not have the answer key, then only giving that answer key to the preferred race is just such a terrible way to do it.
dfilppi 2y ago
[dead]
hitekker 2y ago
For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  Wow, how can anyone take that test and defend FAA hiring practices. This is dystopia level nonsense
  - UberFly 2y ago
    Unfortunately this dystopia level nonsense has infected a lot lately and I'm glad it's finally getting some sunshine applied to it.
  - BonoboIO 2y ago
    I learned about the opportunity to apply for an Air Traffic Control Specialist (ATCS) job through: 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.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    Congress stopped it 9 years ago.
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
      they scheduled the trial for 2026. Congress hasn't stopped or done anything since.
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.
sporkland 2y ago
I look at stories like this and a key moment of failure that is obvious to anyone that has ever deployed code is don't make a change and roll it out to 100% of all devices/servers immediately. Feels like there is just some basic things missing from folks brains that gradual release and validation of the impacted cohort isn't a built in instinct for us.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
  yeah, they should have absolutely piloted this approach, look at the results, re-avaluated or fixed things, try again, before making it the absolute new policy
throw7 2y ago
Exactly what do the liberals (the author) want to happen? He seems to still believe that "lowering the bar" is the right and good thing to do moving forward?
potato3732842 2y ago
Complaints about controller shortages and 6-day weeks being the norm and whatnot go back into the 00s. Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and onboarding pipeline in the first place? The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is egregious.
- Xelynega 2y ago
  Do you honestly believe that hiring rate is determined by DEI departments and not budgets? 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"...
khazhoux 2y ago
From what I'm seeing, this program started in 2014 and was killed in 2016. Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's culture-war narrative.
exabrial 2y ago
> Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.” Wow.
throwaway260124 2y ago
I don’t think a test with R^2 of 0.27 should be used to completely reject candidates. It should have weighting proportional to its explanatory power. Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was clearly being overused.
ramblenode 2y ago
The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself: > The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
- armada651 2y ago
  Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any 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.
  - TraceWoodgrains 2y ago
    To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.
    - Aloisius 2y ago
      Is it absurd? 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.
mhalle 2y ago
Some important points that this article glosses over. The FAA Academy where all flight controllers are trained is way over-subscribed. Recruiting policies aside, I can find no evidence that the FAA wasn't training as many controllers as it could through its academy. This fact remained true through the Trump 1 administration into the Biden admin, except for COVID. The pandemic was understandably a huge disruption, as were government shutdowns. We can know this from the FAA Controller Staffing reports from 2019 (Trump 1 before the pandemic but after Obama) and 2024 (Biden). The 2024 report has been scrubbed from the FAA website when I last checked, but is available through the wayback machine: 2019: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staffing/media/2019-ABA-001-CWP_2019_508c.pdf https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf... 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241225184848/https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/afn-aba-20240509-cwp.pdf 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 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-faa-taps-outside-schools-boost-air-traffic-controller-training/400040/ 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-a883-3b7f79e06dd9 https://chatgpt.com/share/679eb87f-c4fc-800a-a883-3b7f79e06d...
dj_gitmo 2y ago
One of the reasons that these attempts to increase diversity are such a mess is because it is illegal to have a straightforward quota. If these agencies could just have a policy like "Group X is %Y of the population. This agency must hire at least %Y/2 from group X", there would be no need to have these sneaky roundabout methods of increasing equity.
rdtsc 2y ago
> The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation Ah yes, we carefully investigated ourselves and we have not found anything wrong. Thank you for your concern. > Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.” It's like we're talking about a talent show not air traffic controllers. I mean, shit, this just fuels Trump and his supporters' rhetoric and validates all the rambling and craziness involved around this topic. Who needs enemies when you got friends doing this kind of stuff and shooting everyone in the foot. It's like Biden pardoning his son after talking about corruption and nepotism.
- lordloki 2y ago
  Or all the people that you assumed were racist are really just upset about these racist policies.
- macrocosmos 2y ago
  You’re upset that reality aligns with the rhetoric? Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    > Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric? Yeah, fair enough
ein0p 2y ago
