Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
Respectfully, thats not accurate.
The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.
The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.
The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.
> Taking old, resolved scandals
In what way do you consider this resolved?
The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).
The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)
The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.
The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.
The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
In 2023, the FAA set several, major goals for DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FY23%20OSI-M%20and%2...
Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion = Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...
Too many examples. Compared to 2016, the FAA of the 2020s was better at hiding their written bias. Nonetheless, they failed to attract the talent they needed.
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.
That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
It's bizarre to see people say that since the media initially didn't report on the full story, telling people the full story is similar to "state-sponsored propoganda." That mindset appears to be saying that once the media has made up a narrative for the story, people should be hostile to other pertinent information, even when it's uncovering major aspects of the story that the media didn't report on.
That kind of attitude runs counter to anyone interested in finding out the truth.
Edit: Also worth pointing out the author's original article on this scandal was written a year ago, and a followup was recently written to clarify things in response to increased discussion about that article. They're a law student who initially wrote about it after coming across court documents and being surprised that there had been almost no coverage regarding what actually had happened.
The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels.
There are two separate arguments happening:
Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.
Did changing their application process create a shortage of ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too many mediocre candidates.
I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.
intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.
Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.
It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.
Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".
And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.
"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."
This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology.
The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity.
Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents.
When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away.
Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost.
Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?
I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.
> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.
This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will be in the first few sentences they say.
The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to place in it.
Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy reflects on the changes some seek.
Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal.
Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on.
What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted.
So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.
Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.
Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.
This doesn’t make ATC professionals better people. It doesn’t make them smarter. It doesn’t make them superhuman. It makes them better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits probably make them worse at many others.
We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.
Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more comfortable and easier.
Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and neurological development. is there really any difference, or is neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity?
Different is not a value judgement.
> We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.
In the situation of hiring people for specific jobs, filtering for a perceived "neurodiversity" would have no scientific basis.
Fortunately, hiring doesn't work this way. The idea is to hire for people who are qualified for and capable of the job, not to try to evaluate questionable proxies like neurodiversity.
Ergo we should test for ability, not some arbitrary representation of race, sex, or other non-task related metric.
Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than others.
Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something exceptionally simple.
This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.
That's exactly what providing the grounds means. It's like how the no-fly list provides a convenient way to trap your estranged wife outside the country. You can do a whole lot of racism, call it a DEI initiative and use the right terminology, and no-one bats an eye.
And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.
The biographical screen was not flawed, it was designed to try to pass minority students at higher rates than non minority (for example that question on "your hardest topic" needing to be science). And it did exactly what it was designed to do.
Which had the effect of dramatically reducing the available candidates.
CTI never had preferential treatment, they simply were students who learned the skills needed to pass the actual ability test. That's not preferential treatment, that's exactly what school is meant to do.
Imagine, for a second, having tapes on someone saying "Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for ~~Caucasians~~ <insert minority here>, it wasn’t for, you know, the ~~white~~ <insert minority here> male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”
Would you still argue this the way you are doing? Would this still have been buried? Are you actually trying to argue this isn't a blatant case of racism?!
> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.
After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
A. A PUBLIC NOTICE OR MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT +5 B. A FRIEND OR RELATIVE 0 C. COLLEGE RECRUITMENT +3 D. WORKING IN SOME OTHER CAPACITY FOR THE AGENCY +3 E. SOME OTHER WAY 0
Wow … I get points for this. No surprise, that this is going south. I m shocked.
How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.
This gives examples of the test format and questions:
https://pointsixtyfive.com/xenforo/threads/atsa-compilation....
The elite are getting hired no matter what. It's the average person who was just barely above the bar that gets bumped to make room for a quota based hire that really feels the impact.
Left leaning people are more concerned with power controlled by nepotism and “unfair” connections. To me that is a kind of sour grapes view fueled by too many participation trophies.
A government full of cronies sucks but we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point. A meritocratic/technocratic government sounds like a dystopian novel.
Elementary school kids are huge on fairness and injustice. It seems like it's built in to facilitate group social dynamics in great apes. It takes a lot of sophistication to be able to frame valuing fairness as a character flaw.
>A meritocratic...government sounds like a dystopian novel.
So nepotism + networking = bad, but meritocracy also = bad...?
>...we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point.
OR you reduce the risk vector and limit the size & scope of government. Most people agree with your earlier premises, so why would I support adding powers to a structure where folks I strongly disagree with will lead that structure ~50% of the time?
It should never, ever be about hard quotas.
It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.
It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that’s no hyperbole.
The scandal was coaching people how to pass the personality test. That's just a waste. You end up getting people who are a bad fit for the job, and will ultimately not be successful long-term
For instance, I will ace any aptitude test at 99.9%+ percentile easily (I always do at any standardized test, SAT, GRE, MCAT etc). Yet I would be a terrible terrible fit for ATC. The level of detail-orientedness it needs day to day for me would be a challenge. I can do it for short periods of time of absolute concentration, but my god, there is no way I would last at the job long-term. Training me would have been a waste of scarce resources. But I know several people that such tasks energize them and may not score as high on the aptitude test, but would be a better fit for that job long-term
If done well, including personality test could have been a good way to produce better outcomes, and increase the early part of the pipelines by opening it up to more people than just CTI grads.
