And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech.

People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certain subgroups getting passed up during interviews, underpaid, getting passed up for promotions, etc. As an example an ex-colleague had a really hard time landing his first job in the industry. No one would call him back. He wondered whether his Hispanic sounding name was hurting his chances, so he anglicized it and tried again. He said it was like night and day. He found a job soon after. Perhaps you haven’t witnessed something like this first or second hand.

I think many companies are butchering their diversity recruiting efforts. They try to “fix” the issue with superficial and inefficient policies. But the problem they’re attempting to address is very real.

I interpreted their argument as "people who want to can get on in tech". Being non-discriminatory doesn't lead to representative demographics (unless everyone likes/wants the same things equally, which is clearly not true).

it's curious, right?

My Talon project is capable of voice controlling Visual Studio, both at the interface level and at the code insertion/editing level. It can use Dragon as a speech engine, or my own engine. It has an existing Visual Studio integration, and Talon makes it easy to write your own context specific app commands or integrations.

- https://talonvoice.com

Here's some Visual Studio support for it:

- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vi...

As well as vscode:

- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vs...

Here are a couple of public GitHub issues about dictation support in vscode:

- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/40976

- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/117980#issuecomme...

I'm not saying that it's impossible, and I don't know what kind of difference something like braille would make. Idk, are there any blind programmers that you know of ? Surely there must be some programmers who have gone blind, I wonder if they just decide to switch careers idk.

It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs?

Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?

Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.

It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.

What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.

0. https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

Something like X-Keys L-Trac (Formerly CST2545-5w)

I've developed carpal tunnel, and to mitigate my problems I now use a mouse at work and trackball at home (strain different muscles). The clicking of the mouse bothered me for awhile, so for that I tried two mice. Right hand would control position and left hand would do the clicking. A foot pedal for the clicks would have been so much less awkward.

People with disabilities are the most neglected of any demographic because they are not easily exploited for political gain.

How do you get to your conclusion from your statement? Simply having some minority groups overrepresented doesn't mean that the industry is welcoming. It may mean its welcoming to those groups.

And people w/o formal education isn't really a minority group. Any more than PhDs in computer science is a minority group that is overrepresented in the tech industry.

> But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.

This isn't about political expedience, but its about understanding the context of the discussion. Either you're new to the US or simply are ignorant to the issues of the post.

They’re a minority / highly underrepresented in other highly paid professions (law, medicine, finance). That’s something that IMO makes tech a truly exceptional industry!

(Technically, women aren’t a “minority” either.)

We are all minority and majority at the same time for different groups. And that's ok.

Pointing out what groups _aren’t_ underrepresented is like saying “Yeah, we’ll, all lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter”.

Your parent was responding to this statement:

> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt.

And their response - that tech is, in fact, diverse and meritocratic - is a fair response to that statement.

I think what OP meant by their statement is that there is a diversity problem _pertaining specifically to people of color_ in tech. Which is true.

I think we would all benefit by being a little generous with each other when trying to discuss these sensitive issues.

It's actually a great habit that helps facilitate polite discussions. It's called the principle of charity and unless I'm mistaken it's actually one of the rules of this site.

And the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. It means that if a statement could be read in an irrational way or in a rational way, you choose the latter. So if for example I said "sheep are white" you could interpret that to be the obviously false claim that 100% of sheep are white with no exceptions, or as the much more reasonable statement that sheep are typically white, where the principle of charity would be assuming the second interpretation. It has nothing to do with bending over backwards to make a statement palatable.

The hacker news guideline you are thinking of is "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

In fact, it is exactly these kinds of attitudes that directly contribute to perpetuating the diversity problem in tech.

And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.

> Saying "We do have plenty of representation of some minorities" is not a refutation of "we have a diversity problem in tech".

Nobody is trying to refute anything. Your knee jerk reaction is to attack anyone who doesn't 100% agree with you. _You_ are turning a nuanced discussion into an argument.

> And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.

Again, there is no reason for you to go full offence here. You are deliberately choosing the least charitable interpretation in order to make me the enemy.

I was referring to OP's own statement:

> This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps

I was giving a reason why OP's comment was a little generalized.

I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc.

The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?

There are, they’re called “Nigerians”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans

> In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households.

https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3...

> Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions.

Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.

Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.

Or, zooming out, "me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger".

That's an odd way to write, "modern educations for gifted people so fancy that their brand comes from their status at the world's biggest corporations instead of universities, but have nothing in common with the experiences of a typical person who did not receive a formal education.