> In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work she’s passionate about—not lowering the bar, but inspiring more people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to reach it Discrimination by race, gender and sexual orientation (aka DEI, jokingly disabbreviated as "didn't earn it") always results in lowering the bar. No exceptions. Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. What's ironic is this is setting minorities back decades. In 2000 nobody cared what color you were or whether you had a penis. In 2025 the assumption is that a minority is a "DEI hire" unless proven otherwise. And bah gawd there are real exemplars out there to support that narrative.
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  The one positive "DEI" thing you can do without lowering the bar is to widen the net: look harder for qualified candidates in places where you didn't look before.
- default-kramer 2y ago
  > Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. False dichotomy. It's possible that in some situations DEI could replace cronyism and produce better hires. I have no idea how often that actually happens, but I know that cronyism happens a lot.
  - sneedle 2y ago
    [flagged]
synergy20 2y ago
i will prefer driving to taking flights for the coming years for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.
silexia 2y ago
"Diversity hiring goals" is the pretty new propaganda word for ugly old racism.
- gitnow 2y ago
  Yeah, wanting to increase diversity sure is, uh- wait...
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    "Wanting to increase diversity" means "fetishization of racial identity at the cost of other human traits". Yeah, sounds racist to me.
vichle 2y ago
There's a very high amount of political topics lately, and it's very uninteresting to non-US readers. Please stop.
- mfkp 2y ago
  Nobody is forcing you to read this or comment. Go find a local news website if you're so displeased with the US content.
  - vichle 2y ago
    Not every forum needs to be an arena for your polarized world views. This used to be a place where all types of scientific and tech related content was posted. Not so much right now, everyone is just throwing shit at each other but with nicer choice of words than on Twitter.
    - tstrimple 2y ago
      And this forum isn’t specifically made for you. Ignore it and move on. Just like other people do for other subjects they aren’t interested in. The ego to think that things that don’t interest you specifically have no place here while plenty of others are engaging just fine.
      - vichle 2y ago
        Of course it isn't made for me, and I do not expect it to be. The fact that you assume so points to a lack of empathy on your end, something that I think most Americans could really use more of right now. 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.
        2y ago
zombiwoof 2y ago
I really need a ChatGPT summary of this article
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  Qualified applicants were discriminated against explicitly because of DEI initiatives.
anitil 2y ago
Trace is on here, though not very active (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains)
dml2135 2y ago
DEI is simply a framework. Like Agile, it can be well implemented if the person implementing it understands the problems it is trying to address, along with its limitations. 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.
- yeahwhatever10 2y ago
  Are people still using Agile?
  - hyeonwho4 2y ago
    Yes.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    Are people not?
- sneedle 2y ago
  [flagged]
hjgjhyuhy 2y ago
America should help its poor and underprivileged groups through stuff like progressive taxation, better social service, and extra resources for schools in poor areas. It’s not perfect, but kind of works. It helps people to achieve better educational outcomes already in their childhood. Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.
- mp05 2y ago
  Well as they say, it's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Te former I believe strongly, no doubt. They latter? EH
- kshahkshah 2y ago
  > better social service 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.
  - soared 2y ago
    Extra resources for schools = free breakfast, lunch, afterschool activities = kids cost less money = parents can work less demanding/normal hour jobs = more parental involvement. 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.
    - kshahkshah 2y ago
      Agree with all that in theory. I don't know of a good implementation of it.
      - anon7000 2y ago
        There are loads of successful implementations! Just look outside of the US to Nordic countries or, say, Japan or Korea. The US does a lot of things pretty badly.
macrocosmos 2y ago
I saw this posted on the aviation subreddit and after gaining a few dozen comments, it seems to have been deleted. Strange times since it is seems this is very relevant there. I'm glad an article like this can exist here.
jmpman 2y ago
My brother in law is a pilot, and has colleagues who were impacted by this. What surprised me is that he blames Obama for this. I typically ignore his blame of Obama as some racist tirade, but this seems to point to Obama pushing these changes?
electrondood 2y ago
It's ridiculous to me that we're back in the world of "politician blames bad thing on wokeness" > "everyone has to spend months discussing this as if it's a sane idea."
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  It's ridiculous to me that a journalist can provide clear evidence that dei initiatives were used to discriminate against people and you can dismiss it by calling it wokeness.
geenkeuse 2y ago
[flagged]
worik 2y ago
Bad examples of DEI do not invalidate DEI, they invalidate bad implementation of policy 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

