That means we so far have:

* Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0]

* Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1]

* Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians

While it's possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire in exact quotas (which would also be discriminatory really).

[0]: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/09/26/palantir-...

[1]: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/04/google-su...

Couple points:

First, this is where the meat is: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170118-0

Second:

"...Oracle nevertheless preferred Asian applications over other qualified applicants in the Professional Technical 1, Individual Contributor Job group and in the Product Development job group at statistically significant rates." [1]

[1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...

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Perhaps I'm naive, but I'll say it again and again until someone with influence hears me: large companies should do anonymous interviewing. I've interviewed with Oracle, Cisco, and many of the "old corporate-y" companies. There's ZERO reason the interview process can't be completely anonymized. Their interviews (from my limited experience) are completely impersonal and done on an ad-hoc basis anyway.

That being said, it seems this issue may be more of an H1B1 issue, which inherently cannot be made anonymous.

I worked at Oracle in 1992-1998. I hired a white male employee who complained later that I was hiring too many indian employees. I went backed to look at the applicants and noticed that 90% of them were indian and that I'd contacted every non-indian applicant. I'm not white or indian so I was very eager to make sure I was being fair. My non-scientific conclusion after working at a lot of other companies is that very successful companies paid a lot better and had much more interesting work than Oracle (remember oracle missed the .com shift in a major way); I feel oracle gets so few the applications of whites because most of them had much better jobs and opportunities. In that situation, it might require oracle to pay more to retain white employees.

I left oracle in 1998 and returned in 2003. I did notice a dramatic shift in the employee demographics at that time. Areas that used to be mostly white or mixed were now entirely indian. I'm not sure of the reasons but I've worked at places that are much more successful than oracle and I suspect it is not oracle that is discriminating as much as it is a lot of better companies enticing talent away. I've seen many of oracle's brightest employees working at more successful companies.

"Oracle was far more likely to hire Asian applicants - particularly Indian people - for product development and technical roles than black, white or Hispanic job seekers."

Can the DOL back up this claim with salary data to see if Oracle is abusing the H1-B visa system by purposefully keeping wages low?

Most of the time it is just easier to hire Asian/Indian employees because they are readily available (larger proportion of population entering tech filed via education or change of career).

It would be interesting to see how far DOL can stretch this.

Edit 1: Improvement

I feel that I can provide a small yet worthy piece of context. We have a difficult time interviewing ANYBODY for our open reqs. And like every other technology company I've ever worked at; a majority of resume's I've reviewed had Indian names. This seems especially weighted given how the Oracle brand and database are still desirable properties and tech in India.

Your average white dude in Silicon Valley may have a fair to negative view of Oracle. While (from my experience) your average Indian dude's opinion of Oracle is more favorable.

Question: as an employer what exactly am I supposed to do if when I put a req out for an engineer, >>>>50% of applicants are asian?

Is the burden really on me to dig through the remaining applicants for good ones?

These laws really sound like people with no skin in the game demanding things for which they don't know all ramifications.

> The department also said that during its investigation, which began in 2014, Oracle refused to provide relevant information about its pay practices.

That's the part that doesn't help Oracle at all in this.

If you really don't have anything to hide/cleanup, why avoid providing useful information for 2+ years? (Granted, 'relevant information' might be loosely defined here)

Tangent: I know several employers use the concept of a "salary band" for roles. I.e. entry level "Software Engineer" can make between $70k and $85k depending on some metric. I wonder how often our preconceived biases/prejudice are used as an excuse to put people in lower salary bands.

Is there even merit to these? On one hand, people have different skill levels even in a role. On the other, shouldn't the salary be tied to title?

Is "culture fit" illegal?

Let's say that an Indian manager hires more Indians because he feels like they are easier to work with. Now, he doesn't just hire Indians, but he is statistically more likely to do so over a large quantity of hires. Is that against the law?

I now sue NBA for having too few whites and Asians.

