We got rid of QA engineers a few years ago. I think some VP will hear what Nadella is doing and start their innovative initiative to start hiring QA engineers.
> I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI.
Isn't the central point of DEI that whites prefer whites due to an unconscious bias?
Then, on one hand you have a very conscious decision to hire a minority just because he or she is a minority. On the other hand, you have an unconscious bias that might or might not be there but you can't really measure it by definition because it's unconscious. It's not the same.
I think it's more unsaid than unconscious. But putting that aside, if DEI is purposeful and deliberate while the "natural state" of things is not (unconscious bias), is that how we should leave it?
Should businesses have the freedom to exclude if it's unconscious?
The problem with unconscious bias is that it's unobservable by definition: it might be there, it might not be there and if it's there it might be imperceptible or very strong; you don't know because it's unconscious. It might even be not existing, and the gaps in hiring explained by the fact that minorities have less access to higher education for economic reasons. Yet the response to this is always conscious.
But in hiring, I think it's mostly conscious. What I mean is that I think people will see a long Indian name they can't pronounce and skip that resume or put it off until later. That's conscious. They'll see someone who looks like themselves and feel more comfortable talking to them. That's conscious. Etc.
If it was so simple, we wouldn't need equality of outcome. We would just need to tell people to pay more attention. The whole point of dei is that, since bias is unconscious and impossible to eliminate, we should err on the other side.
It might not be simple. It could be very hard, very expensive. Is it worth doing? Does it have value?
Would it be so bad if most of the CEOs are white men? All the execs are white men?
But I don't want to pick on white men. Let's say would it be so bad to let the incumbents call the shots. Let the incumbents hire only who they want to hire.
Should business have freedoms that are good for business but bad for society?
Isn't the whole reason for businesses in the first place is that they improve society? They are an efficient way to allocate resources for the good of everyone involved. It runs by rules that we set. And we tweak those rules. And it seems DEI may be one of those rules that aren't good and we can change it.
But the end goal shouldn't be defined as anything that is good for business is good for society.
Introducing unfair bias to contrast perceived bias that might or not might be there and might have or not have the provided explanation is not good for society, no.
What if we don't assume any bias and just look at outcome?
We stipulate that bias should play no part in decision making. Only the outcome should matter. If the outcome doesn't match racial balance of the society we make it so.
Is the business perspective the right one to go with?
Let's say it's legal to discriminate on race in hiring in the US. Then a Japanese restaurant hires only Japanese workers because they find customers prefer it. Do we want to have this?
The purpose of our state is to provide for its citizens. So we decided to use a market economy because it seems the most efficient way to do that. But we make up the rules that it runs by and we can change the rules as we see fit.
So it seems now we are saying DEI is not a good rule. Can we make a better rule or is the goal of that rule not good?
There are multiple axes upon which something like this can be evaluated. I'm not against us as a society collectively deciding we should enforce rules that may be counter to business logic (e.g., child labor laws to pick something uncontroversial).
When something is more controversial, it's common to look at the business case. It has commonly been argued that 'diversity' is good business even disregarding any desire one may have related to restorative justice.
Put simply, if it's good business and good morals we should do it, if it's bad business and good morals or good business and bad morals, we have to weigh the balance of it (bad business can lead to morally bad outcomes, like layoffs), and if it's bad business and bad morals we ought not do it at all. I was just focusing on the business case under the assumption that the poster believed it to be good morally.
The reason people like her is that she gets them interested in the guest. Not many interviewers can do that. She'll interview some blues artist you've never heard of and the next thing you know you're looking them up on Youtube.
I've never listened to Terry Gross... but taking your and parent's comment together, it sounds like she's someone who has researched the guest well and actively directs the interview in a particular direction - ie. tries to craft a compelling narrative.
Unfortunately, no. That’s my pet peeve about Terry Gross, she often gets things wrong and the guest has to correct her. It often sounds like she didn’t prep for the interview at all.
I'd heard at one point that she specifically cram-preps for interviews the night before, so it's all still fresh and interesting in her head. (Versus overly-researched and boring)
The article alludes to something similar, in the context of her interview pace.