739 points by firebaze 2y ago

Related: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840

widowlark 2y ago

This is a great read - thanks for sharing. This provides valuable context to this whole situation that I was wholly unaware of.

wand3r 2y ago

> I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations. This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.

scott_w 2y ago
I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds. It’s simply a case of DEI either being implemented in a lazy or stupid way to tick boxes OR it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own. If DEI didn’t exist, the above things would still happen, just for a different reason and possibly different group of activists.
- ars 2y ago
  How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills. And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
  - scott_w 2y ago
    As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy option and just threw out white candidates from the pipeline. I also include “setting hiring targets” as a lazy and stupid way of “achieving DEI,” just for clarity.
    - wand3r 2y ago
      This is kind of like the argument that communism is great but no one has been able to implement it correctly yet. "Setting targets" having highly paid DEI consultants, and identity based hiring is what DEI is. Lowercase diversity and inclusion are good ideals, which I think is what you are saying. Uppercase DEI are the exact policies we are talking about here.
      - scott_w 2y ago
        I’ve provided a list of DEI hiring policies that don’t fit into your list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302 I said at the top of my thread that the refusal of people in power to engage with criticisms like this thoughtfully has allowed the far right to toxify these debates and I think the downvotes and responses to my comments are minor, but perfect, examples of my point. Instead of discussing the issues and how they should be fixed, the “debate” breaks down into “DEI bad” on your side and “saying DEI bad is racist/sexist/etc.” on the other side.
spectraldrift 2y ago
The bar wasn’t lowered at all. What happened was that the FAA stopped giving preferential treatment to a separate group—namely, CTI graduates—by replacing their streamlined path with a flawed biographical screening. Every candidate still has to pass the same rigorous training and certification.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Well, the FAA also leaked the official answers to the biographical screen to black interest groups so that they could teach black applicants to cheat on the screen.
  - spectraldrift 2y ago
    That’s not exactly what happened. The article shows that an FAA employee leaked guidance on answering the biographical questionnaire to members of the NBCFAE. This wasn’t an official FAA policy but a rogue action. Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective. According to the post, candidates who weren't capable of passing the training were promoted into management positions instead. > This was [...] a rogue action aimed at reducing competition, not at giving any specific group an undue advantage. I'm honestly curious whether you think that sentence means something.
    - ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
      It's hard to defend it as a rogue action, given: > The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation. They don't seem to have overlooked what he did either, they just determined that it was okay
- 2y ago
fortran77 2y ago
I’m in two of those groups and I feel like they ignore me and take me for granted.
itronitron 2y ago
It's a myth that the bar is lowered for DEI hires.
- djohnston 2y ago
  You should RTFA before making such an obviously disprovable assertion.
  - itronitron 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- mistermann 2y ago
  It isn't possible for you to know this.
- kikokikokiko 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Why are you (and many others) just assuming the black candidate is less qualified?
    - d1str0 2y ago
      That’s literally what this whole article was about. Removing a high correlation performance test, that black candidates didn’t pass as frequently, and replacing it with a very low correlation questionnaire that provided a more diverse applicant pool while weeding out highly qualified individuals.
adolph 2y ago
> it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.

navtoj 2y ago

wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues

motorest 2y ago
> wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues I don't agree. You're reacting to a one-sided, very partial critique of a policy change that no longer benefitted a specific group and the only tradeoff was a hypothetical and subjective drop of the hiring bar. This complain can also be equally dismissed as members of the privileged group complaining over the loss of privilege. The article is very blunt in the way their framed the problem: the in-group felt entitled to a job they felt was assured to them, but once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem. To make matters worse, this blend of easily arguable nitpicking is being used to kill any action or initiative that jeopardizes the best interests of privileged groups. Also, it should be stressed that this pitchfork drive against discriminate hiring practices is heard because these privileged groups believe their loss of privilege is a major injustice. In the meantime, society as a whole seemed to have muted any concern voiced by any persecuted and underprivileged group for not even having the chance of having a shot at these opportunities. Where's the outrage there?
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  The undisputed facts at hand are: * The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants. * The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees. * Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission. This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are: This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.

spectraldrift 2y ago

The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the process. However, the reality is nuanced. Although the new process may have altered who got to start the journey, every candidate still had to pass the FAA’s rigorous and extremely selective training and certification— which remain the true measure of an air traffic controller’s capability. In an ideal world, we could put everyone through this process to see who passes. Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control, such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the qualification bar. This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool, and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it doesn’t translate to less competent controllers.