The goal is to make sure everywhere people are distributed on their population and color and gender and age ratio, instead of merits, after this micro-level-equality is accomplished everywhere, let's then work on making sure everyone has their fair share of fortune, finally, communism will be realized and the world will be a peaceful place, starting from US!

When I started my first job, I was shocked at the amount of racial self-selection there was. Although the company itself was diverse, many teams were 80%+ white/Chinese/Indian. If you looked closer you saw that they had all gone to the same schools (albeit in different years or even decades) or had worked together previously.

This wasn't a top-tier company, so my theory was that candidates with options went elsewhere, while those without options stayed here and hired people like themselves. I could easily see the same thing happening at a place like Oracle.

Quotas and affirmative action seem to me like hack workarounds to try to solve the real problem, and that is that our society itself is highly unequal.

None of these business can tackle the real problems on their own, but even assuming that one "race" generally has an advantage because of educational background or some other factor that makes them more attractive hires, simply hiring them and ignoring everyone else (that isn't exceptional) only perpetuates the problem.

Therefore, attempts are made to resolve the issues in ways that an individual organization with a limited reach can: quotas, diversity hires. The problem is that the problems that create a disparity between the hires are long term, where as most of these companies have to think of the relative short term.

Because we as a society can't (or won't) tackle these issues in a holistic way, we're always going to have some hack workarounds that feel like BS to a lot of people because they are. If all public schools were well funded[1] and taught it wouldn't be such an issue (in a few decades maybe), but instead we've got a model that simply perpetuates the problem. Even if we throw money at the schools it won't fix the problem because a lot of kids growing up in poor areas have problems at home [2]. We know how to fix these problems but we can't even agree as a society that we even have a problem.

We're going to continue having this conversation for 100 years because thats how long its going to take our half-assed measures to work if they work at all. In the richest country on earth we can't agree that all public schools should be equally funded (hell, we're about to have to fight for the actual existence of public schools as all).

[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools... [2] https://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-does-poverty-influence-lea...

If you walk the floors of Oracle office in California, you are not going to feel like you are working in the US. It almost feels like an Indian enclave. In my opinion, this is a bad thing.

In the Database division, the division that also makes most of the money for Oracle, most people including Directors, VPs, SVPS, etc. are Indians. Many are Chinese too. They have been in this company for the last 10 to 20 years. They understand all the politics of the company inside out and use it to their advantage to rule (exploit?) their subordinates. It is almost as if they have setup their kingdom in this company. You might be wondering how all of this relates to salary and hiring discrimination.

* Most of these Indians at the top of the ladder, seem to be hiring only Indians.

* These Indian SVPs and VPs hire Indians for cheap. A unique cultural thing about Indians is that they are obsessed about saving money, e.g. lowball prospective candidates; sometimes the negotiation can last for 2-12 months before an offer is made!

* It helps these VPs if there are Indian engineers or managers under these VPs. Indians don't counterquestion their superiors much. So when these VPs find insane ways of saving money, e.g. not spending the budget for team outings, project parties, etc., the Indian engineers seem to oblige. One team activity or team outing only once in 2 years is not unheard of in Oracle while our neighbourhood goes for such outings every quarter. Indian VPs rejecting employee's request for stationery is also not unheard of. It is necessary to hire Indians so that they don't question when VPs reject reasonable requests.

* Another thing unique about Indian culture is utter lack of respect for schedules. The SVPs define schedules for a product release in a random fashion without ever consulting the managers or the engineers. Guess what? The schedule is not met. The company remains in a never ending loop of reschedule, miss schedule, repeat. The same goes for meetings. Meetings start late. They end late. Nobody cares that there might be another meeting that people may have to go to. A few Americans might look upset but who cares about the minority! They can get away with this kind of disrespectful scheduling when the majority are Indians.

If someone claims that they hire Indians because they are more skilled than Americans, then I call bullsh*t. It is true that there are more Indian engineers than Americans but it is also true that for the number of people Oracle needs there are enough skilled Americans as there are Indians. So if the hiring was fair, one should see an equal number of Americans and Indians.

