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"...
Readit News
Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
Respectfully, thats not accurate.
The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.
The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.
The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.
> Taking old, resolved scandals
In what way do you consider this resolved?
The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).
The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)
The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.
The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.
The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
In 2023, the FAA set several, major goals for DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FY23%20OSI-M%20and%2...
Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion = Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...
Too many examples. Compared to 2016, the FAA of the 2020s was better at hiding their written bias. Nonetheless, they failed to attract the talent they needed.
Dead Comment
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.
That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
It's bizarre to see people say that since the media initially didn't report on the full story, telling people the full story is similar to "state-sponsored propoganda." That mindset appears to be saying that once the media has made up a narrative for the story, people should be hostile to other pertinent information, even when it's uncovering major aspects of the story that the media didn't report on.
That kind of attitude runs counter to anyone interested in finding out the truth.
Edit: Also worth pointing out the author's original article on this scandal was written a year ago, and a followup was recently written to clarify things in response to increased discussion about that article. They're a law student who initially wrote about it after coming across court documents and being surprised that there had been almost no coverage regarding what actually had happened.
Deleted Comment
The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels.
There are two separate arguments happening:
Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.
Did changing their application process create a shortage of ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too many mediocre candidates.
I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.
intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.
Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.
It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.
Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".
And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.
"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."
This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology.
The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity.
Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents.
When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away.
Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost.
Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?
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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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> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.
This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will be in the first few sentences they say.
The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to place in it.
Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy reflects on the changes some seek.
Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal.
Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on.
What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted.
So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.
Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.
Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.
This doesn’t make ATC professionals better people. It doesn’t make them smarter. It doesn’t make them superhuman. It makes them better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits probably make them worse at many others.
We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.
Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more comfortable and easier.
Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and neurological development. is there really any difference, or is neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity?
Different is not a value judgement.
> We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.
In the situation of hiring people for specific jobs, filtering for a perceived "neurodiversity" would have no scientific basis.
Fortunately, hiring doesn't work this way. The idea is to hire for people who are qualified for and capable of the job, not to try to evaluate questionable proxies like neurodiversity.
Ergo we should test for ability, not some arbitrary representation of race, sex, or other non-task related metric.
Their differences make them better suited to some jobs than others.
Neurodiversity is a useless reframing of something exceptionally simple.
This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.
That's exactly what providing the grounds means. It's like how the no-fly list provides a convenient way to trap your estranged wife outside the country. You can do a whole lot of racism, call it a DEI initiative and use the right terminology, and no-one bats an eye.
And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.
https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
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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.
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Imagine, for a second, having tapes on someone saying "Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for ~~Caucasians~~ <insert minority here>, it wasn’t for, you know, the ~~white~~ <insert minority here> male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”
Would you still argue this the way you are doing? Would this still have been buried? Are you actually trying to argue this isn't a blatant case of racism?!
> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.
After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
A. A PUBLIC NOTICE OR MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT +5 B. A FRIEND OR RELATIVE 0 C. COLLEGE RECRUITMENT +3 D. WORKING IN SOME OTHER CAPACITY FOR THE AGENCY +3 E. SOME OTHER WAY 0
Wow … I get points for this. No surprise, that this is going south. I m shocked.
How can an agency administer that travesty of a test? Heads should be rolling over this.
This gives examples of the test format and questions:
https://pointsixtyfive.com/xenforo/threads/atsa-compilation....
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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.
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Left leaning people are more concerned with power controlled by nepotism and “unfair” connections. To me that is a kind of sour grapes view fueled by too many participation trophies.
A government full of cronies sucks but we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point. A meritocratic/technocratic government sounds like a dystopian novel.
Elementary school kids are huge on fairness and injustice. It seems like it's built in to facilitate group social dynamics in great apes. It takes a lot of sophistication to be able to frame valuing fairness as a character flaw.
>A meritocratic...government sounds like a dystopian novel.
So nepotism + networking = bad, but meritocracy also = bad...?
>...we can at least hope to get our own cronies in at some point.
OR you reduce the risk vector and limit the size & scope of government. Most people agree with your earlier premises, so why would I support adding powers to a structure where folks I strongly disagree with will lead that structure ~50% of the time?
It should never, ever be about hard quotas.
It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.
It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that’s no hyperbole.
The scandal was coaching people how to pass the personality test. That's just a waste. You end up getting people who are a bad fit for the job, and will ultimately not be successful long-term
For instance, I will ace any aptitude test at 99.9%+ percentile easily (I always do at any standardized test, SAT, GRE, MCAT etc). Yet I would be a terrible terrible fit for ATC. The level of detail-orientedness it needs day to day for me would be a challenge. I can do it for short periods of time of absolute concentration, but my god, there is no way I would last at the job long-term. Training me would have been a waste of scarce resources. But I know several people that such tasks energize them and may not score as high on the aptitude test, but would be a better fit for that job long-term
If done well, including personality test could have been a good way to produce better outcomes, and increase the early part of the pipelines by opening it up to more people than just CTI grads.
I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.
The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.
You can also do things to remove stereotypes about your industry - "I'm not going to work in industry X because it's all posh people."
Systems affect different people differently (which is blindingly obvious but bears repeating) so if you want a meritocracy based on actual ability you need to do your best to nurture all people with ability, which isn't a one size fits all approach. I knew multiple people who absolutely kicked ass that benefitted from targeted programs (and from their success we've all benefited from these programs), there's just also a lot of dumb shit out there for DEI, too.
e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.
And yet, it is.
The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category.
A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?
I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure they could post their job openings to affinity outlets frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places of origin, and racial communities.
It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college graduates".
Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.
However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics.
And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?
Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and onboarding pipeline in the first place?
The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is egregious.
Do you really, honestly believe that the FAA was using these practices to hire less people and not just hire the people they want to hire in the limited positions?
Why would they go to such absurd lengths when they could just say "we can't hire more people because we can't afford it"...