But it's important that diversity be considered in all forms, not just based on race/sex.
If your "diverse" team is made up of different ethnicities and genders but only consists of ivy league members who grew up in California... well, not really diverse then, is it?
Maybe we just need more focus groups.
No focus group is going to tell you something obvious you don't want to hear. Walk into any library and see what you find in terms of computing from all those companies saving the world. Most likely, very little. Is that because you can't make a billion dollars selling computers to libraries, hotels and airports? Or that it wouldn't be a good marketing opportunity? Probably not. More likely because people don't give a shit and that tech companies are perfectly happy to live in their own bubble of superiority.
This isn't a "blindspot" it's arrogance, and ignorance, and incompetence. Large tech companies can't makes things that are primarily useful to other people. They are busy capturing markets with touch bars and clones of one of their own service that will be shutdown as soon as it grants someone a promotion. Then their employees can go on Hacker News, or their own internal forums, out of view of any opinion that is slightly uncomfortable and fault political correctness for how everyone else just don't understand that the state of computing is their own fault. Because $500k salaries, sophisticated tax planning and probably the least amount of regulation of any market just isn't enough to not see the world through a straw.
This betrays a very non-diverse view of the world :) In more rural parts of the USA, this is kind of the norm (save for the "shareholders", since a lot of rural transactions are among sole proprietors or other sorts of tiny private companies, if they're even formal at all). Sometimes those proprietorships get big fast, and you end up with that weird case where the CEO wears a camo suit and takes stakeholders hunting instead of golfing.
On a different note: it looks like you're mixing up "class" in the economic sense v. "class" in the etiquette sense, and those ain't always equivalent.
Working in an environment where there is nobody like you and you have to always be on your toes for culture conflict is work! These people already get more than enough time outside of their comfort zone and most are more than happy to cash their paycheck because from their frame of reference that's more than enough "success". They don't feel the need to preach about what "their people" are like because they're outliers at work and they're outliers when they go home and that doesn't exactly make one feel authoritative on the topic.
I'm not sure what I'm saying here but it's not as simple as "listen to the diverse people" or "more focus groups".
Are you ready to have some conservatives/Republicans on your team?
Such individuals are no problem.
What I wouldn't want are people who are "my way or highway", non-evidence-based, paranoid conspiracy theorists...
It doesn't matter if they're conservative or liberal - if they're off in the deep end and drowning, they probably aren't going to help a team move forward.
Putting aside whether they’re Trumpers or card carrying communists, there’s a reason that some kind of Overton window tends to occur: viewpoints aren’t relative, and some viewpoints are wrong (on facts, on outcomes, ie. completely detached from reality). Diversity isn’t productive if we are expected to value dangerous delusions. Valuing off-beat or contrarian ideas, sure. But: I like milk and sugar with my tea, you want to smash capitalism violently for the rise of the proletariat; I think that Education should be free but speech should be censored, you believe in concentration camps, QAnon and pizzagate. This can get silly.
1) People of certain backgrounds want to and need to prove they CAN compete.
2) People of certain backgrounds should be helping make decisions even without credentials.
so there are both competent and less competent people that need to be included.
"wait what why? I wasted way too much of my life to accept why less competitive people should have such lucrative roles"
because the profit engine doesn't really need to care about the human worker's competency, it only needs to expand the addressable market. having already reached peak engagement, the business processes have already reached the evolutionary zenith for the incumbent nepotism and meritocrat talent's way of tapping into human consumptive conscious. Expanding that market further requires perceptions that people in those markets can relate to.
1. It identifies and removes certain unnecessary credentials that might rule out people with diverse backgrounds. Requiring a college degree for applicants when a degree provides no benefit on the job is one example.
2. It makes an active effort to find and pursue diverse candidates. Odds are there are plenty of people who are competent enough to do the job. Let's imagine you are hiring 5 engineers from a pool of 100 qualified people. If there are only 10 diverse candidates in that pool and you just hired the first random qualified candidate you find, there is roughly a 60% chance that you end up with zero diversity on the team. If you actively work to get diverse candidates to apply and maybe get 10 additional diverse candidates added to the previous pool, you can still hire the first random qualified person but your odds drop to roughly 35% of having a team with zero diversity.
TL;DR - You don't have to hire less qualified people to have diversity, it just takes a little more thought and effort to make diversity a priority.
