4 ms·

Ask: How does diversity improve product development?

I'm subscribed to the stratechery.com newsletter. One of the recent emails said diversity improved products. I've racked my brains and can't think of how this can be the case--on the whole. I could understand having someone with cultural knowledge doing UX. But, say, a programmer? Does, for example, a Welsh person create better APIs by virtue of being Welsh? That doesn't follow! Input would be appreciated!

wry_discontent 10y ago
One anecdote I can think of here is that when the Apple health app was released it didn't have a period tracker. If more women were involved with that application it likely would've had one.
- discombobulate 10y ago
  Good example. I think in general women take care of their health more than men. Women may well have been the main users of the app(?). Not having people who represent your main/large user groups does seem problematic. I don't think it calls for automatic diversity, still. Instead, a definite consideration of who is using the product.
Mz 10y ago
I worked for Aflac for over five years. They have a good track record as an ethical company that treats employees really well, etc. They also have a good track record on diversity specifically. They always said something like We hire "everyone" because we sell to "everyone." There are things you just will not think of if you are not part of a particular subgroup. The other thing I will suggest is that in order to have diversity internally, you need a certain level of general respect for people of a sort that fosters good communication. If your people are too similar, the odds are really good that there will be implicit bias showing in how you word things or whatever. This implicit bias will be something that seems innocuous to insiders. Most people are not very welcoming of hearing that the way they do things smacks of implicit bias. This feels really ugly to them, so it is incredibly hard to change such things. Even if someone is willing and able to point it out, most people will not only not listen, they will actively deny it. But if you have a lot of implicit bias, most people won't even try to tell you that you are doing this Thing that excludes them and others like them. I do blog a bit about such topics and would be happy to pull up a relevant post or two from my blog if you are interested. I have a track record of promoting diversity in online forums and I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member of HN. Those are my "credentials," FWIW. I could probably also find you some research or articles, if you are interested. I have posted stuff about this, probably on HN, but definitely elsewhere and I could find what I posted elsewhere fairly readily.
- discombobulate 10y ago
  Yes, please. Blog posts & research are welcome!
  - Mz 10y ago
    Here is a thing I posted elsewhere, with links and discussion: http://www.metafilter.com/158703/Show-Me-The-Money http://www.metafilter.com/158703/Show-Me-The-Money Blog posts: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/less-exclusive.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/less-exclusi... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/09/pronouns-and-paradox.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/09/pronouns-and... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/defending-my-enemies.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/defending-my... The above are the easiest things for me to find. If I think of anything else, I will post it later. But these are just things readily remembered off the top of my head and readily found.
    - discombobulate 10y ago
      I've read all the links. Thanks. Having a larger pool to hire from is appealing (from MetaFilter), 'I hire people, and I'm interested in any avenue I can take to improve the quality of my applicants. I have no social justice reason to do this - I have an interest in making my applicant pool broader (in order to make hiring easier) and more qualified (in order to have more awesome employees). Currently, one way I have to do that is to make my applicant pool more diverse.' The above quote doesn't indicate hiring for diversity per se. It's a byproduct of not excluding people. Oh, and I didn't realise Farsi was gender neutral. I know someone who speaks Farsi. I'll have to ask them about it.
      - Mz 10y ago
        My comment, later in that same discussion, is to the effect that putting any additional constraints on your applicant other than "good at the work in question" impairs your ability to get the most qualified people. In some sense, you don't need to "hire for diversity." You just need to hire the best, regardless of who they are. Seeking to The Best instead of The Best (White Middle Class American Male) will tend to be both more inclusive and raise the quality of your hires. It's a subtle distinction, but having gone back to revisit the discussion, I have started a draft for a blog post inspired by those remarks. Not sure yet where I will go with it, but I am glad you commented on it here too.
RNeff 10y ago
Older peoples' eyesight is not as good as younger people. We need bifocals, trifocals, reading glasses, etc. Font and color choices that work for young eyes may not work with older eyes. Using larger fonts in the browser may help, but not all text scales, and some layouts will break really badly. If you see a person looking over their glasses at a screen three inches away, there is a serious problem. Slack tries to be clever and hip with its responses, but it is really silly and irritating after awhile. It is easy to be cute and snarky but end up offending people different from your team, like "Hey, dudes!". Programmers with experience writing APIs will create better new APIs, but not if they are "too old" for the culture fit.
- discombobulate 10y ago
  > Slack tries to be clever and hip with its responses, but it is really silly and irritating after awhile. It is easy to be cute and snarky but end up offending people different from your team, like "Hey, dudes!". Sounds like some bros have imbued the product with their culture. I'm a bit torn on using 'personality' in products. MailChimp seems to do it well. Could call it Clippy-syndrome[0]. An annoying anthropomorphism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
