I recently started to notice a palpable lack of people of color in the workplace. I recently took to writing some tech activism articles and when I looked around for people who could check them and share their lived experiences as marginalized individuals in tech, I found very few. Then I started asking why. I already knew of the systematic oppression that I benefit from as a white person but I didn't truly look at the numbers and how damning they are. I listened to the experiences of BIPOC people that were fed to me, not the ones they were sharing, the real ones. There are people of color in the tech community but I noticed, I had met plenty of developers that were hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, African(but not Black), and Eastern. I am a queer developer and have met other queer developers, even a few women. That said, I NEVER met a Black programmer before last year, not while networking, not while working, not while reading, nowhere. How can we build good products for our communities and societies if we don't let an entire race of people have a vocie in the process? What are we doing? How are we claiming meritocracy when there isn't even an equitable palying field? Have you see and stayed silent in the face of oppression of your friends? Stayed quite to protect the team as a team member is bullied for something outside of their control? Let's brainstorm ways we can be better!
Hello HN friends, frenemies, and everyone in between!
I’m a software engineer who fancies herself as a systems level thinker. I've spent the last couple years thinking about how we might apply systems level thinking and broad engineering techniques from all disciplines, not just software, to daily in-person level big societal issues like justice, ethics, and the engineering of long-term dignity for people within social systems, not just those at the top and middles, but all.
I’ve written up a kind of exploratory “design doc” that asks a lot of questions and attempts to answer them in a cohesive and robust, fault tolerant, and evolving way.
Things like:
* What if we treated dignity of living things the same way we treat uptime, resilience, maintainability?
* What if suffering and despair are treated as bugs, failing test cases, or missing requirements?
* What if the feedback loops, transparency of design and changes, and observability were baked-in and applied to how the system handles injustice and human suffering?
Could we build anti-fragile, renewable, self-healing societal structures that expect conflict, drift, and failure. Ones that are engineered to withstand and correct without collapse, but prepared to dismantle and renew healthily, like a phoenix, not with violence, but with shared vision and tooling that honors both the facts of the injustices and validates the emotions while looking forward?
The idea is currently called Radical Wokeness, which I know may cause an immediate visceral reaction in some. It is explicitly not radical in the idea of extremism, rather in the depth of its vison and hope. It is radical like radical openness or other concepts in mental health are. It is not meant as a political label or even to represent any ideology or side of any political discussion. It fundamentally wants to shift the conversations politicians are having. It believes that politics are a tool by an unjust system to pretend work is being done to repair harms, instead of actually meaningfully doing the work and engineering to solve the real issues. It’s a moral architecture pattern, informed by up to date research on mental health, robust system design, and healthy conflict resolution. It honors both the failures and successes of past systems, while working to incorporate the inherent wisdoms found in many of them, that were unfortunately twisted or decayed to become harmful. It is a system that refuse to make cruelty invisible, and design for care and correction as a core function. To place back into design the implied system requirements for all things that need to be there to serve societies and give dignity to all life.
I’d love feedback in any form. Critiques, pushback, or additions from people who care about systems, complexity, and ethical design. I wrote the article with the idea of explaining what, how, why, and my approach and mindset, as a primer to help people easily find their way into the document and comprehend it.
I want to also expressly admit that I used an LLM to get help making it. I never let it generate things. I only used it to help anaylze and explain and educate me in an attempt to be sure the language is coherent and there are no critical important avenues I accidentally missed. I am not an expert in all or even most fields. This is a best attempt and I'm asking here, to get help from some of the greatest minds the world has to offer, because LLMs are cool and a good tool, but even when using it to be socratic and demanding it back up its suggestions, it is still a flawed tool, limited by its user.
Thank you for reading and I wish nothing but good for all of you!
The real take away here is that only 10% of children who are visually impaired or blind learn braille. Additionally upon looking up that stat cause I figured surely it must be sensationalized, 50% of blind students dropout of school and over 70% are unemployed. A lot of it seems to stem from illiteracy. What a fucking outrage.
Edit: I had the the percentages backwards, 70% are unemployed and 50% drop out, not the other way around as I had written.
