> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity.
This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone to this problem.
Competing for talent and working hard to ensure that underrepresented group members have a fair shot? Should be standard practice and a baseline of ethical corporate and human behavior.
Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. That’s observable from the industry-wide figures. Moving an underrepresented group member from industry company A to industry company B doesn’t change that industry-wide measure at all, which should be obvious but seems to escape mention.
> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt.
We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a underrepresentation problem in tech, but a misrepresentation problem.
There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
> I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech.
People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certain subgroups getting passed up during interviews, underpaid, getting passed up for promotions, etc. As an example an ex-colleague had a really hard time landing his first job in the industry. No one would call him back. He wondered whether his Hispanic sounding name was hurting his chances, so he anglicized it and tried again. He said it was like night and day. He found a job soon after. Perhaps you haven’t witnessed something like this first or second hand.
I think many companies are butchering their diversity recruiting efforts. They try to “fix” the issue with superficial and inefficient policies. But the problem they’re attempting to address is very real.
a good example of this is the disabled. any of those same brilliant tech workers could acquire a disability at any time - they come from the same group of people, but we seem quite under-represented. and the developer tools themselves tend not to be accessible (I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.)
it's curious, right?
It is, but honestly I don't think I could comprehend code that was read out to me. It's very much something I do with the visual parts of my brain in terms of following the logic, etc.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, and I don't know what kind of difference something like braille would make. Idk, are there any blind programmers that you know of ? Surely there must be some programmers who have gone blind, I wonder if they just decide to switch careers idk.
I know of blind programmers but don't know any personally. But I was actually talking about the reverse: dictation. I'm losing use of my arms, and even ergonomic keyboards aren't cutting it. Rehab set me up with a copy of Dragon so I can dictate, but even Microsoft Teams isn't really accessible with it, much less Visual Studio or any kind of terminal. I can see the code just fine, I just can't dictate it.
Can you dictate to plaintext (notepad?) and use an oral markup - if punctuation is the problem - like saying "bang" for "!". Then parse your input, cut-paste into the IDE.
It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs?
Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?
Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.
It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.
What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.