I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.
The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.
You can also do things to remove stereotypes about your industry - "I'm not going to work in industry X because it's all posh people."
Systems affect different people differently (which is blindingly obvious but bears repeating) so if you want a meritocracy based on actual ability you need to do your best to nurture all people with ability, which isn't a one size fits all approach. I knew multiple people who absolutely kicked ass that benefitted from targeted programs (and from their success we've all benefited from these programs), there's just also a lot of dumb shit out there for DEI, too.
e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.
And yet, it is.
The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category.
A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?
I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure they could post their job openings to affinity outlets frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places of origin, and racial communities.
It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college graduates".
Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.
However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics.
And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?
Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and onboarding pipeline in the first place?
The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is egregious.
Do you really, honestly believe that the FAA was using these practices to hire less people and not just hire the people they want to hire in the limited positions?
Why would they go to such absurd lengths when they could just say "we can't hire more people because we can't afford it"...
Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.
we should just drop means testing of services
> extra resources for schools in poor areas
more funding != better outcomes. Parental involvement is what drives outcomes. If you don't have parents around, nothing matters.
That’s a lot of logic, but resources for schools is a lot more than free food, better books, etc. schools are one of the best ways to distribute community resources. The alternative (read: kids who got expelled from normal schools) near me hosts adult job fairs, has family counseling, etc.
A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the application process will immediately be outed for having a disability. The same applies for people who speak different languages.
Beyond that, the application is only one place in which discrimination occurs.
- It also happens during interviews which are much harder to anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that, while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent capable people from becoming qualified.
Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous resume will fix everything.
- Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool
- Don't collect demographic data on applications
- Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee
- The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped
- Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result
- If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting
The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision.
Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.
> If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting
These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.
A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline.
I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.
The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way.
Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.
Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.
Draw from that what conclusions you may.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.
But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.
It just shows how much propaganda there is around DEI, you're saying we should get rid of DEI and replace it with the things DEI was trying to do. It really has become the new critical race theory.
A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...
For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?
And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.
Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.
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.
The answers to the biographical questionnaire - which screened out 90% of applicants - were leaked to ethnic affinity groups. If a select group of being being provided with the correct answers isn't cheating, I don't know what is.
To pass the test you have to click A on all 62 questions apart from question 16 where you have to click D to say your lowest grade in school was in history. The thing's a complete travesty.
Also answering answer A to 23 (>20 hours/week paid employment last year of college) would logically conflict with answering A to 56 (Did not attend college).
Buddy if someone tells you the answers to a multiple choice exam and you use them, then you've deliberately cheated. That's all there is to it.
Wow.
Discrimination by race, gender and sexual orientation (aka DEI, jokingly disabbreviated as "didn't earn it") always results in lowering the bar. No exceptions. Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. What's ironic is this is setting minorities back decades. In 2000 nobody cared what color you were or whether you had a penis. In 2025 the assumption is that a minority is a "DEI hire" unless proven otherwise. And bah gawd there are real exemplars out there to support that narrative.
False dichotomy. It's possible that in some situations DEI could replace cronyism and produce better hires. I have no idea how often that actually happens, but I know that cronyism happens a lot.
And just like Agile, it can be poorly implemented when the person implementing it does not understand its purpose, or hates the framework and cynically implements it under protest.
In both cases, the poor implementations should not justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but so it goes.
America desperately needs more air traffic controllers
If these agencies could just have a policy like "Group X is %Y of the population. This agency must hire at least %Y/2 from group X", there would be no need to have these sneaky roundabout methods of increasing equity.
The FAA Academy where all flight controllers are trained is way over-subscribed. Recruiting policies aside, I can find no evidence that the FAA wasn't training as many controllers as it could through its academy. This fact remained true through the Trump 1 administration into the Biden admin, except for COVID. The pandemic was understandably a huge disruption, as were government shutdowns.
We can know this from the FAA Controller Staffing reports from 2019 (Trump 1 before the pandemic but after Obama) and 2024 (Biden). The 2024 report has been scrubbed from the FAA website when I last checked, but is available through the wayback machine:
2019: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241225184848/https://www.faa.g...
There appears to be no urgency in Trump 1 about this issue in the report. Things changed in 2023 when an external safety report revealed the staffing problem and suggested improvements.
https://www.faa.gov/NAS_safety_review_team_report.pdf
As a result, hiring almost doubled between 2010 and 2024, with 1800 controllers hired in the last year. More importantly, the FAA followed the report recommendation to use CTI schools as additional academies:
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/10/amid-hiring-surge-...
It seems like the Biden administration took real action to address a problem that had been unfortunately present and unacknowledged for many years.