Blind person here, though not living in the US. I don't know the exact stats about unemployment here, but, from my observations, they're pretty similar. Most kids do know braille, though. I think that nowadays, braille doesn't help much, as only blind people can use it anyway. Literacy isn't as important for blind people as for the sighted, as they can't use braille to communicate with the rest of society anyway. I generally consider braille not that useful, except in certain narrow contexts. Beware that this is a personal opinion, and braille versus speech is almost as hot in the blind community as static versus dynamic typing with software developers. I don't really use braille daily (except for math drawings, as I'm still in education). I consider technology to be much, much more important now. Computers have probably been the most revolutionary thing when blind people are concerned. Communicating with the sighted, reading books that haven't been specially prepared, access to services etc. Also programming is one of the most accessible jobs out there, as code is just text that can be read aloud by a program, and most tools are CLI-based or have CLI-based alternatives. I think money would be better spend on teaching people on how to use the internet effectively instead of teaching them braille. Braille is a tool whose existence blind people should be aware of, as it may be useful, but it lost its relevance.
When it comes to unemployment, I don't see how braille could help here. Half of the problem is employer bias, actual obstacles that are hard/impossible to overcome or artifical obstacles (inaccessible software) also matter. I think that solving the bias problem would make the situation much better, though. One more problem I see, at least here, is education. Blind people aren't really that aware of what they can realistically do, so they get majors in art, history, literature etc, or think they can get by without good education. No one tells them where to go to have a real chance of finding a job. Sighted people also do it, but, if nothing else works out, they can get a job at Wallmart/Mcdonald's. Blind people don't have that possibility.
I’m not blind but very visually-impaired and couldn’t agree with you more about computers. The iPad and eBooks have been an absolute godsend for me — I still remember the old days of getting unwieldy enlarged physical books. Now it’s so much nicer!!
When growing up I had to prepare for the possibility that I’d go totally blind one day (thankfully that did not happen). One of the best things that was ever done for me was getting regular touch-typing lessons from a young age.
On screen readers - I’m really excited to see what ML could bring to the table here. I think accessibility could be increased greatly with an ML that could recognise what was happening on the screen based only on the contents of say, the last few seconds of frame buffer data.
I’m also really excited for what AR (augmented with audio in particular) glasses and the like could do here too.
As a random observer I always thought that a linear text based OS would be good for blind people, basically what the CLI is but with more metadata, a tree structure so things not of interest could be skipped, eg a long list of filenames. A CLI with folding.
Actually GUIs or websites, if done right, can be way better than anything that is text based. They include much more semantic information that a screen reader can use. For example, on websites, we have special shortcut keys to i.e. jump to next heading, table, landmark etc. We can even navigate within tables. This makes using most web/electron/chromium apps pretty easy. Most blind people prefer traditional win32 guis, but I actually don't. Problems arise when semantic information isn't provided, as in a web developer making the text whatever color is fashionable now and adding an onClick instead of using <button>. I don't see how a text-based OS would be different from that.
Web UIs can be used with my screen reader's search functionality and quick navigation keys. For example, in Spotify, which uses a web UI, I can do ctrl+ins+f, type rock, press enter and I'm focused on the Rock playlist. Similarly, in Skype, I can search for "audio call" etc. Some elements can also be reached pretty quickly with navigation keys. I think it's much easier to screw up a win32 gui than a web app. The non-web paets of Itunes are a good example. They're accessible, but all objects need to be reached by pressing tab, and there's a lot of objects. There's no semantic structure and no way to provide one. A website-like document would work better in this case.
Many years ago, I was looking into emacspeak [1], which seems like it could work for this. (I thought it would be a cool way to interact with a wearable computer; I didn't get much farther than those thoughts)
Emacspeak is something I always wanted to try, but keep putting it off for later. Emacs is a powerful tool in itself, and the way Emacspeak integrates with it is unprecedented. It's not just a screen reader getting stuff from OS APIs, it knows a lot about internals of most Emacs features so it can make the speech output as efficient as possible. It also has some cool features like sounds in stereo/3d, changing voice parameters for different text styles etc.