mchannon 10y ago
Look at diversity as something to be accumulated over a career. Would you rather hire the 40-year-old developer who's worked at one position in one company for the last 20 years, or the 40-year-old developer who's worked at 20 positions at 20 companies for the past 20 years? Who's going to be better able to adapt quickly to your company's problems? Who's going to be able to teach you some new tricks? So much of what makes us good at what we do is learning from others. If you limit the kinds of others you learn from, you do your trade skills a disservice. Diversity doesn't need a skin color or a gender or an age- it comes from each new contributor to a project. We just often, as human beings, find it more uncomfortable to get somebody new who's not like us, than go with the obvious "culture fit". To get to the kernel of the question, the more people you learn from, the fewer forms of lazy-minded sloppy coding you'll tolerate from yourself and others. If diversity is a variable, then quality experience is its integral.
- discombobulate 10y ago
  > Look at diversity as something to be accumulated over a career. > Diversity doesn't need a skin color or a gender or an age I got the impression the diversity the newsletter referred to was identity, rather than cognitive. It seems harder to judge cognitive diversity. Maybe something like openness as a personality trait could be used as a proxy[0]. [0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-trust/201403/the-brain-works-through-openness-boost-creativity https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-trust/201403/the-...
itamarst 10y ago
One example among many: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... It's not even a complete list! E.g. airline reservation systems break for people with single character last name. Which happens. And I swear the hyphen in my last name is the reason I get selected for extra scrutiny every time I go through US passport control. Airline systems don't do hyphens, so there's a mismatch with passport...
- discombobulate 10y ago
  It's a useful list. You wouldn't need to hire for each of those cases, though. Just be aware of them. > And I swear the hyphen in my last name is the reason I get selected for extra scrutiny every time I go through US passport control. It not unheard of for last names to be hyphenated in the UK. It's most common among the 'upper class'.
  - itamarst 10y ago
    Well, your options are: 1) Hire lots of people with same experience, but each of which spends lots of time trying to learn everything about everything. 2) Hire a bunch of people with different experiences and knowledge and pool their learning. They can and should also try to learn lots of stuff. You can eventually reproduce the necessary knowledge and skills with path #1... but it's not like you have that much time available to learn. Path #2 is much more efficient.
malux85 10y ago
Absolutly! Diversity means different perspectives on problem solving. It also means that it's likely one persons weakness will be another persons strength, as a result the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. You need the exploratory programmers, the ones who can knock up a prototype in a couple of hours to validate an idea. But they might not be so good at doing production quality work. In your API example, this is the guy who is able to try out that new API framework that got released, and see if it fits with our systems in a couple of days. This programmer likes the New Star Trek, playing online MMO's and listens to drum n bass. You need the diligent programmers - the ones who think of every edge case and make sure it's covered. Their systems are more robust than the exploratory programmers, but slower to deliver. This engineer is the one who will think of every single possible combination of events that could be called on your API. They worry a lot, but don't take this as a sign they're unhappy, as they usually are generally happy. They like reading sci-fi books slowly, they don't make many jokes themselves but will erupt in laughter if you pose a quirky pun or bit of dark humor. They can appreciate the old and the new star trek, but would rather be coding. You need the grumpy guy with a white beard, because he can see the entire tech stack and doesn't mind writing a high perforamnce kernel extension that 10x's your companies I/O perforamnce. But this engineer is NOT interested in working in the latest fad framework. They'll pull your chestnuts out of the fire when it matters most. They like the old star trek, dungeons and dragons and read Poe during lunch breaks. You need the social coder who's great at seeing how systems interact, respected by different teams, they're all about the interface boundaries. They'll be on twitter and in your slack channel. They'll be reading all the pull requests and helping answer questions on the wiki. They dont care much for star trek, but are subscribed to 100 youtube channels. Please forgive my tongue-in-cheek stereotyping, the richness of diversity allows a large field of view, and this comes from everybody having a different background, different interests, and different lives.
EJTH 10y ago
Diversity is such a broad concept that without specifying what kind of diversity we are talking about, it is hard to say. I think that diversity in background is pretty important. At my current workplace we have a wide range of highly educated devs, but we also have a self-taught hackers. We tend to have each our strong area and concerns about our product. Gender and cultural diversity in UX is good too for obvious reasons.

wry_discontent 10y ago

One anecdote I can think of here is that when the Apple health app was released it didn't have a period tracker. If more women were involved with that application it likely would've had one.

discombobulate 10y ago
Good example. I think in general women take care of their health more than men. Women may well have been the main users of the app(?). Not having people who represent your main/large user groups does seem problematic. I don't think it calls for automatic diversity, still. Instead, a definite consideration of who is using the product.