I’m saying thats only part of the dilemma and is muddied by that specific binary approach
People talk about interest in certain fields amongst demographics, pipeline problems, resent any perception of undermining a meritocratic process and this hurts everyone
But the kicker is that its not JUST about proving that a proportional distribution of people in a currently underrepresented demographic is competent, there and in the pipeline
Its that companies wont grow to address larger markets if meritocratic diversity is the only thing they look for and try to approve
People - like what you expressed - are barking up just one of multiple trees. Even if you reach peak underrepresented minority, you’ve still failed to bring diverse ideas to the market
If every company wants 50% women and the graduates with interests in CS come out at a 4:1 male to female ratio, the strive for diversity either needs to give up and hire what the pool provides or start giving underqualified women.
TL;DR - Companies absolutely need to lower the bar for minorities if they want ratios that don’t match the pools. This problem is only made worse by the popularity of these very diversity programs.
First, it assumes that the pool of diverse candidates has already been exhausted. Anecdotally I have not seen evidence of that. If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts. There is no evidence that is happening. This will eventually be a problem once every company tries to be more diverse than the pool of candidates, but right now there does not seem to be enough companies prioritizing diversity to an extent that this is an issue.
Secondly one of the causes of the pipeline problem is not having enough visibly successful diverse people in the industry. The more diverse candidates that are put in positions to succeed, the more visible they become to the next generation, and the more likely the next generation believes that this career can be a path they can successfully pursue.
I certainly didn't make the same amount of money as my coworker at my old job.
Or it just means one of the other stated assumptions is wrong, e.g., that companies don't really want 50% women. Every company I've worked for has been happy to hire women for any job, but none has ever made it a quota.
You lost me here. Why is this the case?
So yes, incompetent minorities make more than the competent majorities.
We could use the same fact to prove that giving women more money than men do not increase the ration of women, as otherwise companies would have already done that.
So on paper it looks like they are making the same, but in reality they are making way more than their majority counterpart (because the incompetent majority wouldn’t even be hired in the first place).
I believe many groups that are diverse by gender or race or ethnic composition are actually quite similar if they are the same age even though they might have different upbringings.
I explored this subject in this essay a while back which was based on some reflections I did after an ASK HN i did became quite popular.
https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
my conclusion was "which diversity" is an important discussion to have.
What is this sentence? I had to stop reading here.
Where are problems was an attempt at saying it slightly more vague than where are the problems hiding. It was meant as an opener for the following breakdown of problems.
It could probably have been more eloquent or grammatically correct but I didn't think it would be a show stopper :)
Sorry, you feel that way I think it was an interesting exploration that at least got me to think about diversity and it's use as a business advantage quite differently.
The issue with "Were the problems?" is that it's grammatically incorrect on a level that makes it Really Hard to understand, if not totally ambiguous. I honestly didn't know what exactly you meant until I read your comment explaining it in the other chain.
That said, I like the premise of the article, and how you break down the different types of problems. The idea that the value of diversity is in having different backgrounds, mindsets, and values which provide different perspectives is one that I share.
Maybe for your future posts, consider pushing your text through Grammarly or another English grammar checker to clean up your prose. Solid grammar is a force multiplier when it comes to perceived quality and readability of a text (don't take this to mean Perfect grammar, though. I think an individual's voice shines through inconsequential grammar mistakes).
But I may also be wrong about why people downvoted you; sometimes it just seem random, so you shouldn't take it too seriously.
I am however not going to change that sentence even though I know it doesn't sound (and might not even be grammatically correct) :)
You can think of it as a more open way of asking.
I.e. "where are problems hiding" it's instead of asking what is a problem" because I was trying to explore where they could be found.
https://mms.fandom.com/wiki/Dulce_de_Leche_Caramel_M%26M%27s
From your link:
> In July 2001, Dulce de Leche M&M's were introduced in five markets with large Hispanic populations: Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Florida; Mcallen-Brownsville, Texas; and San Antonio, Texas. The flavor never became popular with the Hispanic community, who preferred existing M&M's flavors, and it was discontinued in most areas by early 2003.
Perhaps there is an opportunity in introducing it to people who don't have previous experience with this flavor? Just thinking out loud...
Don't make something meant to be something else explicitly. Make something that has the same meaning (or in this case flavor) as something else but make it its own thing for its own sake.
Finally found Takis at... Home Depot.
Who knows, maybe they did tests and they didn't sell.
Personally, I like spicy because it's better than the alternatives of sugar and fat. I would say you should be able to eat lots of them without getting full, but then you do get "enchilado".