mik3y 2y ago
A very well-written and persuasive critique, thank you for it. (And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)
gundmc 2y ago
It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their race.
- garbagewoman 2y ago
  if people who have been historically quantifiably discriminated against and disqualified based on that discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?

scott_w 2y ago

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago who’d left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out. I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it. The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups. That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota. And you have to call Asians "white".
- scott_w 2y ago
  You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by equating DEI to “hiring quotas.” That’s a lazy and stupid approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is, unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across society to achieve it.

ars 2y ago

[flagged]

garbagewoman 2y ago
this is the first opinion piece you've read and you're convinced? good grief
bamboozled 2y ago
Trump was also likely referring to the female pilot of the military helicopter. His new head of the military doesn't think women should be in active duty roles, so this would make sense.
- p3rls 2y ago
  Are you thinking of frontline roles? No active duty women would be absurd, but I am not familiar with this Hegseth or whatever his name is I suppose it's possible
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    He seemed to mostly talk about combat, flying a VIP person out of the white house during an attack would be some form of combat IMO.
  - gedy 2y ago
    Hegseth has stated on record that he doesn't think women should be in physical, in-person combat roles like infantry. He has stated he has no problems with women pilots, etc. so the GP is exaggerating.
scott_w 2y ago
Like many things Trump claims, there's a kernel of truth wrapped in a pack of lies. It's likely people in Trump's orbit knew about this (as the article highlights, it was visible to Congress), however what Trump claimed was pretty much nonsense: the crash was obviously not caused by someone with "severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities" in ATC. I think the end of the article clearly sums things up: when Democrats had power, they didn't take deliberate, thoughtful action to resolve the real issues being raised. Because of that failure, we get to watch Trump take a wrecking ball after making DEI a thoroughly toxic issue during the election.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anal_reactor 2y ago

[flagged]

jefftk 2y ago
> if you pointed that out before Trump's election This article is an expanded version of the author's reporting a year ago: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... While it didn't make the same splash then, I saw it and didn't see people responding by trying to cancel the author.
- Khaine 2y ago
  Famously this guy James Damore tried to explain why the approach to diversity at google was not going to work. How did that work out for him?
  - jefftk 2y ago
    I'm not arguing the obviously false "no one has been cancelled for arguing an approach to increasing diversity is counterproductive". I'm arguing "Trace wouldn't have been (and in fact wasn't) cancelled for writing about this pre-Trump"

sschueller 2y ago

I don't have a problem with hiring qualified people instead of meeting quotas but the fact that the ones pushing this are them selves the most unqualified people is just beyond me.

ihsw 2y ago
[dead]
justonceokay 2y ago
That’s because it isn’t actually about qualification. It’s actually about a lack of accountability. Trump wants everyone to be able to hire their friends just like he does, optics be damned. I think a lot of people actually agree with this at a visceral level. Left leaning people are more concerned with power controlled by nepotism and “unfair” connections. To me that is a kind of sour grapes view fueled by too many participation trophies. A government full of cronies sucks but we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point. A meritocratic/technocratic government sounds like a dystopian novel.
- solfox 2y ago
  In your view, is that how all businesses should be run as well? Hiring your least qualified friends? Surely, cronyism exists in corporate America, but I'd venture a guess that a company run in this way would fail almost immediately. No, this style of management and hiring is more like that of a crime boss - and it's not about friendships - it's about LOYALTY.
  - TehCorwiz 2y ago
    They don't "fail" as such. They burn through the money, spread it around, and then declare bankruptcy while everyone involved is somehow wealthier. It's kleptocracy.
    - throwaway7783 2y ago
      This is kinda becoming a thing with VC based startups. But beyond that, where does the money come from?