Mz 10y ago

I worked for Aflac for over five years. They have a good track record as an ethical company that treats employees really well, etc. They also have a good track record on diversity specifically. They always said something like We hire "everyone" because we sell to "everyone." There are things you just will not think of if you are not part of a particular subgroup. The other thing I will suggest is that in order to have diversity internally, you need a certain level of general respect for people of a sort that fosters good communication. If your people are too similar, the odds are really good that there will be implicit bias showing in how you word things or whatever. This implicit bias will be something that seems innocuous to insiders. Most people are not very welcoming of hearing that the way they do things smacks of implicit bias. This feels really ugly to them, so it is incredibly hard to change such things. Even if someone is willing and able to point it out, most people will not only not listen, they will actively deny it. But if you have a lot of implicit bias, most people won't even try to tell you that you are doing this Thing that excludes them and others like them. I do blog a bit about such topics and would be happy to pull up a relevant post or two from my blog if you are interested. I have a track record of promoting diversity in online forums and I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member of HN. Those are my "credentials," FWIW. I could probably also find you some research or articles, if you are interested. I have posted stuff about this, probably on HN, but definitely elsewhere and I could find what I posted elsewhere fairly readily.

discombobulate 10y ago
Yes, please. Blog posts & research are welcome!
- Mz 10y ago
  Here is a thing I posted elsewhere, with links and discussion: http://www.metafilter.com/158703/Show-Me-The-Money http://www.metafilter.com/158703/Show-Me-The-Money Blog posts: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/less-exclusive.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/less-exclusi... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/09/pronouns-and-paradox.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/09/pronouns-and... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/defending-my-enemies.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/defending-my... The above are the easiest things for me to find. If I think of anything else, I will post it later. But these are just things readily remembered off the top of my head and readily found.
  - discombobulate 10y ago
    I've read all the links. Thanks. Having a larger pool to hire from is appealing (from MetaFilter), 'I hire people, and I'm interested in any avenue I can take to improve the quality of my applicants. I have no social justice reason to do this - I have an interest in making my applicant pool broader (in order to make hiring easier) and more qualified (in order to have more awesome employees). Currently, one way I have to do that is to make my applicant pool more diverse.' The above quote doesn't indicate hiring for diversity per se. It's a byproduct of not excluding people. Oh, and I didn't realise Farsi was gender neutral. I know someone who speaks Farsi. I'll have to ask them about it.
    - Mz 10y ago
      My comment, later in that same discussion, is to the effect that putting any additional constraints on your applicant other than "good at the work in question" impairs your ability to get the most qualified people. In some sense, you don't need to "hire for diversity." You just need to hire the best, regardless of who they are. Seeking to The Best instead of The Best (White Middle Class American Male) will tend to be both more inclusive and raise the quality of your hires. It's a subtle distinction, but having gone back to revisit the discussion, I have started a draft for a blog post inspired by those remarks. Not sure yet where I will go with it, but I am glad you commented on it here too.

RNeff 10y ago

Older peoples' eyesight is not as good as younger people. We need bifocals, trifocals, reading glasses, etc. Font and color choices that work for young eyes may not work with older eyes. Using larger fonts in the browser may help, but not all text scales, and some layouts will break really badly. If you see a person looking over their glasses at a screen three inches away, there is a serious problem. Slack tries to be clever and hip with its responses, but it is really silly and irritating after awhile. It is easy to be cute and snarky but end up offending people different from your team, like "Hey, dudes!". Programmers with experience writing APIs will create better new APIs, but not if they are "too old" for the culture fit.