>> [after work, she and her husband] go out for dinner [...], and then Gross will continue working at home, preparing for the next day’s interview in the living room. She clarifies her thoughts first thing in the morning in the shower. [...] It’s important to be away from her notes when she does this. She emerges from the shower with her ‘‘major destination points.’’ Then she goes to her office and refers back to her notes — sheafs of facts; dog-eared, marked-up books — for the details. Then she does the interview. And then she is inundated by the other daily tasks of running a radio show. The next day, she does it all again.
Getting the guest to correct and expound could be an intentional technique to make it so she isn't just reading off a biography to them while they just affirm each statement.
Could be. "Anything is possible," as they say. Personally, I'd apply Occam's Razor and say it's more likely it's not intentional and these are bona-fide mistakes on her part.
Perhaps a difference in what people are looking for. I don't listen to interviews for content discovery -- there is already a glut of content. Rather, I expect interviews to tell me substantially more about a figure I am already familiar with.
Yes, at the time it was all about desktop publishing and graphic design. It wasn't until the end of the 90s that PCs started to make its way into that niche.
Also it didn't feel like Apple was for consumers until the iPod came out.
PCs were already in that niche pretty much all over the world since Windows 95 got introduced, until the Apple recovery they were mostly an US focused company, they weren't going bankrupt for nothing.
In Portugal, nowadays there are Apple Stores all over the big cities, although people still mostly buy them on credit and cable TV deals, back in those days there was a single vendor, Interlog in Lisbon, that would sell for the whole country.
Buying Apple gear meant either traveling to Lisbon, having them coming to the company if big enough or a renowed university, or buying by catalog in the listings from computer magazines.
Seemed like you always needed a trio of main apps. In the graphic design market of the 90s, it was Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator. To a lesser extent it was Pagemaker, Photoshop and Freehand.
This is very dependent on the country or language of your audience, but also Apple computers availability. In Israel, for example, FreeHand was by far the most popular tool for vector editing because of easier integration with right-to-left writing. Former Soviet Union countries almost exclusively relied on CorelDraw. Not sure why, but my guess is it was somehow easier to pirate it.
Pagemaker was always garbage compared to QuarkXPress or even Corel Ventura. But Adobe really improved on it with InDesign, and a lot of places I knew who used Quark promptly switched.
FreeHand was particularly useful because of its integration with Flash. A lot of animation shops would use FreeHand because it was a better editor than Flash, but then import drawings into Flash for animation.
Also, every one of the editors had sort of a recognizable style. Adobe Illustrator was perceived as being more "prestigious", "imported" and most people I knew at the time who used it were Mac users (which was expensive for an artist) so that also probably left a mark.
In general, professional/prosumer local desktop software has mostly collapsed into one (sometimes two) products per category and the categories themselves have become fairly rigidly defined. There's other more mainstream consumer packages but I'm guessing most of those are increasingly marginalized by open source and hosted services of various sorts.
Contrast today with when you probably had one or two dozen word processing programs with significant market share.
The only thing I remember about Quark is that Quark 4 seemed super outdated and old, but it's what the industry standardized on and Quark 5 totally bombed.
And the alien.
I was sure I was going to use PageMaker for 10 hours a day for the rest of my life but you learn a little HTML and you realized that I wasn't ever going to be the next David Carson (NO ONE would ever be the next David Carson) so f- it.
XRes was interesting, it would do all the imaging operations at reduced resolution to make them work quickly, and then when you saved the document it would perform all the actual work at full res. It sort of worked, but saving could appear to be really slow.
I can see it being nice if it's like Minority Report, where you can swipe small screens away, etc. Talk and it types. Glance to the left to see how the builds are going, etc. It could also be a nice virtual whiteboard. Usually it's hard to know how nice hardware can be without the apps. And you don't have to be in your office.
I think a gesture is actually worse. They can say, hey look, I'm just like you. If I can work like this so can you. So buck up. When in fact they can go into their reserved conference room any time they want. Or not even use their bigger cube with 2 assistants. Just get the corner office and keep your gestures.
I'd agree that attempts at such gestures are a calculated risk, and when they backfire the result is worse than doing nothing. But I expect it's at least possible to sell it hard enough that you win over most of the people most of the time.
