7 ms·

One point about remote work, versus in-office work, that rarely gets brought up is that remote work promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. You get to work

by jawns 4y ago

One point about remote work, versus in-office work, that rarely gets brought up is that remote work promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. You get to work with people who live across the country, or across the world, with all of the variety of culture that brings. Plus, you get to work with people from rural areas, for whom big-city jobs would otherwise be infeasible. The more flexible working arrangement is good for women with young children, some of whom would otherwise leave the workforce entirely for a few years. (It's good for men with young children, too, but they are less likely to leave the workforce over it.) It's also good for people with disabilities -- both those that impair mobility and those with chronic conditions.

blueflow 4y ago
Diversity is good, why?
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Same as not putting all your eggs in the same basket. Diversifying a team/company brings resilience and stability in many ways, new insights as well.
- jawns 4y ago
  Sure, I'll bite. Diversity in the abstract has no intrinsic benefits. A dozen red roses is no more or less beautiful than roses of many colors. A set of heterogenous things is not intrinsically more valuable than a set of homogenous things. BUT when it comes to diversity of representation, there is a justice angle. My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem, because it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. Maybe that reason is systemic bias, or maybe it's direct bias on the part of the company. But somewhere in the process, there's an injustice taking place. I used to work for a company that was much more white, male, and otherwise homogeneous than the city in which it was located. And the company was worse off for it. There was a lot of groupthink. There was a lot of what I'd call TDD (testosterone-driven development). And people complained about there being a monoculture. The more homogenous the company became, the harder it became to attract qualified people who didn't fit the mold.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    > My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem. The people who talk like this argued that Asians don’t deserve equal admission to Harvard or UNC because there’s “too many”. I think that kind of racism is disgusting — choosing people based on skin color is horrific.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      You’re putting words in parent’s mouth. I personally never heard someone jumping from one to the other, and don’t see the logical bind either.
      - zmgsabst 4y ago
        UNC and Harvard both argued before the Supreme Court in 2022 that their anti-Asian racism is for “diversity”. A lot of people are dishonest about that, but the people who crow about “diversity” consistently engage in racialized language — and discrimination based on race, such as discrimination against Asians at those universities. (You can see GP works himself around to the racial angle by the end.) I didn’t put any words in GPs mouth: I pointed out he’s using the language of modern bigots, such as those at Harvard and UNC.
        makeitdouble 4y ago
        You are commenting on a case that is still open, and while you seem squarely in favor of SFFA, their claims are far from being validated (they’ve been rejected by lower courts up to this point) What I find interesting in particular from those lawsuits: one of the main argument was the representation of Asians being lower than “white” ethnic groups adjusted for selected academic achievements. That basically goes against your thesis, as doing that intentionally would lower diversity.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Yes, there exist people that do that. Yet, we are talking about a real barrier for many kinds of people that was suddenly lifted, and people are still making an effort to classify the people that pointed "hey, there was a barrier here" as racist. The rhetoric of this thread is amazing.
- adamhp 4y ago
  From a strictly capitalist perspective: because the ability to develop solutions that eventually make a lot of money have to apply to problems that exist in global markets, and having people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds directly working on those solutions gives you a competitive advantage because of the organization's now broader understanding of those problems.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    One of the things even Marx praised about capitalism (vs. feudalism and mercantilism) was exactly this notion that the needs of capital and competition means protectionist and xenophobic tendencies would eventually get pushed aside.
- anecdotal1 4y ago
  I find that people from different cultures have different approaches to solving problems and that's valuable for me to learn
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    I find that people of the same culture tend to clump together. Which diminishes any value from culture difference.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Lack of diversity in your company can result in bugs in your product when unrepresented types of people use your product, presumably leading to reduced profits. https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
  - blueflow 4y ago
    And a company needs black employees to be able to make products that also work for blacks?
    - millzlane 4y ago
      Why is diversity bad?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - harimau777 4y ago
      It's not so much that it is not possible to address any given issue in a different way. E.g. they could have tested the soap dispenser with different skin tones. Rather the issue is that a team is more likely to realize issues caused by interaction between a product and various groups if those groups are part of the team working on the project. It's a discoverability issue.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      A company needs employees who are likely to think about the issues, and while most of it can be learned, in practice those who try to depend on this as a means to catch these issues, or try to make it an appointed role, tend to fail. A more diverse workforce is not enough, but it very much tends to challenge assumptions that would otherwise get made without a second thought. To take a trivial example, I'm Norwegian, and over the years I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain even the most basic internationalisation requirements to English-speakers who somehow manage to even think about basic character set considerations, much less transliteration (Håkon transliterates to Haakon - å -> aa, æ -> ae, ø -> oe -, except when Scandinavians have learnt that some places they run into problems unless it's transliterated Hakon, so good luck doing a string comparison of names reliably), language differences (assuming no need to make different recordings for dates for an IVR system and you can just reuse the ordinals? except when you can't; surely there's a default, "safe", clearly dominant language for each country that you can use without pissing anyone off? and so on). And that's between similar cultures and closely related languages, and ignoring cultural expectations outside of a European heritage.
- harimau777 4y ago
  I can think of a number of reasons: While it may be too blunt of a tool to address the core systemic causes of issues like inequality of opportunity and discrimination, it is a relatively simple way to mitigate their effects. E.g. long term we should try to make sure that the hiring process does not discriminate against various groups, but in the short term making sure that you have at least some of each group helps mitigate any problems. Having diverse team may allow a team to develop a wider range of potential solutions to problems. Having a diverse team may help avoid unanticipated interactions between a product and different groups of people. E.g. facial recognition software that doesn't work well on people with dark skin.