Were you born blind or did you lose your vision later in life? I was born totally blind and grew up as computers became accessible. While I don’t use braille much now, I don’t understand how someone born blind can have basic literacy using only speech. Growing up reading books allowed me to understand basic sentence structure, spelling, etc. These are all important as a programmer considering a large part of the job is communicating your decisions and opinions. I also found braille to be very useful in math. I think that braille is critical for early education if you are blind. It’s less important if you lose your vision later in life and already are literate do to reading print growing up.
I was born blind. I have read only a single book in Braille in my life, though I used it at school for notetaking. I switched to using the computer in last year of secondary (age of 15). I wanted to do so before, but I was in a very backwards special school for the blind. For math, I have been using LaTeX, which, coupled with some speech dictionary hacks in my screen reader, works pretty great. Braille is still useful when drawings are concerned, but only if you have the right books, which is not always the case. Most book reading was either done by my parents (before the age of ten) or by audiobooks afterwards. I don't have that many spelling problems, and those I do have are usually detected by Word, which is what I use when I really do care. I think the warning beep that my screen reader plays when typing a misspelled word is actually a much better learning tool than any form of reading.
One of my blind friends told me there's some evidence that since braille is a form of literacy, people who were blind from birth and never learned braille also never developed some critical brain functions, so they're seriously limited in what kinds of jobs they can do. So if that's true, then even if you don't use braille much, learning it still helped you.
As for me, I'm partially sighted, so I learned to read print; I just need it larger and/or need to get up close to read it. So I can't contribute any first-hand knowledge or opinions on this topic.
I tried learning Braille. It’s incredibly difficult, and I’ve only had a handful of times in 10 years where it would have been helpful. In my opinion, screen readers are king. Also, Audible is amazing!
My last job search was very enlightening. Coding tests, phone interviews all went great at several places. Step into an in person interview with a white cane though and everything changes.
I understand it can make people uncomfortable, especially if I’m the first blind person someone interacts with. But, that doesn’t make it any less illegal to pass on me over someone else all else being equal.
I think most hiring managers just aren’t aware of the bias they might bring in to the equation when they encounter a disability for the first few times. Incredibly frustrating though.
The blind people that I know absolutely excel at what they do. One is a software engineer that is so focused it makes me feel scatterbrained, the other easily the best piano tuner that I've ever met.
Deafblind person here. Braille isn't a nice to have for me. It's a must-have. We Deafblind are certainly a rare species , and unfortunately, usually forgotten. I learned Braille "later" in life when my sight nosedived at age 27. Best decision I've ever made.
A few thoughts about the low Braille literacy levels. First of all, most visually impaired children are not completely blind, and this is especially true with progressive eye conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa (which I have as part of Usher syndrome, which presents with hearing and viision losses). Magnification and color technology has enabled people who can't read 12-point fonts to read now. For instance, I'm close to completely blind in one eye, and have somethign like 20/300 in the other ... and I can use built-in features to zoom in/invert colors to read visually. So, "visually impaired" =/= completely blind.
Also, you must use Braille every day to develop neural pathways to process it quickly. It only took me 2 weeks to learn the code. It took me much, much longer to internalize it--to the point when I can jsut put my fingers on it and get it. For people who can still see, especially if they see enough to benefit handsomely form magnification technology, it's hard to feel motivated.
There are a lot of other issues that I won't get into. But what I can say is that blind people can get away without learnign Braille, sure, but they won't be able to excel at certain things.
For instance, Braille is still the only thing that gives blind people a spatial appreciation for language. Language is more than words. It comes in paragraphs, has puncuation, et cetera. If a blind person wnats to truly master their language, they must learn Braille. They can get buy without it, sure, but ... they won't excel at it.
On the pratical side, you need to know braille to label things. This is why I advocate for at least a functional knowledge of Braille. If you have a labeler, you can label wine bottles and cans that feel identical. This is where audio-only approach fails.
There's a lot more I could say on the topic, but I'll stop here. Just putting this out there: I wish people would stop sayign that text-to-speech technology has obviated Braille. There are Deafblind people out ther, too, and Braille will always have a place for those who want to excel at writing and reading.
This may be a stupid question, but how do you read from the computer as a deafblind person? Is there some sort of device that converts the text to braille?
