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.
> 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.
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 Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.
With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case.
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.
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.
That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.
That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
Right, if you look at the documents there was clear racial discrimination involved.
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.
> How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?
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 don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"
I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda,
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.
Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.
From an internal US pov, yes you are correct that's exactly what the culture is here. Call out the obviously lowered standards for women and minority candidates and expect severe consequences to your career.
> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..."
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.
"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment."
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.
How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again.
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.
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.
> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology
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.
If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this:
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.
The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
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.
This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?
A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.
Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires.
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.
Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.
In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal.
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.
Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.
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?
Neither the FAA situation nor the article are about neurodiversity.
> 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.
I think you maybe misunderstood what I was saying. I’m saying that neurodivergence is why some people thrive at certain jobs that others would find exhausting.
Ergo we should test for ability, not some arbitrary representation of race, sex, or other non-task related metric.
Maybe it’s become politicised or fetishized and we need a new word again. But yeah, that was kinda my point. Hire people that thrive in that environment.
> 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.
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.
> I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds... it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own.
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.
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".
You should listen to what Harj, a YC partner and former CEO of TripleByte an objective software engineer competency test for hiring, has to say about what many companies were trying to do in lowering the bar. He only admitted companies were doing this in the past week.
There are methods of practicing DEI that don't lower the bar. There are methods of DEI that do lower the bar. There's no single answer to that question, it depends on how DEI is implemented in that particular case.
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.
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.
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.
You created this account 1hr ago, and are already 3 comments in on this topic. In all your comments you're doing mental gymnastics on a pretty clear-cut case. they have tapes.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
This is not the FAA's air traffic controller test. This is the biographical assessment. The air traffic controller test is called the ATSA (formerly AT-SAT) for Air Traffic Skills Assessment (Test).
This gives examples of the test format and questions:
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.
I'm not sure about most unqualified but I will say that it's people the bubble who are most impacted by these policies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
its actually a personality test, that ideally should be designed to be well-suited to filter out personality types that tend to be successful at the job.
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.
You expand your pipeline into places where you were not previously looking. Go recruit at a historically black college, or a Women Who Code convention. You don’t need to lower standards.
The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.
Another example is to make your recruiting contextual. How would you rate two candidate - one that grew up dirt poor and when to the worst public schools but gets 90% on your test, vs one that went to the best private schools and got 95%?
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."
The "Women in Engineering" group where I worked was instrumental in retaining multiple good engineers who would've definitely left otherwise after some gendered issues (asked out by coworkers, asked whether they were an engineer in meetings, etc). I was a mentor for early career engineers and I had a woman talking about leaving but the woman in engineering group at work helped her immensely and she's a top performer.
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.
Require diversity in the interview pool, not when making hiring decisions.
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.
As the article itself describes, programs that expose kids to fields they might otherwise not have a chance to interact with. A field trip for kids that focuses on creating more people in the future who are interested in the field from more diverse background.
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.
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?
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.
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"...
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.
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.
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.
Everything is easy until you account for the real world.
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.
The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are:
- 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.
> 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
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.
notice how these solution requires a dedication to diversity throughout the process from candidate sourcing to interviewing and all the way through, and not some simple cut and paste answers.
The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that.
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.
They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate.
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.
> 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.
This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as pulling from a larger pool.
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.
It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "make them more diverse": https://archive.is/iH2uh
Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.
Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence?
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...
This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.
> There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application.
For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?
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.
> I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.
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.
No, that's not what happened. The guy from the black affinity group CLAIMED that he knew the answers. But he's a completely unreliable source who was pretending to know things that he didn't actually know. He also claimed to have a list of magic buzzwords that would get your application moved to the top of the pile, but if you look at the list of magic buzzwords that he provided, it was just a list of dozens of generic action verbs like "make", "manage", "organize", "analyze", etc. from a resume writing book. I'm sure it's the same thing with the biographical assessment. He was just telling people what he THOUGHT were the right answers.
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.
You don't have to do that to pass the test. The max score possible is 179. One can pass the test without answering either of the worst subject questions "correctly."
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It is a US based website, mostly about US tech companies. You may find it uninteresting but it has large impacts on these companies so would not be out of place here.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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
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?
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.
> that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways
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.
