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Comment by starpilot | Hacker News Reader

My takeaway: there are huge potential markets in people who are not like me. The execs were probably completely unaware of this market, and it took an outsider to hold their hand and bring it to them. I love flaming hot cheetos and know tons of people who do, but there is no way I would have thought of taking the hot pepper / other spices from a traditional Mexican food (elotes, which I had in LA) and adapting them in this way. The fact that everyone I interact with forms an upper class monoculture (white/asian, college educated, 20s-40s, mostly US-born) means that I have huge blindspots. I wonder what huge businesses could be created catering toward senior citizens, for middle aged people working retail, recent Asian immigrants, working single fathers, and so on.

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This is why diversity is so important! Not only in business, but in general — everyone has huge blind spots, no matter what background they have. Life is much larger and more diverse than people usually imagine. Interacting and learning from people with different backgrounds than yours is a fundamentally rewarding experience, although it can be hard at times.

It has to be taken seriously by management, however. I've worked at a few places where diversity was king but upper management continued to make the decisions of aging middle-class white folks. Not that I have a problem with that in and of itself, but it was funny how they would hire lots of women and minorities, say that they wanted to target undeserved demographics, but then never actually attempt to do it. Diversity is, more often than not, a veneer.

The unfortunate result of viewing diversity as a performance metric to hit, rather than a real and decisive advantage.

And percicely the metric being pushed for by those who should know better. You can't quantify viewpoint diversity in a spreadsheet or quarterly report.

"Undeserved" instead of "underserved" is an unfortunate typo there... :P

Yep, that's what I meant. Thanks!

The problem with diversity is that it's thought of wrongly most of the times. What people think of is not actually the diversity that creates the value.

I believe many groups that are diverse by gender or race or ethnic composition are actually quite similar if they are the same age even though they might have different upbringings.

I explored this subject in this essay a while back which was based on some reflections I did after an ASK HN i did became quite popular.

https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...

my conclusion was "which diversity" is an important discussion to have.

>"Were are problems?"

What is this sentence? I had to stop reading here.

While I am not a native speaker I am trying to wrap my head around if I said something really bad or why exactly you stopped reading.

Where are problems was an attempt at saying it slightly more vague than where are the problems hiding. It was meant as an opener for the following breakdown of problems.

It could probably have been more eloquent or grammatically correct but I didn't think it would be a show stopper :)

Sorry, you feel that way I think it was an interesting exploration that at least got me to think about diversity and it's use as a business advantage quite differently.

The right way to say it is "Where are the problems?" (present tense), or "Where were the problems?" (past tense)

The issue with "Were the problems?" is that it's grammatically incorrect on a level that makes it Really Hard to understand, if not totally ambiguous. I honestly didn't know what exactly you meant until I read your comment explaining it in the other chain.

That said, I like the premise of the article, and how you break down the different types of problems. The idea that the value of diversity is in having different backgrounds, mindsets, and values which provide different perspectives is one that I share.

Maybe for your future posts, consider pushing your text through Grammarly or another English grammar checker to clean up your prose. Solid grammar is a force multiplier when it comes to perceived quality and readability of a text (don't take this to mean Perfect grammar, though. I think an individual's voice shines through inconsequential grammar mistakes).

I 100% agree.

But it's important that diversity be considered in all forms, not just based on race/sex.

If your "diverse" team is made up of different ethnicities and genders but only consists of ivy league members who grew up in California... well, not really diverse then, is it?

Class diversity is pretty hard to achieve because you usually need some baseline class to actually be able to succeed in a role, i.e. you can't show up to a meeting with customers or shareholders chewing dip and wearing camo jorts. And social mobility from lower classes into corporate-ready roles is rather low in this country, so while there certainly are people who grew up poor and would be useful for companies to figure out what lower class consumers might need, there aren't many of them; furthermore, for the people who did grow up that way and into being a person able to function in the corporate sphere, it's probably in part due to their rejection of their poor background.

Maybe we just need more focus groups.