K0balt 2y ago

Working effectively in ATC without burnout hanging over your head constantly favours a certain amount of neurodivergence. A certain kind of delight in detail, delight in predictable progression of system. The overload needs to invigorate , not fatigue. This doesn’t make ATC professionals better people. It doesn’t make them smarter. It doesn’t make them superhuman. It makes them better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits probably make them worse at many others. We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity. Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more comfortable and easier. Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and neurological development. is there really any difference, or is neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity? Different is not a value judgement.

jeffrallen 2y ago
In case you [need citation] of this analysis, please see the 1999 "documentary" Pushing Tin, starring John Cusack. :)
timewizard 2y ago
Not all people are the same. Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than others. Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something exceptionally simple.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  What's a better word?
  - ironmagma 2y ago
    Autism...
    - 2y ago

insane_dreamer 2y ago

[flagged]

jtgverde 2y ago
[flagged]
- mistermann 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tclancy 2y ago
    If anything, I think the characterization of the candidate's qualifications is kind, as it fails to mention any of the obvious disqualifying issues.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Out of curiosity: in your model, can something be kind and unkind simultaneously?
  - ailun 2y ago
    Your post added nothing to the conversation except insults though. I would have been interested in hearing an alternative perspective on why GP's post was reductive because as far as I know it's accurate.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      >Your post added nothing to the conversation except insults though. You are describing your experience, but stating it as if it is a universal fact. A relevant post from this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946854
      - ailun 2y ago

legitster 2y ago

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

generationP 2y ago
Resolved? By whom?
s3r3nity 2y ago
The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership. This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  > This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
  - s3r3nity 2y ago
    Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      [flagged]

iamleppert 2y ago

Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully automated ATC model.

thot_experiment 2y ago
You think that ATC could be automated with the tools we have today?! I knew I'd get some wild takes in the comments but this one is absolutely next level. And I'm an AI maximalist!!
- throwaway173738 2y ago
  Yeah my biggest concern with any kind of automation is handling and recognizing edge cases. There are already manual systems like flight levels and patterns for traffic management. But what happens if one plane starts deviating because of something unexpected? Then you have to respond to a specific situation and the reason for deviating matters quite a lot. Think about all the ways your car can break down.
sandworm101 2y ago
Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.
- JackFr 2y ago
  > Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Everything is easy when you don't know about it.
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  > Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation. This. Commercial jets have had full auto taxi, take off, fly, land capability for a long time at supported airports. A human is still in the loop for parts of it due to the potential for something to deviate from nominal in a novel way at almost any time.

boohoo123 2y ago

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.

a12k 2y ago
So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?
malfist 2y ago
For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution. Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  > Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers. But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.
some_random 2y ago
The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.
drawkward 2y ago
>There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.

cratermoon 2y ago

[flagged]

apical_dendrite 2y ago

I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating. Let's say you have a completely random data set. You generate a bunch of random variables x1 through xn and a random dependent variable y. Then you poke around and see whether any of the x variables look like they might predict y, so you pick those variables and try to build a model on them. What you end up with is a model where, according to the standard tests of statistical significance, some of the xs predict the y, even though all the data is completely random. This is a much more likely explanation for why the answer weights on the biographical assessment were so weird than some conspiracy between the contractors who developed the test, the FAA staff, and the black employee organization. They had a dataset that was very skewed because historically there have been very few black controllers, and so was very prone to overfitting. The FAA asked the contractor to use that dataset to build a test that would serve as a rough filter, screen in good candidates, and not show a disparate impact. The contractor delivered a test that fulfilled those criteria (at least in the technical sense that it passed statistical validation). Whether or not the test actually made any sense was not their department.

daemonologist 2y ago
I agree that it seems likely that the weird questions and their weighting came from over-fitting as you describe. The cheating allegation though, from my reading, is that the "correct" answers were leaked and then disseminated by the leakee(s). (And that this was particularly impactful because it was unlikely that you would pass the overfit test otherwise.)
- apical_dendrite 2y ago
  When I read the IG report and saw what the guy actually said (and that his list of secret buzzwords actually turned out to be a photocopy from a resume writing book) it was pretty clear that he was bullshitting and claiming that he had inside information about the process that he didn't actually have.
  - itsdrewmiller 2y ago

gadders 2y ago

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name. It should never, ever be about hard quotas. It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

paulddraper 2y ago
> It should never, ever be about hard quotas. And yet, it is. The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category. A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?
- gadders 2y ago
  Ish. Yes, if everyone in your company (of a significant size) is the same, then that is a fail. However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics. And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?
- browningstreet 2y ago
  I'll counter this with my experience. I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure they could post their job openings to affinity outlets frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places of origin, and racial communities. It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college graduates". Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.
saynay 2y ago
Honestly, quotas would probably have been better than what was done here. Inventing a test (or 'questionnaire' as it was called here) where the goal was to filter out almost everyone who did not have the answer key, then only giving that answer key to the preferred race is just such a terrible way to do it.