  - abduhl 4y ago
    You’re talking about people like they’re different types of Pokémon to collect.
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      That's an excellent comparison! If you only have electric-type Pokémon, you can theoretically beat every Pokémon Gym. But it's a lot easier if you have a _diverse_ set of Pokémon with different abilities. =)
      - abduhl 4y ago
        As an electric-type Pokemon (aka a minority), I'd prefer it if people didn't tailor their demeanor towards me and their hiring/firing decisions about me based on my type but rather on my abilities. Let's not forget that Pikachu starts with a normal type ability and isn't only able to learn electric type moves. Build your team based on ability, not Pokemon type, especially when there isn’t even a good correlation between Pokemon type and ability and ability can be inspected directly. Stereotyping about a person's ability based on their skin color is similarly bigoted. And try not to use a =) when endorsing racism so openly.
        theshrike79 4y ago
- alex_duf 4y ago
  Variety of point of views brings opinions you may not have, had you been uniquely surrounded by people that have been through similar experiences to you. In my experience I've seen it impacting product decisions, pricing decisions, and engineering decisions.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    I hear this often. What I see with hiring has nothing to do with diversity of opinion, it's about hiring enough of protected classes to avoid lawsuits. I would love to hear how companies can interview for deep differences in thinking. Doing that in a way that would not risk lawsuits from the interview process (asking about personal religion or neurodiversity), of course.
- papandada 4y ago
  The parent comment gave a number of specific examples why remote work benefits various people. Those points still stand regardless of the "diversity" label.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Yes. So the question is why they found it necessary to include it.
- mmh0000 4y ago
  When you live in a bubble you stagnant.
- O__________O 4y ago
  Most obvious reason is that ecosystems are most resilient when diversified. Supporting diversity as an aspect of culture, especially at scale, has many benefits, including: equality, alternative perspectives, economic resilience & performance, opportunity & threat awareness, geographical risk management, respect for diversity in nature, multilingual capacity, cultural awareness, etc. Why would diversity not be good?
  - dijit 4y ago
    > Why would diversity not be good? (responding to this statement, and this statement only): When creating systems, using a diverse array of standards instead of just one creates problems. For example: using metric units and imperial units. Heterogeneity in standards is desired in those circumstances. When collaborating: having a diverse array of cultural norms can cause friction when people interpret phrases as pleasant vs passive aggressive. When designing corporate identity: a diverse set of art-styles would likely give a muddled or non-professional look of a company. (though in certain circumstances this can be desirable if you are going for an "indy" look).
    - O__________O 4y ago
      Agree, there clearly exceptions, though issue is that each of those situations either has a reasonable resolution or that lack of diversity just postpones cultural conflicts among cultures. Basically, if lack of inclusion issue for significant subset of a population, then it’s an issue. If there two cultures that are naturally wholly independent of each other, attempting inject diversity is clearly flawed. On the flip side, unable non-statistically significant diversity would lead to a chaotic state. Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception.
      - abduhl 4y ago
        >>Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception. China’s rise as a superpower would seem to directly contradict your statement. It seems like the truth is the opposite of what you say: a heterogenous system will always outperform a diverse/chaotic system unless there are edge cases which introduce shocks to the system.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  People with different backgrounds offer different solutions to problems. This is an objectively good thing. Invisible Women[0] is an excellent book on the subject with multiple anecdotes and hard statistical data on how having diverse people making decisions is good for business. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
One other benefit of remote work that doesn’t get talked about as much is that it makes harassment harder, and any harassment is likely to leave more of an electronic evidence trail.
- 6510 4y ago
  Good one, harassment is in the face tho, records would also diminish talking shit behind peoples back. Records would keep us honest about policy, protocol, law and they make it harder to agree to cut corners. It enforces professionalism.
- sshine 4y ago
  Not my experience. Video streams don't leave evidence. Having been harrassed by a group of colleagues during covid, it felt worse in person but it was also easier to circumvent and defend in the office. The distance to changing team was shorter in the office, since I had the opportunity to network while at work. Remote work means you mostly talk to the same people. Another example of that, not related to harrassment: First time I spoke to someone who had once spoken to a customer was 7 months into a job, during my first in-office lunch break. It is amazing that companies can be "customer and usability driven" yet almost make a deliberate effort to prevent programmers from talking to end users. Being in office actually got me closer to customers (being able to talk to sales and support without scheduling a meeting).
  - beej71 4y ago
    IANAL, but the question on my mind is this: can you just record the stream, especially if the app (like Zoom) has a clear indicator visible to all participants that it is being recorded? And double especially if you're in a one-party consent state? Any lawyers willing to chime in? Another option comes to mind, namely a preemptive "I record all my videos for reference." I can imagine some businesses having a problem with that for secrecy reasons, though.
_nalply 4y ago
But for Deaf people? How often do remote working people phone?
- shagie 4y ago
  Many conferencing tools have live transcriptions as part of the service. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions-in-a-teams-meeting-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions... In combination with the person typing to participate in the meeting, this may be more accessible than having to have a sign translator in the meetings with you all the time.
  - _nalply 4y ago
    I hope the quality of transcription will increase. Nowadays in Switzerland there are four different languages: English, French, German and the Swiss-German dialect which is different enough to warrant a separate speech-to-text training, which will be a bit difficult because every valley has its own variant of the dialect. This is currently a serious barrier. For example at Youtube, if people talk Swiss German Youtube identifies it as Spanish, Dutch, Ukrainian or English, I have seen it all. If I would need to do remote work, I would look for an international company where the office language is strictly English.
bad_username 4y ago
Sounds more like it promotes equality, rather than the other things you mentioned.