All these "diverse" people are gonna rub the mostly middle upper class decision makers the wrong way unless they specifically work to fit in. You can leave the trailer park but the trailer park will never leave you. Also, once you've "made it" your needs change too. You might still be trailer trash but you're trailer trash with money which is rare.

Working in an environment where there is nobody like you and you have to always be on your toes for culture conflict is work! These people already get more than enough time outside of their comfort zone and most are more than happy to cash their paycheck because from their frame of reference that's more than enough "success". They don't feel the need to preach about what "their people" are like because they're outliers at work and they're outliers when they go home and that doesn't exactly make one feel authoritative on the topic.

I'm not sure what I'm saying here but it's not as simple as "listen to the diverse people" or "more focus groups".

Settle down, Nigel. No one's seriously suggesting a law mandating class diversity. Focus groups will be good enough.

> i.e. you can't show up to a meeting with customers or shareholders chewing dip and wearing camo jorts

This betrays a very non-diverse view of the world :) In more rural parts of the USA, this is kind of the norm (save for the "shareholders", since a lot of rural transactions are among sole proprietors or other sorts of tiny private companies, if they're even formal at all). Sometimes those proprietorships get big fast, and you end up with that weird case where the CEO wears a camo suit and takes stakeholders hunting instead of golfing.

On a different note: it looks like you're mixing up "class" in the economic sense v. "class" in the etiquette sense, and those ain't always equivalent.

You don't necessarily need class diversity, though that would be nice, you need psychological diversity.

Here's the real divider: Viewpoint diversity.

Are you ready to have some conservatives/Republicans on your team?

Viewpoint diversity? Republican/conservative seems to be the default state in most corporations.

You clearly don't work in Silicon Valley :)

Yes, it's possible bzudo is one of the 99.9% of people who does not work in SV.

If we're only 0.1% who work, I understand why I've been feeling tired...

Why not?

> Are you ready to have some conservatives/Republicans on your team?

Such individuals are no problem.

What I wouldn't want are people who are "my way or highway", non-evidence-based, paranoid conspiracy theorists...

It doesn't matter if they're conservative or liberal - if they're off in the deep end and drowning, they probably aren't going to help a team move forward.

That depends.

Putting aside whether they’re Trumpers or card carrying communists, there’s a reason that some kind of Overton window tends to occur: viewpoints aren’t relative, and some viewpoints are wrong (on facts, on outcomes, ie. completely detached from reality). Diversity isn’t productive if we are expected to value dangerous delusions. Valuing off-beat or contrarian ideas, sure. But: I like milk and sugar with my tea, you want to smash capitalism violently for the rise of the proletariat; I think that Education should be free but speech should be censored, you believe in concentration camps, QAnon and pizzagate. This can get silly.

Please. Large tech companies are happy to have their Ivy Leaguers show up in flip flops while ridiculing anyone making an effort. All they have to do is not actively ruin the chances of outsiders and hire some of those contractors as equal employees.

No focus group is going to tell you something obvious you don't want to hear. Walk into any library and see what you find in terms of computing from all those companies saving the world. Most likely, very little. Is that because you can't make a billion dollars selling computers to libraries, hotels and airports? Or that it wouldn't be a good marketing opportunity? Probably not. More likely because people don't give a shit and that tech companies are perfectly happy to live in their own bubble of superiority.

This isn't a "blindspot" it's arrogance, and ignorance, and incompetence. Large tech companies can't makes things that are primarily useful to other people. They are busy capturing markets with touch bars and clones of one of their own service that will be shutdown as soon as it grants someone a promotion. Then their employees can go on Hacker News, or their own internal forums, out of view of any opinion that is slightly uncomfortable and fault political correctness for how everyone else just don't understand that the state of computing is their own fault. Because $500k salaries, sophisticated tax planning and probably the least amount of regulation of any market just isn't enough to not see the world through a straw.

This is kind of circular reasoning though. The nice thing about this story is that the CEO of the company decided to look past how that janitor did not know corporate etiquette or have the right clothes or the fancy education. The only reason you need "some baseline class" is because that's how the people at the top have decided it should be.

You’re right, it’s not diverse in the sense of ‘diversity of education.’