See a chatgpt analysis comparing the two reports here: https://chatgpt.com/share/679eb87f-c4fc-800a-a883-3b7f79e06d...
Having a workforce the is purely white men is sub optimal and needs to be addressed. But it needs to be addressed carefully and with good management.
It does not need to be addressed like this
If you want to see a good example of DEI in action look to New Zealand. Forty years ago there were almost no Māori lawyers in New Zealand.
The deans of the law schools got together and decided to do something about it.
It worked, now there are many. Now it is much much harder for the state to accomplish the systematic impoverishment of Māori people and things are turning around
It takes decades done properly, but creates huge improvements in society
This story is a story of doing it catastrophically wrong
A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago who’d left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out.
I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.
This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about. It's become increasingly difficult to find out what actually happened once it's been filtered through media, social media, activists, and algorithmic propaganda.
What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?
> slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.
Again, something a lot of people are lying or selectively reporting about. Which is why it's become toxic in the first place. You could occasionally see the same people who were complaining about Rotherham not being investigated complain when other allegations of sexual assault were being investigated ("cancel culture"). Or not investigated, such as the Met police rapist.
Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.
DEI is actual racism.
Just personally, in the last four years:
1) The acting Dean at my law school held a struggle session where white people declared they were “white supremacists”
2) My kids’ school adopted racially segregated affinity groups. My daughter was invited to go to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess half south Asian = quarter black in the DEI hierarchy). Following that lead, a kid tried to kick my daughter out of a group chat for her circle of friends by making it black-kids only.
3) I’ve had coworkers ask if I count as “diverse” for purposes of a client contract and have had to perform diversity jigs during client meetings.
I’m not even going to list all the alienating behaviors from overly empathetic but deeply ignorant white people—the likes of which I never encountered living in a nearly all white town in the 1990s.
For the avoidance of doubt, I 100% agree that right-wing media is telling a lot of outright lies and you pointed out some good examples. However, I have seen left-leaning criticise tokenism in companies' DEI efforts. Philosophy Tube and Unlearning Economics are 2 examples off the top of my head.
> Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.
I disagree with this because I feel it misrepresents the riots this summer as a genuine expression of rage. It was not. It was organised violence by hardcore Nazis and football hooligans bussed in from Stoke to smash up a job centre in Sunderland and attempt to murder women and children.
70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this. This began 20 years ago and has gotten increasingly worse.
It has nothing to do with your topic.
> 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.
You're not disputing my core point.
That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it.
The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups.
That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota.
And you have to call Asians "white".
The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.
This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in poverty that there is a path to success for them.
The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.
Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?
You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully. They just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.
I don't think critical thinking and thoughtfulness from the left, or lack thereof, is the issue here.
I think the issue is simple, rhetoric beats nuance, every time. Rhetoric is the rock to nuance's scissors. We need to find the paper.
for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.
Ah yes, we carefully investigated ourselves and we have not found anything wrong. Thank you for your concern.
> Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”
It's like we're talking about a talent show not air traffic controllers.
I mean, shit, this just fuels Trump and his supporters' rhetoric and validates all the rambling and craziness involved around this topic.
Who needs enemies when you got friends doing this kind of stuff and shooting everyone in the foot. It's like Biden pardoning his son after talking about corruption and nepotism.
Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's culture-war narrative.
My take is we, collectively, pride ourselves on staying up-to-date with the latest and best practices. However, that staying up to date tends to be a rather shallow understanding at best. It's as if we read a short summary of the best practice, then cargo cult it everywhere, fully convinced that we're right because it is the current best practice.
The psychological intent is to outsource accountability and responsibility to these best practices. I'd argue that goal isn't always consciously undertaken. I'm not asserting malevolence, but more a reluctance to dig into the firehose of industrial knowledge that gets spewed at us 24/7.
I suspect this is not just confined to software dev. It's a sort of anti-intellectualism, ultimately. And it's hard to cast it as that, because I don't think we should tell people they're wrong for triaging emotional energy. But it also isn't right that we're okay with people generally checking out as much as possible.
I 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?
Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was clearly being overused.
Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control, such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the qualification bar.
This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool, and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it doesn’t translate to less competent controllers.
It seems like you are mincing words, similar to my previous company that wanted to hire more women. They started attending the women-only hiring convention and we could only interview from those candidates (HR filtered out the rest). So while we hired the best candidates we could, on average they weren't that great, they just passed a minimum bar.
If there was no change (or an increase) in the absolute numbers of passing graduates, that would support what you're saying. If there was a drop in the absolute numbers, it implies that there's at the very least fewer competent controllers. (And changes in the relative numbers tell us about whether the efficiency of the program changed.)
Given the litigation and FOIA requests around this, it seems like this data should be floating around, and should be fairly conclusive for one side.
(And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)
Just to be clear: you think that air traffic control is fully automatable?
How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into account, if it even thought about that edge case.