by jawns 4y ago

blueflow 4y ago

Diversity is good, why?

makeitdouble 4y ago
Same as not putting all your eggs in the same basket. Diversifying a team/company brings resilience and stability in many ways, new insights as well.
jawns 4y ago
Sure, I'll bite. Diversity in the abstract has no intrinsic benefits. A dozen red roses is no more or less beautiful than roses of many colors. A set of heterogenous things is not intrinsically more valuable than a set of homogenous things. BUT when it comes to diversity of representation, there is a justice angle. My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem, because it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. Maybe that reason is systemic bias, or maybe it's direct bias on the part of the company. But somewhere in the process, there's an injustice taking place. I used to work for a company that was much more white, male, and otherwise homogeneous than the city in which it was located. And the company was worse off for it. There was a lot of groupthink. There was a lot of what I'd call TDD (testosterone-driven development). And people complained about there being a monoculture. The more homogenous the company became, the harder it became to attract qualified people who didn't fit the mold.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  > My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem. The people who talk like this argued that Asians don’t deserve equal admission to Harvard or UNC because there’s “too many”. I think that kind of racism is disgusting — choosing people based on skin color is horrific.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    You’re putting words in parent’s mouth. I personally never heard someone jumping from one to the other, and don’t see the logical bind either.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      UNC and Harvard both argued before the Supreme Court in 2022 that their anti-Asian racism is for “diversity”. A lot of people are dishonest about that, but the people who crow about “diversity” consistently engage in racialized language — and discrimination based on race, such as discrimination against Asians at those universities. (You can see GP works himself around to the racial angle by the end.) I didn’t put any words in GPs mouth: I pointed out he’s using the language of modern bigots, such as those at Harvard and UNC.
      - makeitdouble 4y ago
        You are commenting on a case that is still open, and while you seem squarely in favor of SFFA, their claims are far from being validated (they’ve been rejected by lower courts up to this point) What I find interesting in particular from those lawsuits: one of the main argument was the representation of Asians being lower than “white” ethnic groups adjusted for selected academic achievements. That basically goes against your thesis, as doing that intentionally would lower diversity.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Yes, there exist people that do that. Yet, we are talking about a real barrier for many kinds of people that was suddenly lifted, and people are still making an effort to classify the people that pointed "hey, there was a barrier here" as racist. The rhetoric of this thread is amazing.
adamhp 4y ago
From a strictly capitalist perspective: because the ability to develop solutions that eventually make a lot of money have to apply to problems that exist in global markets, and having people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds directly working on those solutions gives you a competitive advantage because of the organization's now broader understanding of those problems.
- vidarh 4y ago
  One of the things even Marx praised about capitalism (vs. feudalism and mercantilism) was exactly this notion that the needs of capital and competition means protectionist and xenophobic tendencies would eventually get pushed aside.
anecdotal1 4y ago
I find that people from different cultures have different approaches to solving problems and that's valuable for me to learn
- drewcoo 4y ago
  I find that people of the same culture tend to clump together. Which diminishes any value from culture difference.
pabs3 4y ago
Lack of diversity in your company can result in bugs in your product when unrepresented types of people use your product, presumably leading to reduced profits. https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
- blueflow 4y ago
  And a company needs black employees to be able to make products that also work for blacks?
  - millzlane 4y ago
    Why is diversity bad?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - harimau777 4y ago
    It's not so much that it is not possible to address any given issue in a different way. E.g. they could have tested the soap dispenser with different skin tones. Rather the issue is that a team is more likely to realize issues caused by interaction between a product and various groups if those groups are part of the team working on the project. It's a discoverability issue.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    A company needs employees who are likely to think about the issues, and while most of it can be learned, in practice those who try to depend on this as a means to catch these issues, or try to make it an appointed role, tend to fail. A more diverse workforce is not enough, but it very much tends to challenge assumptions that would otherwise get made without a second thought. To take a trivial example, I'm Norwegian, and over the years I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain even the most basic internationalisation requirements to English-speakers who somehow manage to even think about basic character set considerations, much less transliteration (Håkon transliterates to Haakon - å -> aa, æ -> ae, ø -> oe -, except when Scandinavians have learnt that some places they run into problems unless it's transliterated Hakon, so good luck doing a string comparison of names reliably), language differences (assuming no need to make different recordings for dates for an IVR system and you can just reuse the ordinals? except when you can't; surely there's a default, "safe", clearly dominant language for each country that you can use without pissing anyone off? and so on). And that's between similar cultures and closely related languages, and ignoring cultural expectations outside of a European heritage.