It’s absolutely not being over reported. In the last four years, we have had the Supreme Court smack down Harvard for blatantly discriminating against whites and Asians (granting admission to black and Hispanic applicants with similar academic credentials at 3-10x the rate). A federal court smacked down Biden for racially discriminating in granting SBA loans. Another federal court smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas for board seats.
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.
> This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Is your friend interested perhaps in getting back in at the intersection of EMS and software engineering? She is welcome to contact me at my HN handle at gmail or my LinkedIn from the who wants to be hired post. We might have an opportunity for her she might find agreeable.
> 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.
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.
> 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 disagree with you, however I singled out the USA because, over the period of this article, both Obama and Biden were both president. Ultimately, the people arguing against my point can point to kernels of truth and of things that did happen. While I disagree with their diagnosis, I can't point to the fact that the issues were recognised and attempts made to address them. And, ultimately, Trump did win the presidential election partially off the back of this!
> 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.
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."
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.
I can't comment on DEI, I'm not qualified there. I can comment on software eng culture the past twenty years, however.
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.
yea, i agree — it’s definitely not just a software thing. good intentions don’t always translate into good execution.
i wonder if/when AGI becomes real, could it help with writing better policies/laws since it would have a broader understanding of issues and (hopefully) no bias so it would be able to predict outcomes we can't
> 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?
> once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.
It wasn’t on equal footing, so your entire post is based on either a misunderstanding or you’re just blatantly trolling in which case well done, I totally bit.
>But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of the US...
I'm old enough to remember when Biden nominated someone with no aviation experience to lead the head of the FAA, and also had corruption charges while acting as head of the LA transit system....AND Democrats were in _favor_ of that lack of experience:
"Democrats...spinning his lack of direct involvement with aviation as a positive, theoretically making him less likely to be aligned or swayed by any of the many interest groups or companies in the industry."[1]
I'm also old enough to remember when Pete Buttigieg was appointed Transportation Secretary, despite having virtually no experience in mass transit (no, a McKinsey deck doesn't count) and whose highest office was mayor of a small Indiana town.[2]
So can we stop with the hyperbole? Yes there are many good candidates, but the US could do much worse than a guy with experience in Iraq/Afghanistan/Guantanamo + 2 Bronze Stars + Joint Commendation + 2 Army Commendations + Expert Infantryman Badge + degrees from Harvard & Princeton.[3]
Dude, none of that has _anything_ to do with being able to run a huge organization. Nothing. It’s undeniable that Hegseth, even if you ignore all of the white supremacist shit, is completely unqualified to run a large organization. Noting other folks that aren’t super qualified doesn’t change that one bit, and it’s insulting to others’ intelligence to suggest it does.
We would call those qualifications to be a Sr. Principal Engineer or higher even ... not an SVP in charge of 1M+ people. Hegseth is way out of his league.
> But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of the US, to run the most powerful military in the world?
For some context, in the last fifty years, one nominee was rejected (Towers, for drinking), one was 'close' (Hagel, 58-41), but everyone else:
> Aside from that vote and Mr. Tower’s rejection following accounts of his excessive drinking, no other secretary of defense nominee in the past 50 years has gotten fewer than 90 votes, with Leon Panetta being confirmed 100-0 in 2011. Three others — Harold Brown in 1977, Les Aspin in 1993 and Donald Rumsfeld in 2001 — sailed through on voice votes.
It’s politics. These are political roles. It’s organizational leading and having people in place who are aligned with your goals, not splicing DNA.
And we’ve had the qualified one who got 90 Senate votes in confirmation and what did that get us? The Iraq War and the Afghan departure with abandoned locals falling off airplanes.
It’s laughable when the idea of checking the same boxes that always get checked is “qualified”.
He has zero experience running a large organization. The Secretary of Defense, while a political appointee, also requires some ability to manage a large organization, which again, he doesn’t have. And suggesting that we didn’t get the desired outcomes from another qualified candidate doesn’t mean we should switch to literally unqualified candidates. Take your partisan hat off for a few minutes and think about what qualities are necessary in a SecDef, and think about whether Hegseth meets them or not.
> It’s organizational leading and having people in place who are aligned with your goals, not splicing DNA.
We're talking about the DOD here, not Transportation Secretary.
And this conversation is in the context that these are the same people who are "rooting out the disease of DEI", Red Scare style, in order to "promote meritocracy".
As for whether qualified leaders got us into wars we should never have gotten into (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) that's a whole other conversation.
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.
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
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?