I think the cultural ideal of meritocracy needs to be addressed, and this is conflating two separate issues:

1) People of certain backgrounds want to and need to prove they CAN compete.

2) People of certain backgrounds should be helping make decisions even without credentials.

so there are both competent and less competent people that need to be included.

"wait what why? I wasted way too much of my life to accept why less competitive people should have such lucrative roles"

because the profit engine doesn't really need to care about the human worker's competency, it only needs to expand the addressable market. having already reached peak engagement, the business processes have already reached the evolutionary zenith for the incumbent nepotism and meritocrat talent's way of tapping into human consumptive conscious. Expanding that market further requires perceptions that people in those markets can relate to.

The idea that a push for diversity is somehow in conflict with a meritocracy is deeply flawed because it relies on the idea that people with diverse backgrounds either haven't shown they are capable or that there are no people with diverse backgrounds that are capable. A good diversity program does two things:

1. It identifies and removes certain unnecessary credentials that might rule out people with diverse backgrounds. Requiring a college degree for applicants when a degree provides no benefit on the job is one example.

2. It makes an active effort to find and pursue diverse candidates. Odds are there are plenty of people who are competent enough to do the job. Let's imagine you are hiring 5 engineers from a pool of 100 qualified people. If there are only 10 diverse candidates in that pool and you just hired the first random qualified candidate you find, there is roughly a 60% chance that you end up with zero diversity on the team. If you actively work to get diverse candidates to apply and maybe get 10 additional diverse candidates added to the previous pool, you can still hire the first random qualified person but your odds drop to roughly 35% of having a team with zero diversity.

TL;DR - You don't have to hire less qualified people to have diversity, it just takes a little more thought and effort to make diversity a priority.

That’s a fantasy. The reality is that there aren’t enough diverse candidates to reach the diversity goals of every company without hiring incompetent people.

If every company wants 50% women and the graduates with interests in CS come out at a 4:1 male to female ratio, the strive for diversity either needs to give up and hire what the pool provides or start giving underqualified women.

TL;DR - Companies absolutely need to lower the bar for minorities if they want ratios that don’t match the pools. This problem is only made worse by the popularity of these very diversity programs.

The pipeline problem is a concern long term, but I don’t think it is the primary problem at the moment for a couple reasons.

First, it assumes that the pool of diverse candidates has already been exhausted. Anecdotally I have not seen evidence of that. If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts. There is no evidence that is happening. This will eventually be a problem once every company tries to be more diverse than the pool of candidates, but right now there does not seem to be enough companies prioritizing diversity to an extent that this is an issue.

Secondly one of the causes of the pipeline problem is not having enough visibly successful diverse people in the industry. The more diverse candidates that are put in positions to succeed, the more visible they become to the next generation, and the more likely the next generation believes that this career can be a path they can successfully pursue.

> If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts.

You lost me here. Why is this the case?

Simple supply and demand. If the demand for women exceeded the supply of women, then the naturally result is a bidding war for the available women that would drive up their salary. The fact that women in this industry don't make more than men disproves the idea that companies are currently prioritizing the hiring of women to an extent that the talent pool of available women cannot meet.

Why do you expect the demand for women to be different from the demand for similarly qualified men?

I don't, that was the idea I was arguing against. The comment I replied to put forward the hypothetical regarding every company wanting to hire 50% women in a world with only 20% of CS graduates being women. That would result in a world in which the demand for women is equal to men but the supply of women is much smaller than the supply of men. The natural result of that is that women have a higher salary than men. We know this isn't true so this is a modus tollens argument that disproves the original hypothetical.

I don’t think anyone was making the argument you were arguing against...

Why assume that the only thing a companies can use in a bidding war for employees is money?

We could use the same fact to prove that giving women more money than men do not increase the ration of women, as otherwise companies would have already done that.

No, the other option is to hire incompetent women at a competent salary. That’s one of the major complaints with diversity programs. You can’t pay more to be able to fill the unfillable quota, so you just hire incompetent people at competent salaries instead.

