Re:Changes at Basecamp
by unpolloloco on Friday April 30, 2021 @05:28PM
(#26999599)
Diversity doesn't matter in practice if management doesn't want to spend the resources to engineer for diverse use cases. I've been over-ruled too many times when I've pushed for "fringe" use cases - including once with exactly your example of a product not working on Black people (different product, but same ethnicity-based issue). My team intentionally sought out (internal) diversity to test the prototype on. And guess what? When I said this was a big problem and we needed to fix it, I got over-ruled (by my non-White company president) because we were already late shipping the product. (Then product got canned for other reasons later - after I left the company shortly after this decision).
I'm not sure how to fix this broader problem - or what else I could/should have done there (other than leave for greener pastures)!
The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin:
https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
Facial recognition systems that don't work well on dark-skinned people:
https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...
I can't find it now but there's another demo of the simple face detection algorithm (not recognition, just highlighting that "here is a face") simply not detecting a dark-skinned person til she lifts up a white mask to her face, and then it detects a "face" immediately.
Something as simple as soap dispenser not detecting dark skin, would that have made it out into production if they'd had a dark-skinned person on the team? Something as basic as, "Hey this doesn't work on Jim, maybe we should tweak the sensor a bit."
That's where some diversity matters, just so that your products work on everyone out there.