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.
if people who have been historically quantifiably discriminated against and disqualified based on that discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?
> This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway
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.
How many people (in absolute and relative terms) from each cohort passed/failed the training program and how long did they take to do so? Did the numbers change with the two policy changes described in the article?
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
> 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.
They are, this is supposedly part of the "Nexgen" air traffic system. I think eventually airlines will be forced into greater automation. When a possible collision scenario arises, the plane will take over and evade on it's own. Airplanes will increasingly become automated and pilots wait for emergencies.
We have an automated system to prevent mid-air collisions,
it's called TCAS, Traffic collision avoidance system.
For safety reasons,
it is inhibited at 1000 feet AGL or below,
to prevent dangerous descents into terrain.
How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into account, if it even thought about that edge case.
Everything is heavily automated right now up to and including autopilot landings. The people are in the loop to cover the gaps where automation doesn't exist or when it fails. Everything is so tightly scheduled at airports now that any kind of failure in automation would pretty rapidly lead to catastrophic outcomes if humans weren't constantly involved in decision making. Even if you just had humans on "stand by" it would take to long to get them up to speed on the context if things went sideways.
Sort of. There’s like 5 conditions of automation commercial planes can be in. The automation mostly functions to make the pilots workload manageable, not to make their workload non existent. Commercial flights used to have a crew of 3, captain, first officer and flight engineer. The automation has reduced the workload to eliminate the flight engineer role and make flights operable by 2 people.
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.
> 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.
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.
Congress stopped the shitty behavior quiz 9 years ago
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Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.
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The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.
With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case.
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.
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> Taking old, resolved scandals
The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
Yes, the scandal is not over because the FAA continued to conflate diversity with performance.
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.
No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.
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Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?
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That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.
That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
Right, if you look at the documents there was clear racial discrimination involved.
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.
> How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?
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.
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I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"
I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
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> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda,
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.
Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories.
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From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.
Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.
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From an internal US pov, yes you are correct that's exactly what the culture is here. Call out the obviously lowered standards for women and minority candidates and expect severe consequences to your career.
> to call a spade a spade
intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.
Yes. It was also often career suicide to criticize DEI indicatives.
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like the n word?
The problem is it hasn’t been resolved, there is a big lawsuit about it still working its way through the courts.
> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..."
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.
"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment."
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.
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How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again.
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.
> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.
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."
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.
> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology
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.
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> 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
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If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this:
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.
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Resolved? By whom?
You're suggesting DEI wasn't the problem then? Using a new colloquial term doesn't suddenly change the foundation of the concern.
> be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?
Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was interesting
The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
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.
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Spot on for this guy.
From the article:
> 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.
This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?
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> Likely yes.
Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
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A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.
If you look at the articles on this blog, it’s clear the author has an agenda. The site is filed away as “view with suspicion” for me
Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires.
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.
Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.
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In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal.
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.
Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.
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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.
Neither the FAA situation nor the article are about neurodiversity.
> 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.
I think you maybe misunderstood what I was saying. I’m saying that neurodivergence is why some people thrive at certain jobs that others would find exhausting.
Ergo we should test for ability, not some arbitrary representation of race, sex, or other non-task related metric.
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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.
Maybe it’s become politicised or fetishized and we need a new word again. But yeah, that was kinda my point. Hire people that thrive in that environment.
What's a better word?
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In case you [need citation] of this analysis, please see the 1999 "documentary" Pushing Tin, starring John Cusack. :)
> 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.
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.
> I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds... it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own.
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.
How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills.
And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
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> 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.
I’m in two of those groups and I feel like they ignore me and take me for granted.
It's a myth that the bar is lowered for DEI hires.
You should RTFA before making such an obviously disprovable assertion.
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You should listen to what Harj, a YC partner and former CEO of TripleByte an objective software engineer competency test for hiring, has to say about what many companies were trying to do in lowering the bar. He only admitted companies were doing this in the past week.
https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
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There are methods of practicing DEI that don't lower the bar. There are methods of DEI that do lower the bar. There's no single answer to that question, it depends on how DEI is implemented in that particular case.
And you are backing this claim up with what exactly?
It isn't possible for you to know this.
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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.
That's not an accurate way of describing this.
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.
CTI graduates had a much better rate of actually becoming ATC professionals. So why should the FAA ignore that instead of spin one up at Howard?
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.