So yes, incompetent minorities make more than the competent majorities.

I'm not sure companies could legally pay women more than men. Sex is a protected class.

And yet, men and women doing the same job don't always get the same salary.

Hardly anyone doing the same job gets the same salary, with notable exceptions.

I certainly didn't make the same amount of money as my coworker at my old job.

> If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts.

Or it just means one of the other stated assumptions is wrong, e.g., that companies don't really want 50% women. Every company I've worked for has been happy to hire women for any job, but none has ever made it a quota.

Invest in people and that problem goes away.

> The idea that a push for diversity is somehow in conflict with a meritocracy is deeply flawed because it relies on the idea that people with diverse backgrounds either haven't shown they are capable or that there are no people with diverse backgrounds that are capable

I’m saying thats only part of the dilemma and is muddied by that specific binary approach

People talk about interest in certain fields amongst demographics, pipeline problems, resent any perception of undermining a meritocratic process and this hurts everyone

But the kicker is that its not JUST about proving that a proportional distribution of people in a currently underrepresented demographic is competent, there and in the pipeline

Its that companies wont grow to address larger markets if meritocratic diversity is the only thing they look for and try to approve

People - like what you expressed - are barking up just one of multiple trees. Even if you reach peak underrepresented minority, you’ve still failed to bring diverse ideas to the market

I mean, it's a nice side effect of diversity, I really don't think Flaming Cheetohs, or finding Takis in every supermarket near me, are why diversity is so important.

Your comment doesn’t explain why you actually do think it’s important.

Then again, there is the tale of dulce de leche M&M’s - trying to tap into such a market, only for it to fail terribly.

https://mms.fandom.com/wiki/Dulce_de_Leche_Caramel_M%26M%27s

My guess based on what I read from the grandparent post is there was probably some poor product fit. Perhaps we would have done better marketing it towards "gringos"?

From your link:

> In July 2001, Dulce de Leche M&M's were introduced in five markets with large Hispanic populations: Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Florida; Mcallen-Brownsville, Texas; and San Antonio, Texas. The flavor never became popular with the Hispanic community, who preferred existing M&M's flavors, and it was discontinued in most areas by early 2003.

Perhaps there is an opportunity in introducing it to people who don't have previous experience with this flavor? Just thinking out loud...

As someone who ate those Dulce de Leche M&Ms, what would've helped is if they were any good or bore any resemblance to the flavor they were named after.

The other issue was that the whole "Dulce de Leche" market became over-saturated. I remember that time - it was like everything was "dulce-this, dulce-that"; heck, I think there were cough-lozenges in that flavor.

This nails the issue. It's why flaming hot Cheetos were successful but Dulce de Leche weren't.

Don't make something meant to be something else explicitly. Make something that has the same meaning (or in this case flavor) as something else but make it its own thing for its own sake.

also, chocolate is a heavy part of mexican cuisine.. so it's not 'foreign' to start with..

Went to the east coast, couldn't find spicy chips/snacks of any kind in the grocery stores.

Finally found Takis at... Home Depot.

Try the gas stations next time.

Actually I did, but that was hit or miss.

Who knows, maybe they did tests and they didn't sell.

Personally, I like spicy because it's better than the alternatives of sugar and fat. I would say you should be able to eat lots of them without getting full, but then you do get "enchilado".

Home Depot is targeting day laborers, I would imagine. I live in the southeast where there are lots of migrant workers, and it's like described in the article, with entire aisles of gas stations dedicated to these kinds of snacks.

What, adding chili to a food? I reckon the monoculture cohort you talk of could have come up with that.

And yet, they didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

Making something hotter is the food equivalent of "Uber for" in the startup world.

There were hot/spicy snacks before hot Cheetos. No white person could have put two and two together?

Maybe they could have, but obviously they didn't.

The problem with being an engineer is, in general, you do not think like normal people. Case in point, Facebook. I know I've often discussed with other engineers how simple it would have been to implement with off the shelf technology in the '00s, but none of us would have ever wanted it. Often when I encounter problems I try to route around them, instead of developing productized solutions and marketing them to others.

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