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle. I am Chinese. I love Indians. I have many Indian friends.

> technology company systematically paid its white, male employees more than other workers and unlawfully favored Asian applicants in its recruiting and hiring efforts.

Wow...this is big.

The real solution to the problem is everyone needs to share their income level with their co-workers as well as their performance reports. And don't be afraid to leave!

Who in their right mind would want to work for oracle in 2017? That's like fighting for a gig at DEC circa 1997. They're doing candidates a favor by refusing them entrance on the Titanic.

I am Indian. (I used to work for Oracle). If I were to hire, given everything else is equal , I would prefer an Indian to a non-Indian. You can attribute it to cultural bias, or whatever.

But hardly 'everything else' is equal. I hire people who can get 'shi* done' , and who are easy to be managed. Period. And I assume most of the managers would do so. So if Indians are easy to be managed, and are getting hired, it is not racism. Because, they were getting hired for the easiness of managing them, and not for the Nationality.

The issue of white males getting paid more is certainly racist. But the sad part is one cannot verify it, because one cannot isolate the 'merit' part of the salary , from the part attributed to the 'race'

(By the way, I never hired anyone while working at Oracle.)

Irrespective of one's opinion.

The part relating to H1B visas is likely to be targeted under the new administration. The part about the white males, not as likely.

Serious question:

If it's against the law to have a disproportionate amount of a certain group employed (or paid a certain way), but it's also against the law to discriminate in the hiring process (and in the termination process), how is a company like this supposed to comply?

* Hire more of x group - it's illegal because you'd be discriminating against a group to meet the employment quota

* Fire x group to equalize the amount of people working - it's illegal because you're targeting a specific group of people to fire

There doesn't seem to be any way to meet these requirements without some form of discrimination at some step of the way.

Does the government have "legalized discrimination" policies to allow companies to become compliant?

As someone unfamiliar with US law, could someone explain whether it's illegal for companies like Oracle to pay white, male workers more (as stated in the article) or if it's only illegal to pay them more because they are male and white?

The former seems obviously absurd. So, assuming it's the latter, has the government supplied any evidence that this has happened?

How easy is it for new DOL administration to back out of this? Trivial, right? No real consequences.

I'm interested to see how this ends up, and how other large companies (Google, Amazon, etc) haven't fallen victim to the same target by DOL.

In this case is it different because of direct hire? The company I work for seems to just contract out quite a bit to emerging markets.

This is silly, obviously, if I'm hiring somebody, I discriminate the others.

This is the first legal test of the pervasive practice of Indian nationals hiring predominantly or exclusively other Indian nationals from their same region in India.

edit:

From the Department of Labor complaint:

"...Oracle nevertheless preferred Asian applications over other qualified applicants in the Professional Technical 1, Individual Contributor Job group and in the Product Development job group at statistically significant rates."

Who is it who is favoring Asian applicants for this job group?

This sort of bias is a danger when hiring decisions are made at a team level rather than a systematic company-wide process like at Google.

"Oracle was far more likely to hire Asian applicants - particularly Indian people - for product development and technical roles..."

Another employer with significant hiring with such practises is CISCO

How does the US government have standing in such a case? If such practices are not legal, shouldn't the law specify a remedy? If not, how has the government been harmed?

You know what actually is hiring discrimination? Quotas. Racism, if racial quotas.

Oracle America in Redwood Shores H1B salaries, for reference

http://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=oracle&job=&city=REDWOO...

I assume, they are gonna sue those Chinese restaurants too?

not surprising . pay less and still get work done. I have the same experience in automotive sector. GM, FORD, FCA

A woman, Safra Catz, was co-president and is now co-CEO which means that they are accusing a woman of discriminating against women.

SO much this.

Why can the US sue a private company for this reason? I thought private companies were exempt from these laws

Why am I not surprised ? Yet another H1B discrimination story to rant about. (though the article do not say anything about the 'Indian' people's visa status, isn't it obvious ?)