Not a stupid question at all. I use an assortment of accessibility tools. I can still read visually thanks to my absurdly large screen and equally absurdly large text in inverted colors. I can also hear (low-resolution sound quality) through a cochlear implant, so i use VoiceOver to navigate. To read more long-form text such as books, articles, etc. I use a refreshable Braille display.
Basically, I use a bit of everything because no one accessibility tool meets all of my needs. Better than nothing, I guess.
I should clarify something about deafblindness. Very, very rarely is a deafblind person totally deaf and blind. Usually they have some residual hearing or sight, and I fall into that camp.
Thanks for the reply. I've learned something today.
I have an almost completely blind friend who mainly relies on audio and braille so I wondered how that carried over.
Almost everyone who is legally blind is partially sighted. The two legally blind people I know both tell me those were most screwed over were the ones who learned to read braille in school instead of printed text. In this world, it's invaluable to simply be able to pull a sheet of paper up right up to a thick lens over your eye and slowly read it. If you only know Braille, you're helpless to solve this predicament, and Braille documents are extremely rare.
For digital media, screen readers are an enormous accessibility feature, but having (impaired) vision and knowledge of english is a helpful fallback for the plethora of poorly built sites and applications that have, say, text in an image. Braille is not helpful in a world of flat screens.
Often blindness is one of many disabilities a child may have. If a child is severely impaired basic skills such as the ability to dress and feed them selves are a lot more important then the ability to read braille. I’d like to see these statistics broken down in a way that considers individuals with multiple disabilities.
A early facebook clone can work well. If you're learning a new frontend tech, reuse the backend from one you did before, or if it's new backend, reuse the frontend from a different one.
I say early facebook cause I feel that doing a login, and feed page, and allowing status updates, friends search and confirmation, and a profile page with photo uploads to be a pretty good intro stack.
That said for a new language I ALWAYS look for a modern koans exercise to do. Some langs have them, some don't.
I like going thrifting and looking for cool things or coming up with something to search for and collect. Recently i'm into collecting uranium glass for instance. It's also gives you some walking around the stores and such. You can even maybe try and play with some weird fashion while there. It helps with exploring some good restaurants also as a lot of thrift shops are in different areas of town and I like to give the stores time to 'refresh' between visits.
I've been fired a few times as a developer and I think your empathy approach is truly wonderful!
The first time I was fired it was entirely 100% my fault. I was a practicing alcoholic at the time(meaning I was still getting smashed by whisky every night) and it affected my performance, as well as my punctuality, energy levels, and concentration. I would show up late, fall asleep in meetings, and not really get much done. There was no surprise for me when I was let go and I had been given several warnings. My boss was my programming mentor all throughout college, and one of my best friends, so I can imagine it was really hard for him. Me and him are still friends and talk everyday though it took a month or so for me to mentally uncouple 'boss' him who fired me and friend him. Either way, he made sure some friends came over and hung out with me after and encouraged me and made sure I knew that if called for a reference that he would give me a good one. He also helped me brush up my resume and such which was a nice gesture. I was in a bad place at the time though and I still kept drinking so it took a long time to find a job, but that's not really here nor there. I would say depending on your level of knowledge of this employee, be sure to try and help him through maybe some external issues if you think he may have a drinking problem or medical issue, go through HR to do it most likely, but do try and give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't think most people enjoy being shitty employees, if they chose that career path there is most likely a reason, and being in the bottom percentile of professionals in their field is most likely not a life goal of theirs.