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You created this account 1hr ago, and are already 3 comments in on this topic. In all your comments you're doing mental gymnastics on a pretty clear-cut case. they have tapes.
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?!
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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).
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.
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.
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For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
Wow, how can anyone take that test and defend FAA hiring practices. This is dystopia level nonsense
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.
Congress stopped it 9 years ago.
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Unfortunately this dystopia level nonsense has infected a lot lately and I'm glad it's finally getting some sunshine applied to it.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.
Congress stopped it 9 years ago
This is not the FAA's air traffic controller test. This is the biographical assessment. The air traffic controller test is called the ATSA (formerly AT-SAT) for Air Traffic Skills Assessment (Test).
This gives examples of the test format and questions:
https://pointsixtyfive.com/xenforo/threads/atsa-compilation....
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NB they still administered a cognitive test to candidates that passed (blegh) the biographical assessment
After lowering the standards so that 95% of people who took the test would pass.
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It turns out you can’t be an ATC unless your worst subject is science. It’s the only question which awards points.
I think you misread something, because that's not true.
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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.
I'm not sure about most unqualified but I will say that it's people the bubble who are most impacted by these policies.
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.
Well then it demonstrates their sincerity I suppose.
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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.
Sour grapes rather than valuing fairness?
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.
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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.
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>A government full of cronies sucks...
>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?
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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.
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.
“Such a terrible way to do it” is a huge understatement.
It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that’s no hyperbole.
its actually a personality test, that ideally should be designed to be well-suited to filter out personality types that tend to be successful at the job.
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.
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"This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name."
I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.
You expand your pipeline into places where you were not previously looking. Go recruit at a historically black college, or a Women Who Code convention. You don’t need to lower standards.
The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.
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Another example is to make your recruiting contextual. How would you rate two candidate - one that grew up dirt poor and when to the worst public schools but gets 90% on your test, vs one that went to the best private schools and got 95%?
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."
The "Women in Engineering" group where I worked was instrumental in retaining multiple good engineers who would've definitely left otherwise after some gendered issues (asked out by coworkers, asked whether they were an engineer in meetings, etc). I was a mentor for early career engineers and I had a woman talking about leaving but the woman in engineering group at work helped her immensely and she's a top performer.
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.
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Require diversity in the interview pool, not when making hiring decisions.
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.
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As the article itself describes, programs that expose kids to fields they might otherwise not have a chance to interact with. A field trip for kids that focuses on creating more people in the future who are interested in the field from more diverse background.
Blind auditions in orchestras, efforts to get women into sciences are all great examples.
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> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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"...
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.
> 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.
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.
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Well as they say, it's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Te former I believe strongly, no doubt. They latter? EH
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.
Everything is easy until you account for the real world.
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.
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The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are:
- 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.
> 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
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.
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notice how these solution requires a dedication to diversity throughout the process from candidate sourcing to interviewing and all the way through, and not some simple cut and paste answers.
The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that.
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.
They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate.
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.
Blind hiring in practice that reduces diversity. [1]
Draw from that what conclusions you may.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
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.
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.
> 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.
This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as pulling from a larger pool.
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.
It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "make them more diverse": https://archive.is/iH2uh
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Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.
Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence?
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...
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This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.
Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.
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So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?
> There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application.
For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?
IT's not so simple. Eventually there will be an interview and the person scoring the interview may have some bias.
And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.
The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the workforce.
>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.
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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.
> I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.
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.
No, that's not what happened. The guy from the black affinity group CLAIMED that he knew the answers. But he's a completely unreliable source who was pretending to know things that he didn't actually know. He also claimed to have a list of magic buzzwords that would get your application moved to the top of the pile, but if you look at the list of magic buzzwords that he provided, it was just a list of dozens of generic action verbs like "make", "manage", "organize", "analyze", etc. from a resume writing book. I'm sure it's the same thing with the biographical assessment. He was just telling people what he THOUGHT were the right answers.
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Have you looked at the info on the test here https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/? (copied from another post)
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.
You don't have to do that to pass the test. The max score possible is 179. One can pass the test without answering either of the worst subject questions "correctly."
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).
Did you get a different question/answer than I did? For me it showed science as the only correct answer awarding 15 points.
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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.)
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.
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> I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.
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.
This is a great read - thanks for sharing. This provides valuable context to this whole situation that I was wholly unaware of.
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.
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.
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
> Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”
Wow.
> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
Are people still using Agile?
