Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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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.

You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications?

The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.

That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar.

There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know.

And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.

How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants pass (vs. ~60% previously) not “lowering the bar”?

"One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness) is to correlate test scores with job performance. After reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from .69 to .60..."

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&co...

That was the recruitment pipeline. You still had to pass the hiring one.

This is akin to schools that got rid of testing requirements. Agreed it was a terrible choice that should get reversed. But, to say that standards went down on graduates of the schools, you would look at the scores of graduates from said schools.

And to be clear, the expectation of lowering standards for admits to a school would be a higher dropout rate. More stress on the school and testing protocols. But this is not, itself, evidence that graduates are worse.

It's valuable to note that this paper is from 2006, and states:

"Reweighting was based on data collected from incum- bent ATCSs who took AT-SAT on a research basis; some of these employees achieved overall scores less than 70 (that was one of the reasons for the reweighting effort – a belief that incumbent employees should be able to pass the entry-level selection test)"

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