dfilppi 2y ago

[dead]

hitekker 2y ago

For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.

sashank_1509 2y ago
Wow, how can anyone take that test and defend FAA hiring practices. This is dystopia level nonsense
- UberFly 2y ago
  Unfortunately this dystopia level nonsense has infected a lot lately and I'm glad it's finally getting some sunshine applied to it.
- BonoboIO 2y ago
  I learned about the opportunity to apply for an Air Traffic Control Specialist (ATCS) job through: 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.
- sethammons 2y ago
  Congress stopped it 9 years ago.
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
    they scheduled the trial for 2026. Congress hasn't stopped or done anything since.
drivebyhooting 2y ago
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.

sporkland 2y ago

I look at stories like this and a key moment of failure that is obvious to anyone that has ever deployed code is don't make a change and roll it out to 100% of all devices/servers immediately. Feels like there is just some basic things missing from folks brains that gradual release and validation of the impacted cohort isn't a built in instinct for us.

naijaboiler 2y ago
yeah, they should have absolutely piloted this approach, look at the results, re-avaluated or fixed things, try again, before making it the absolute new policy

throw7 2y ago

Exactly what do the liberals (the author) want to happen? He seems to still believe that "lowering the bar" is the right and good thing to do moving forward?

potato3732842 2y ago

Complaints about controller shortages and 6-day weeks being the norm and whatnot go back into the 00s. Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and onboarding pipeline in the first place? The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is egregious.

Xelynega 2y ago
Do you honestly believe that hiring rate is determined by DEI departments and not budgets? 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"...

khazhoux 2y ago

From what I'm seeing, this program started in 2014 and was killed in 2016. Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's culture-war narrative.

exabrial 2y ago

> Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.” Wow.

throwaway260124 2y ago

I don’t think a test with R^2 of 0.27 should be used to completely reject candidates. It should have weighting proportional to its explanatory power. Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was clearly being overused.

ramblenode 2y ago

The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself: > The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

armada651 2y ago
Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any 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.
- TraceWoodgrains 2y ago
  To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    Is it absurd? 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.

mhalle 2y ago

Some important points that this article glosses over. The FAA Academy where all flight controllers are trained is way over-subscribed. Recruiting policies aside, I can find no evidence that the FAA wasn't training as many controllers as it could through its academy. This fact remained true through the Trump 1 administration into the Biden admin, except for COVID. The pandemic was understandably a huge disruption, as were government shutdowns. We can know this from the FAA Controller Staffing reports from 2019 (Trump 1 before the pandemic but after Obama) and 2024 (Biden). The 2024 report has been scrubbed from the FAA website when I last checked, but is available through the wayback machine: 2019: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staffing/media/2019-ABA-001-CWP_2019_508c.pdf https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf... 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241225184848/https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/afn-aba-20240509-cwp.pdf 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 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-faa-taps-outside-schools-boost-air-traffic-controller-training/400040/ 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-a883-3b7f79e06dd9 https://chatgpt.com/share/679eb87f-c4fc-800a-a883-3b7f79e06d...

dj_gitmo 2y ago

One of the reasons that these attempts to increase diversity are such a mess is because it is illegal to have a straightforward quota. If these agencies could just have a policy like "Group X is %Y of the population. This agency must hire at least %Y/2 from group X", there would be no need to have these sneaky roundabout methods of increasing equity.

rdtsc 2y ago

> The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation Ah yes, we carefully investigated ourselves and we have not found anything wrong. Thank you for your concern. > Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.” It's like we're talking about a talent show not air traffic controllers. I mean, shit, this just fuels Trump and his supporters' rhetoric and validates all the rambling and craziness involved around this topic. Who needs enemies when you got friends doing this kind of stuff and shooting everyone in the foot. It's like Biden pardoning his son after talking about corruption and nepotism.

lordloki 2y ago
Or all the people that you assumed were racist are really just upset about these racist policies.
macrocosmos 2y ago
You’re upset that reality aligns with the rhetoric? Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric? Yeah, fair enough

ein0p 2y ago

> In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work she’s passionate about—not lowering the bar, but inspiring more people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to reach it Discrimination by race, gender and sexual orientation (aka DEI, jokingly disabbreviated as "didn't earn it") always results in lowering the bar. No exceptions. Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. What's ironic is this is setting minorities back decades. In 2000 nobody cared what color you were or whether you had a penis. In 2025 the assumption is that a minority is a "DEI hire" unless proven otherwise. And bah gawd there are real exemplars out there to support that narrative.

