Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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".

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 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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com