4 ms·

And a company needs black employees to be able to make products that also work for blacks?

by blueflow 4y ago

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.

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.