teractiveodular 2y ago
The one positive "DEI" thing you can do without lowering the bar is to widen the net: look harder for qualified candidates in places where you didn't look before.
default-kramer 2y ago
> Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. False dichotomy. It's possible that in some situations DEI could replace cronyism and produce better hires. I have no idea how often that actually happens, but I know that cronyism happens a lot.
- sneedle 2y ago
  [flagged]

synergy20 2y ago

i will prefer driving to taking flights for the coming years for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.

silexia 2y ago

"Diversity hiring goals" is the pretty new propaganda word for ugly old racism.

gitnow 2y ago
Yeah, wanting to increase diversity sure is, uh- wait...
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  "Wanting to increase diversity" means "fetishization of racial identity at the cost of other human traits". Yeah, sounds racist to me.

vichle 2y ago

There's a very high amount of political topics lately, and it's very uninteresting to non-US readers. Please stop.

mfkp 2y ago
Nobody is forcing you to read this or comment. Go find a local news website if you're so displeased with the US content.
- vichle 2y ago
  Not every forum needs to be an arena for your polarized world views. This used to be a place where all types of scientific and tech related content was posted. Not so much right now, everyone is just throwing shit at each other but with nicer choice of words than on Twitter.
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    And this forum isn’t specifically made for you. Ignore it and move on. Just like other people do for other subjects they aren’t interested in. The ego to think that things that don’t interest you specifically have no place here while plenty of others are engaging just fine.
    - vichle 2y ago
      Of course it isn't made for me, and I do not expect it to be. The fact that you assume so points to a lack of empathy on your end, something that I think most Americans could really use more of right now. 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.
      - 2y ago

zombiwoof 2y ago

I really need a ChatGPT summary of this article

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
Qualified applicants were discriminated against explicitly because of DEI initiatives.

anitil 2y ago

Trace is on here, though not very active (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains)

dml2135 2y ago

DEI is simply a framework. Like Agile, it can be well implemented if the person implementing it understands the problems it is trying to address, along with its limitations. 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.

yeahwhatever10 2y ago
Are people still using Agile?
- hyeonwho4 2y ago
  Yes.
- sethammons 2y ago
  Are people not?
sneedle 2y ago
[flagged]

hjgjhyuhy 2y ago

America should help its poor and underprivileged groups through stuff like progressive taxation, better social service, and extra resources for schools in poor areas. It’s not perfect, but kind of works. It helps people to achieve better educational outcomes already in their childhood. Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.

mp05 2y ago
Well as they say, it's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Te former I believe strongly, no doubt. They latter? EH
kshahkshah 2y ago
> better social service 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.
- soared 2y ago
  Extra resources for schools = free breakfast, lunch, afterschool activities = kids cost less money = parents can work less demanding/normal hour jobs = more parental involvement. 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.
  - kshahkshah 2y ago
    Agree with all that in theory. I don't know of a good implementation of it.
    - anon7000 2y ago
      There are loads of successful implementations! Just look outside of the US to Nordic countries or, say, Japan or Korea. The US does a lot of things pretty badly.

macrocosmos 2y ago

I saw this posted on the aviation subreddit and after gaining a few dozen comments, it seems to have been deleted. Strange times since it is seems this is very relevant there. I'm glad an article like this can exist here.

jmpman 2y ago

My brother in law is a pilot, and has colleagues who were impacted by this. What surprised me is that he blames Obama for this. I typically ignore his blame of Obama as some racist tirade, but this seems to point to Obama pushing these changes?

electrondood 2y ago

It's ridiculous to me that we're back in the world of "politician blames bad thing on wokeness" > "everyone has to spend months discussing this as if it's a sane idea."

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
It's ridiculous to me that a journalist can provide clear evidence that dei initiatives were used to discriminate against people and you can dismiss it by calling it wokeness.

geenkeuse 2y ago

[flagged]

worik 2y ago

Bad examples of DEI do not invalidate DEI, they invalidate bad implementation of policy 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