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Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

> Building amazing products that power thousands of fintech apps requires us on the Plaid engineering team to empathize with the developers and end users who build and use these apps. To do that well, we need to have a team whose diversity reflects the millions of people Plaid supports.

This is the notion that apparently justifies the entire diversity and inclusion industrial complex - that your ability to empathize with somebody is dependant on sharing certain immutable characteristics, such as your sex or skin color. If the soft bigotry and regressivism of that stance isn't glaringly obvious to people I despair. Almost 60 years since MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech we've managed to invert its message, and calcify it into a lucrative and discriminatory corporate culture.

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I think the simpler explanation is that the easiest way to have a diversity of thought is through a diverse workforce. We all have different lived experiences, I have many blind spots due to my upbringing. Can I learn these and overcome them? Of course, but it's a lot easier if someone with a different viewpoint is on my team or in my organization.

Diversity of thought isn't just important to cater to a diverse user base, it's important because approaches to problem solving and engineering doesn't have a singular solution.

The scent of racism that underlies the whole “white and asian American men can’t possibly empathize with other cultures, foreign or domestic” idea seems to grow every day.

But it seems politically dangerous to even hint that you smell anything.

This seems like a mean-spirited leap. The quote says that they want to have a diverse team because their product's userbase is diverse, and you're saying they don't think people are capable of empathizing with people of a different skin color. Their intentions and/or implementations may not match their stated goal for all I know, but it seems like based on very little you've declared that this quote is racist.

I don't think it's a leap. It's the fundamental idea behind the corporate jargon. They didn't just say they want a diverse team because their users are diverse, they explicitly said that to empathize well with their diverse users they need a diverse team. I find that notion quite reprehensible, but it's parroted so much these days that most people now just accept it as somehow self-evident.

Or maybe it helps you empathize with somebody who is different from you if you regularly interact with people who are different from you.

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