Are people not?
Yes.
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There's a very high amount of political topics lately, and it's very uninteresting to non-US readers. Please stop.
It is a US based website, mostly about US tech companies. You may find it uninteresting but it has large impacts on these companies so would not be out of place here.
I see absolutely zero comments in this thread about how it affects tech companies. Please elaborate.
Nobody is forcing you to read this or comment. Go find a local news website if you're so displeased with the US content.
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.
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Related:
America desperately needs more air traffic controllers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840
"Diversity hiring goals" is the pretty new propaganda word for ugly old racism.
Yeah, wanting to increase diversity sure is, uh- wait...
"Wanting to increase diversity" means "fetishization of racial identity at the cost of other human traits".
Yeah, sounds racist to me.
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.
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_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...
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
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?
Trace is on here, though not very active (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains)
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.
> that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways
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.
> What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?
DEI is actual racism.
It’s absolutely not being over reported. In the last four years, we have had the Supreme Court smack down Harvard for blatantly discriminating against whites and Asians (granting admission to black and Hispanic applicants with similar academic credentials at 3-10x the rate). A federal court smacked down Biden for racially discriminating in granting SBA loans. Another federal court smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas for board seats.
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.
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> This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about
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.
> the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out
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.
>> the laziest and stupidest possible ways
> 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.
You're not disputing my core point.
> 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".
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.
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> there isn't another legal way to do it
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.
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Is your friend interested perhaps in getting back in at the intersection of EMS and software engineering? She is welcome to contact me at my HN handle at gmail or my LinkedIn from the who wants to be hired post. We might have an opportunity for her she might find agreeable.
Unfortunately not. She soured on the profession quite badly quite a while ago and she's never expressed a desire to go back.
> left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny
Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?
You’re exhibiting all the behaviours that push women out of Software Engineering right in this post.
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> 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.
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.
> 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 disagree with you, however I singled out the USA because, over the period of this article, both Obama and Biden were both president. Ultimately, the people arguing against my point can point to kernels of truth and of things that did happen. While I disagree with their diagnosis, I can't point to the fact that the issues were recognised and attempts made to address them. And, ultimately, Trump did win the presidential election partially off the back of this!
The paper "is pedantic" and rejected by everyone except "pedants".
Love how everyone is projecting their bigotry onto this lol.
i will prefer driving to taking flights for the coming years
for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.
> 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.
Or all the people that you assumed were racist are really just upset about these racist policies.
You’re upset that reality aligns with the rhetoric? Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?
> Why not just accept that maybe there is something to the rhetoric?
Yeah, fair enough
I really need a ChatGPT summary of this article
Qualified applicants were discriminated against explicitly because of DEI initiatives.
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.
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."
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.
wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues
I can't comment on DEI, I'm not qualified there. I can comment on software eng culture the past twenty years, however.
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.
yea, i agree — it’s definitely not just a software thing. good intentions don’t always translate into good execution.
i wonder if/when AGI becomes real, could it help with writing better policies/laws since it would have a broader understanding of issues and (hopefully) no bias so it would be able to predict outcomes we can't
> 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?
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.
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> equal footing
So, the candidates who were not members of some racially based association also got access to the answers to the first test?
> once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.
It wasn’t on equal footing, so your entire post is based on either a misunderstanding or you’re just blatantly trolling in which case well done, I totally bit.
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.
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>But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of the US...
I'm old enough to remember when Biden nominated someone with no aviation experience to lead the head of the FAA, and also had corruption charges while acting as head of the LA transit system....AND Democrats were in _favor_ of that lack of experience:
"Democrats...spinning his lack of direct involvement with aviation as a positive, theoretically making him less likely to be aligned or swayed by any of the many interest groups or companies in the industry."[1]
I'm also old enough to remember when Pete Buttigieg was appointed Transportation Secretary, despite having virtually no experience in mass transit (no, a McKinsey deck doesn't count) and whose highest office was mayor of a small Indiana town.[2]
So can we stop with the hyperbole? Yes there are many good candidates, but the US could do much worse than a guy with experience in Iraq/Afghanistan/Guantanamo + 2 Bronze Stars + Joint Commendation + 2 Army Commendations + Expert Infantryman Badge + degrees from Harvard & Princeton.[3]
[1]https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/faa-nominee-quizzed-on-a... [2]https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit... [3]https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4042297...
