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Comment by ecmascript | Hacker News Reader

Weird list with fancy words that don't offer much of explanation which opens up for making different interpretations.

> 2. The lack of diversity among founders and investors propagates harmful exclusion.

As an example. What kind of diversity? I assume she is writing about gender and ethnicity but in reality I think the diversity of opinions is what is most important to prevent harmful exclusion. I could read it like she mean diversity of opinions, diversity in a specific area like gender or just diversity in general. I assume what I assumed because I read the other points and people with left wing beliefs rarely care about diversity of opinion even if they claim to care about diversity.

Overall I don't understand several of the words that are being used, altough I am not a native english speaker I consider myself to be pretty well versed in the english language.

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Yes, and also: if anything, technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything. There may be discrimination if you need to rely on external help (investors, etc), but there are many very successful bootstrapped tech startups. You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer.

> You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer.

Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose.

If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better.

Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.

True that the free availability of tools broadens the field, but you can’t solve inequality by that alone. “Time” is still a necessary ingredient in that success recipe and if you’re working two jobs just to keep a family afloat due to generational poverty you’re not also going to be starting Microsoft in your garage.

For sure. But what do you think of the possibility that many people who are suffering from financial inequality may actually have quite a bit of free time? That's my sense at least looking at global screen time statistics not only in the US but in many poor countries.

I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity.

And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year.

Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.

I’m in agreement that increase in tech availability and accessibility are a big and positive factor. My point is mainly that we need to augment tech with some social solutions to solve this problem rather than treating it as only a problem of technology + waiting for the problem to solve itself.

And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).

So what’s your very specific solution that the tech world should embrace to address this scenario you outlined?

I won’t claim that these are perfect solutions, but I do believe they’re better than just making stuff open source and then feeling that you can ignore diversity. So with that, here are a few things that I think could be helpful:

- use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder

- develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent

- add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code)

- sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth

- at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.

> technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything

This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.

It's not just about "opinion". Diversity of gender and ethnicity is important, because many tech products fail for users who are non-male and/or non-white. Some examples off the top of my head: facial recognition that doesn't recognize black faces, tracking technologies that ignore the issue of stalking, only giving two options "male" and "female", input fields that require US-style formats for names, phones that are too big for smaller hands, etc.

Also diversity of age and ability. Examples include tiny, low contrast text. On-screen controls that challenge fine motor control. Also on the US-style formats, poor or non-existent support for non-Latin alphabets. Try booking a commercial airline flight with a name that includes anything but the 26 English letters.

Diversity solves none of these and artificial diversity just creates divided teams.

> Diversity solves none of these

Why not? And what would?

> artificial diversity just creates divided teams.

Why do you consider diversity to be "artificial"? It's actually lack of diversity that's artificial.

Forget about gender and ethnicity for a second; what about the lack of age diversity in tech, and the rampant age discrimination? Oh, but it's a "meritocracy", and younger people are just "better", right? (See "Using terribly thin fonts with low contrast colors leading to unreadable websites." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068697)

User interviews and user testing

Offloading all of your design to users just shows that your team is lacking.

So you claim that a group of pro-diversity ("left wing") leaders would do less to prevent harmful exclusion, than a group that is mixed on the issue? Am I reading this right?

Obviously it depends on the leaders in questions but yes that is my experience at least. They pretend to care about inclusivity but in reality it's the ones that talk about it that are the most exclusive.

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