harimau777 4y ago
I can think of a number of reasons: While it may be too blunt of a tool to address the core systemic causes of issues like inequality of opportunity and discrimination, it is a relatively simple way to mitigate their effects. E.g. long term we should try to make sure that the hiring process does not discriminate against various groups, but in the short term making sure that you have at least some of each group helps mitigate any problems. Having diverse team may allow a team to develop a wider range of potential solutions to problems. Having a diverse team may help avoid unanticipated interactions between a product and different groups of people. E.g. facial recognition software that doesn't work well on people with dark skin.
- abduhl 4y ago
  You’re talking about people like they’re different types of Pokémon to collect.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    That's an excellent comparison! If you only have electric-type Pokémon, you can theoretically beat every Pokémon Gym. But it's a lot easier if you have a _diverse_ set of Pokémon with different abilities. =)
    - abduhl 4y ago
      As an electric-type Pokemon (aka a minority), I'd prefer it if people didn't tailor their demeanor towards me and their hiring/firing decisions about me based on my type but rather on my abilities. Let's not forget that Pikachu starts with a normal type ability and isn't only able to learn electric type moves. Build your team based on ability, not Pokemon type, especially when there isn’t even a good correlation between Pokemon type and ability and ability can be inspected directly. Stereotyping about a person's ability based on their skin color is similarly bigoted. And try not to use a =) when endorsing racism so openly.
      - theshrike79 4y ago
alex_duf 4y ago
Variety of point of views brings opinions you may not have, had you been uniquely surrounded by people that have been through similar experiences to you. In my experience I've seen it impacting product decisions, pricing decisions, and engineering decisions.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  I hear this often. What I see with hiring has nothing to do with diversity of opinion, it's about hiring enough of protected classes to avoid lawsuits. I would love to hear how companies can interview for deep differences in thinking. Doing that in a way that would not risk lawsuits from the interview process (asking about personal religion or neurodiversity), of course.
papandada 4y ago
The parent comment gave a number of specific examples why remote work benefits various people. Those points still stand regardless of the "diversity" label.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Yes. So the question is why they found it necessary to include it.
mmh0000 4y ago
When you live in a bubble you stagnant.
O__________O 4y ago
Most obvious reason is that ecosystems are most resilient when diversified. Supporting diversity as an aspect of culture, especially at scale, has many benefits, including: equality, alternative perspectives, economic resilience & performance, opportunity & threat awareness, geographical risk management, respect for diversity in nature, multilingual capacity, cultural awareness, etc. Why would diversity not be good?
- dijit 4y ago
  > Why would diversity not be good? (responding to this statement, and this statement only): When creating systems, using a diverse array of standards instead of just one creates problems. For example: using metric units and imperial units. Heterogeneity in standards is desired in those circumstances. When collaborating: having a diverse array of cultural norms can cause friction when people interpret phrases as pleasant vs passive aggressive. When designing corporate identity: a diverse set of art-styles would likely give a muddled or non-professional look of a company. (though in certain circumstances this can be desirable if you are going for an "indy" look).
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Agree, there clearly exceptions, though issue is that each of those situations either has a reasonable resolution or that lack of diversity just postpones cultural conflicts among cultures. Basically, if lack of inclusion issue for significant subset of a population, then it’s an issue. If there two cultures that are naturally wholly independent of each other, attempting inject diversity is clearly flawed. On the flip side, unable non-statistically significant diversity would lead to a chaotic state. Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception.
    - abduhl 4y ago
      >>Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception. China’s rise as a superpower would seem to directly contradict your statement. It seems like the truth is the opposite of what you say: a heterogenous system will always outperform a diverse/chaotic system unless there are edge cases which introduce shocks to the system.
theshrike79 4y ago
People with different backgrounds offer different solutions to problems. This is an objectively good thing. Invisible Women[0] is an excellent book on the subject with multiple anecdotes and hard statistical data on how having diverse people making decisions is good for business. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