Dude, none of that has _anything_ to do with being able to run a huge organization. Nothing. It’s undeniable that Hegseth, even if you ignore all of the white supremacist shit, is completely unqualified to run a large organization. Noting other folks that aren’t super qualified doesn’t change that one bit, and it’s insulting to others’ intelligence to suggest it does.
We would call those qualifications to be a Sr. Principal Engineer or higher even ... not an SVP in charge of 1M+ people. Hegseth is way out of his league.
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> But at the same time we -- meaning Trump and the GOP Senate -- just appointed the least qualified candidate in the history of the US, to run the most powerful military in the world?
For some context, in the last fifty years, one nominee was rejected (Towers, for drinking), one was 'close' (Hagel, 58-41), but everyone else:
> Aside from that vote and Mr. Tower’s rejection following accounts of his excessive drinking, no other secretary of defense nominee in the past 50 years has gotten fewer than 90 votes, with Leon Panetta being confirmed 100-0 in 2011. Three others — Harold Brown in 1977, Les Aspin in 1993 and Donald Rumsfeld in 2001 — sailed through on voice votes.
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/pol...
For Hesgeth, four GOPs voted against him, and so the VP in his role as President of Senate had to break the 50-50 tie.
Getting >90 votes for SECDEF is the norm. The picks are regarded as competent and the votes have generally reflected that.
Least qualified according to who? The Democrats?
It’s politics. These are political roles. It’s organizational leading and having people in place who are aligned with your goals, not splicing DNA.
And we’ve had the qualified one who got 90 Senate votes in confirmation and what did that get us? The Iraq War and the Afghan departure with abandoned locals falling off airplanes.
It’s laughable when the idea of checking the same boxes that always get checked is “qualified”.
He has zero experience running a large organization. The Secretary of Defense, while a political appointee, also requires some ability to manage a large organization, which again, he doesn’t have. And suggesting that we didn’t get the desired outcomes from another qualified candidate doesn’t mean we should switch to literally unqualified candidates. Take your partisan hat off for a few minutes and think about what qualities are necessary in a SecDef, and think about whether Hegseth meets them or not.
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> It’s organizational leading and having people in place who are aligned with your goals, not splicing DNA.
We're talking about the DOD here, not Transportation Secretary.
And this conversation is in the context that these are the same people who are "rooting out the disease of DEI", Red Scare style, in order to "promote meritocracy".
As for whether qualified leaders got us into wars we should never have gotten into (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) that's a whole other conversation.
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> 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-...
While it didn't make the same splash then, I saw it and didn't see people responding by trying to cancel the author.
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?
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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.
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.
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
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this is the first opinion piece you've read and you're convinced? good grief
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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?
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.
It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their race.
But but but I was told that DEI lowered standards
if people who have been historically quantifiably discriminated against and disqualified based on that discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?
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> This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway
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.
the average engineer is not 10x.
How many people (in absolute and relative terms) from each cohort passed/failed the training program and how long did they take to do so? Did the numbers change with the two policy changes described in the article?
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.
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.)
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.
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!!
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.
> a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people.
Just to be clear: you think that air traffic control is fully automatable?
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.
> 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.
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> Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation.
Everything is easy when you don't know about it.
They are, this is supposedly part of the "Nexgen" air traffic system. I think eventually airlines will be forced into greater automation. When a possible collision scenario arises, the plane will take over and evade on it's own. Airplanes will increasingly become automated and pilots wait for emergencies.
We have an automated system to prevent mid-air collisions, it's called TCAS, Traffic collision avoidance system. For safety reasons, it is inhibited at 1000 feet AGL or below, to prevent dangerous descents into terrain.
How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into account, if it even thought about that edge case.
Everything is heavily automated right now up to and including autopilot landings. The people are in the loop to cover the gaps where automation doesn't exist or when it fails. Everything is so tightly scheduled at airports now that any kind of failure in automation would pretty rapidly lead to catastrophic outcomes if humans weren't constantly involved in decision making. Even if you just had humans on "stand by" it would take to long to get them up to speed on the context if things went sideways.
Sort of. There’s like 5 conditions of automation commercial planes can be in. The automation mostly functions to make the pilots workload manageable, not to make their workload non existent. Commercial flights used to have a crew of 3, captain, first officer and flight engineer. The automation has reduced the workload to eliminate the flight engineer role and make flights operable by 2 people.
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