There is absolutely zero chance that he was rejected in 30s based on ethnicity. No matter how unethical you might think a corporation might be, none would be stupid enough to implement a policy so obviously illegal.

Of course that was the reason he was rejected. Companies do plenty of stupid and/or illegal things, they just think they can get away with it. Just look at Theranos. Or banks wilfully working with drug dealers to launder money. Or Google and co making agreements not to steal people to keep wages down. It's all about risk management.

And yet, Harvard and all the Ivys do it all the time.

Not in 30s.

Having some undesirable demographics myself, I'm quite aware that corporations discriminate illegally. It's so easy to hide, though, and so costly not to do so, that imagining this as an example seems a bit silly.

It’s definitely not “absolutely zero”.

Sure, in the same way -450 degrees Fahrenheit isn't technically "absolute zero."

I am guessing he was already in the queue to be rejected, but they wanted to capture the demographic data first.

I have zero sympathy for people applying to a company known for doing shady things for Governments.

Really? Palantir is a real time geoanalytics platform. Among their customers are police departments, municipal governments, emergency response agencies, and, well, intelligence agencies. None of these are intrinsically bad.

No. The demo survey is the last piece of the application process. Once completed your application was finalized, processed, and the rejection email is sent.

If they ask the demo questions before interview it is likely to lead into accusations of bias.

Now, if pushed to court, they will have paper to backup that you were rejected at stage X, before the demo survey was sent.

I'm sure Palantir wasn't explicitly doing this - the blowback would be far too severe.

Although, I am hugely cynical and always "decline to identify" whenever I'm asked.

Consider yourself very lucky. They dragged me through a month worth of interviews and wasted so much of my time. I wish they would have rejected me aftet 30 seconds.

How is this excusable again? My only consolation is that this will eventually backfire due to them not hiring based on skill.

Seems pretty obvious to me that they were rejected earlier in the day. The rejection triggered 2 batch jobs: One to gather applicant demographics and one to notify of their status. The timing was unfortunate, but almost certainly a pure coincidence.

Cue lazy "shill" accusations in 3... 2...

Or the application was rejected but they only send rejections to completed applications. There's a lot of reasonable explanations.

On the other hand, they are a consulting company. Traditionally optics and credentials are more important in that field.

Doubt anything associated with Thiel is rejecting based on "male", especially for technical positions.