One other benefit of remote work that doesn’t get talked about as much is that it makes harassment harder, and any harassment is likely to leave more of an electronic evidence trail.

6510 4y ago
Good one, harassment is in the face tho, records would also diminish talking shit behind peoples back. Records would keep us honest about policy, protocol, law and they make it harder to agree to cut corners. It enforces professionalism.
sshine 4y ago
Not my experience. Video streams don't leave evidence. Having been harrassed by a group of colleagues during covid, it felt worse in person but it was also easier to circumvent and defend in the office. The distance to changing team was shorter in the office, since I had the opportunity to network while at work. Remote work means you mostly talk to the same people. Another example of that, not related to harrassment: First time I spoke to someone who had once spoken to a customer was 7 months into a job, during my first in-office lunch break. It is amazing that companies can be "customer and usability driven" yet almost make a deliberate effort to prevent programmers from talking to end users. Being in office actually got me closer to customers (being able to talk to sales and support without scheduling a meeting).
- beej71 4y ago
  IANAL, but the question on my mind is this: can you just record the stream, especially if the app (like Zoom) has a clear indicator visible to all participants that it is being recorded? And double especially if you're in a one-party consent state? Any lawyers willing to chime in? Another option comes to mind, namely a preemptive "I record all my videos for reference." I can imagine some businesses having a problem with that for secrecy reasons, though.

_nalply 4y ago

But for Deaf people? How often do remote working people phone?

shagie 4y ago
Many conferencing tools have live transcriptions as part of the service. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions-in-a-teams-meeting-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions... In combination with the person typing to participate in the meeting, this may be more accessible than having to have a sign translator in the meetings with you all the time.
- _nalply 4y ago
  I hope the quality of transcription will increase. Nowadays in Switzerland there are four different languages: English, French, German and the Swiss-German dialect which is different enough to warrant a separate speech-to-text training, which will be a bit difficult because every valley has its own variant of the dialect. This is currently a serious barrier. For example at Youtube, if people talk Swiss German Youtube identifies it as Spanish, Dutch, Ukrainian or English, I have seen it all. If I would need to do remote work, I would look for an international company where the office language is strictly English.

bad_username 4y ago

Sounds more like it promotes equality, rather than the other things you mentioned.