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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.

The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion. So it's a pretty arbitrary standard that can go either way depending on the judge.

But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.

It seems to me there are two axes here: vague versus concrete legislation, and restrictive versus unrestrictive. Complaining that the current system is too restrictive (or not restrictive enough) for private companies (or public organizations) seems like a fairly interesting debate. But I really really don't think you want to be asking for concrete legislation that irons out all the ambiguity, like "only these 5 industries can ask math questions during interviews", "you can only require applicants to write essays if their job involves writing more than 4 essays a year", etc.

Passing the buck on to judges is how systems try to avoid insanely idiotic edge cases that inevitably comes from extremely concrete legislation -- judges are the political organ trusted with discretion and judgement.

Yes, that makes the legal system less predictable (which is bad), but the alternative is not "incredibly concrete legislation that doesn't have any terrible edge cases". The alternative is "iron-rules bureaucracy that follows a brain-dead flow chart" -- i.e. precisely the system that people on here like to complain about.

Granted, "prove x is true" can be incredibly sane or downright impossible, depending on how sensible your judge is. I just don't think there is really an alternative here that isn't worse. Similarly, note that the rules on this website are also pretty open to interpretation, and you may get different rulings from different mods. Nonetheless, trying to simply write more concrete rules could never actually work.

The counterfactual isn’t dumb regulations about tests, it’s racial quotas or laissez faire freedom of association. The politics of quotas have been unpalatable to voters forever so instead we get opaque jurisprudence trying to square the circle of stopping racism without noticing minority underperformance. There’s a ton of path dependence that got us here, and while the bureaucracy might be metastatic at this point good concrete legislation in the 1960s might have built a different, more functional world.

Are you arguing you'd prefer the New York school system to use racial quotas? Or that you'd prefer if principals could exclusively hire $race $gender teachers and be protected by freedom of association?

The current system of "hey, try to let the requirements of the job drive the hiring process. Sorry that we can't give you a perfect checklist that guarantees you won't be sued" seems far superior to either of those.

I’d prefer if good workers were hired over bad workers, and failing that quotas could grant the system of racial spoils some transparency. The status quo of neither drives inflationary compliance costs where every company has to shell out for the next hot seminar about racial equity or run the risk of deviating from standard practice and thus become liable for a lawsuit.

But that wasn’t my point. What we get is overdetermined; underperforming minorities are going to underperform, and it’s mean to be mean about that, but they on average are worse than the average worker, so we get a stupid compromise that solves nothing with immense costs but sounds nice and fair so we’re going to be stuck with it forever.

The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion.

What was their test like?

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching. Or that a bank employee should be able to do whatever kind of math they might use for their job.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum. I vaguely remember having to pass an algebra test as an adult, some years after taking the course, in order to continue teaching a subject that involved no algebra at all, but a lot of enforcement of social norms and some design stuff. It seemed a little silly, and I do think I would have been pretty pissed if I had failed and needed to both re-learn algebra and pay a fee to re-take the test.

Seems sort of similar to the kinds of friction you get in big companies. Google has teams that require very in-demand skills and teams that require very out-of-demand skills, but front or back, iOS or Android, C++ or JavaScript, everyone gets paid on the same ladder and has to pass the same interview.

Google actually has a separate SWE-Front End position with different interviews. This is not because Google's interview process is good (it's not), but because the market puts some limits on corporate idiocy.

IIRC, most of the interviews were the same for front end SWEs, but they swapped out the system design interview for a frontend interview.

Yeah that's fair. IME out-of-college interviews tend to be very general, algorithms/data structures stuff (e.g. I did a general interview, and was offered a spot on a computer vision team and on a software engineering team). But if you're hiring somebody with industry experience, especially at a senior level (L5), questions will be geared more to their specialty. The pay scale is still the same though, afaik.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum.

The current system of requiring a college degree with an education specialization is also extra friction and expense compared to the previous system of letting school officials hire 16 year old girls and use their judgement to pick which ones would be any good at it.

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching.

Yes, but then they didn't have anywhere near enough black or hispanic teachers, which was not an acceptable outcome in that culture.

The tests weren't made public to protect trade secrets of the testing company unfortunately so I'm not sure.

I agree it might seem silly but I don't think that it would be racist or that you should get a $2 million pay out like in this case.

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