discombobulate 10y ago
> Slack tries to be clever and hip with its responses, but it is really silly and irritating after awhile. It is easy to be cute and snarky but end up offending people different from your team, like "Hey, dudes!". Sounds like some bros have imbued the product with their culture. I'm a bit torn on using 'personality' in products. MailChimp seems to do it well. Could call it Clippy-syndrome[0]. An annoying anthropomorphism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

mchannon 10y ago

Look at diversity as something to be accumulated over a career. Would you rather hire the 40-year-old developer who's worked at one position in one company for the last 20 years, or the 40-year-old developer who's worked at 20 positions at 20 companies for the past 20 years? Who's going to be better able to adapt quickly to your company's problems? Who's going to be able to teach you some new tricks? So much of what makes us good at what we do is learning from others. If you limit the kinds of others you learn from, you do your trade skills a disservice. Diversity doesn't need a skin color or a gender or an age- it comes from each new contributor to a project. We just often, as human beings, find it more uncomfortable to get somebody new who's not like us, than go with the obvious "culture fit". To get to the kernel of the question, the more people you learn from, the fewer forms of lazy-minded sloppy coding you'll tolerate from yourself and others. If diversity is a variable, then quality experience is its integral.

discombobulate 10y ago
> Look at diversity as something to be accumulated over a career. > Diversity doesn't need a skin color or a gender or an age I got the impression the diversity the newsletter referred to was identity, rather than cognitive. It seems harder to judge cognitive diversity. Maybe something like openness as a personality trait could be used as a proxy[0]. [0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-trust/201403/the-brain-works-through-openness-boost-creativity https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-trust/201403/the-...

itamarst 10y ago

One example among many: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... It's not even a complete list! E.g. airline reservation systems break for people with single character last name. Which happens. And I swear the hyphen in my last name is the reason I get selected for extra scrutiny every time I go through US passport control. Airline systems don't do hyphens, so there's a mismatch with passport...

discombobulate 10y ago
It's a useful list. You wouldn't need to hire for each of those cases, though. Just be aware of them. > And I swear the hyphen in my last name is the reason I get selected for extra scrutiny every time I go through US passport control. It not unheard of for last names to be hyphenated in the UK. It's most common among the 'upper class'.
- itamarst 10y ago
  Well, your options are: 1) Hire lots of people with same experience, but each of which spends lots of time trying to learn everything about everything. 2) Hire a bunch of people with different experiences and knowledge and pool their learning. They can and should also try to learn lots of stuff. You can eventually reproduce the necessary knowledge and skills with path #1... but it's not like you have that much time available to learn. Path #2 is much more efficient.

malux85 10y ago

Absolutly! Diversity means different perspectives on problem solving. It also means that it's likely one persons weakness will be another persons strength, as a result the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. You need the exploratory programmers, the ones who can knock up a prototype in a couple of hours to validate an idea. But they might not be so good at doing production quality work. In your API example, this is the guy who is able to try out that new API framework that got released, and see if it fits with our systems in a couple of days. This programmer likes the New Star Trek, playing online MMO's and listens to drum n bass. You need the diligent programmers - the ones who think of every edge case and make sure it's covered. Their systems are more robust than the exploratory programmers, but slower to deliver. This engineer is the one who will think of every single possible combination of events that could be called on your API. They worry a lot, but don't take this as a sign they're unhappy, as they usually are generally happy. They like reading sci-fi books slowly, they don't make many jokes themselves but will erupt in laughter if you pose a quirky pun or bit of dark humor. They can appreciate the old and the new star trek, but would rather be coding. You need the grumpy guy with a white beard, because he can see the entire tech stack and doesn't mind writing a high perforamnce kernel extension that 10x's your companies I/O perforamnce. But this engineer is NOT interested in working in the latest fad framework. They'll pull your chestnuts out of the fire when it matters most. They like the old star trek, dungeons and dragons and read Poe during lunch breaks. You need the social coder who's great at seeing how systems interact, respected by different teams, they're all about the interface boundaries. They'll be on twitter and in your slack channel. They'll be reading all the pull requests and helping answer questions on the wiki. They dont care much for star trek, but are subscribed to 100 youtube channels. Please forgive my tongue-in-cheek stereotyping, the richness of diversity allows a large field of view, and this comes from everybody having a different background, different interests, and different lives.

EJTH 10y ago

Diversity is such a broad concept that without specifying what kind of diversity we are talking about, it is hard to say. I think that diversity in background is pretty important. At my current workplace we have a wide range of highly educated devs, but we also have a self-taught hackers. We tend to have each our strong area and concerns about our product. Gender and cultural diversity in UX is good too for obvious reasons.