The second time I was fired was different. I wasn't a great culture fit, but mainly I was a victim of some politics from what I gathered after talking it out with my direct boss. There was a project which was the first I was made the lead of and the reqs kept changing until there were conflicting requirements and I told them as much and that the end product would be defective and could get into an invalid state, but then was ignored, and the project didn't work as they expected. It was a big release and so 'someone had to take responsibility' and it couldn't be my boss as he's the CTO and had all the passwords and more domain knowledge, so I was let go. At least that's what I gathered. Luckily, I had two months notice here and I was already swimming in recruiter offers at the time and had been looking anyways. MY boss told me privately that I was being let go and that the interviews we were doing were for my position and that I'm not supposed to know but he felt me being fired was dumb. When I was let go they told me that they had brought up some issues before in my performance reviews but they had not, but rather mentioned them offhand in company wide meetings that everyone in the company should keep in mind. Things like lunch is EXACTLY one hour and things, sometimes I would take like 1 hour 15 minute ones even though I would also skip lunch multiple times a week. Regardless, never brought up to me one on one. So be sure if you're going to mention improvement things, that you mention them EXPLICITLY to the employee, and also be willing to work with them if possible as they may even feel bad but not know how to bring it up. If they need an hour and fifteen for lunch everyday, and maybe have a good reason, perhaps just don't worry about it. Not saying that is the case, and my reasons weren't really anything besides apathy, but maybe they live a bit far out and have to go home for lunch to give their pet medication at lunch. The other thing that was nice here is they considered if I had family in the area who could help if I got into a pinch between jobs and also gave a small severance. Things like that can really help.
Lastly some other pieces of things are to do it privately, hopefully near some lesser used exit or another. They will be emotional I imagine, and the last thing they want is to describe why they are looking distraught while leaving the building. A walk of shame is just cruel. Offer to let them get their things after hours if they like. Also offer to let them use the computer again at that time and maybe bring an external cd burner and blank cd or supply a memory stick. We all 'know' not to use the work computer for personal things but many do, especially by accident or its the first job or whatever. They may have some documents they saved as pdf's like receipts or something they need off. Or an important account tied to their work email. I think my first job I was an idiot and tied my electric bill to my work email for instance. Allowing them that can be nice. Also perhaps allow them to write a letter or something to some employees that they were friends with that they may want to exchange contact info with to get lunch or something sometime.
As for morale on the team, I think keeping them around is most likely worse though. I mean if you've ever had a coworker who was just horrid and then things improved when they left for a different job, its like that if they are the kind of employee that needs to be fired but you keep them around.
To summarize though. Kindness is key. A person most likely isn't underperforming because they want to, rather some other issue may be at play, even if they can't fix it themselves after being warned. Be sure to give explicit warning, and also to give a good run-time to find a new job if possible. Many people don't have the reserves to be between jobs for long after all, especially people with other issues in their lives. Let them keep their dignity, and also to get their belongings/friends/relationships/digital info with dignity and respect.
If you have questions or something let me know and I'll try to answer them. Good luck and no matter what try not to feel bad if you've really tried to help them. In the end the only person you can truly force change on is yourself. It's not your fault. :)
I would for sure talk to your doctor about it. Normally your doctor can recommend medicine and services such as a psychologist(more talk therapy) or psychiatrist(more prescription based) that will work with them and be in your insurance network if that's a thing you need to worry about.
That said, I would do a lot of research before going in, but do see your doctor for sure. I say do research because depression can be a symptom of other things such as Bipolar type II or Cyclothymic disorder. Hypomania is the main hallmark that you would look into with those. I would also read and be prepared to talk to your doctor about anxiety symptoms as well as panic attack or ptsd symptoms. You may not have them but knowing the signs can help as depression can easily present with those, and you may need treatment for more than one thing to feel better.
Knowledge is power in this case. Jobs in IT and doctors are similar in some regards. Someone comes to us with a problem and we need to fix it. The more they know(symptom identification) and the better they can articulate why they think they may have some condition the easier it is to diagnose and fix a problem. Also both professions start with 'safe' treatments. We reboot the computer first, they try for pills or treatments with few to no side effects. We also go for the most obvious diagnoses first before getting into the esoteric,(the power is unplugged rather than the cable to supply power to the motherboard being bad) just like a doctor would go for depression rather than bipolar II for instance as that's the more common path.
I ran across this when I was suffering from some depression and was trying to see how other devs deal with it. It outlines some emotions and feelings about it, but also talks about bipolar type II and adhd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIa-Mc2KSk
I hope this helps and feel free to reach out if you have questions. I'm still dealing with it myself so I get how hard it can be. It's not a failing of character or anything like that. It's a medical condition and should be monitored and treated as such by your doctor.
Also don't just do what code review comments tell you to.
If you disagree, state that and tell them why. Maybe you know something they don't about why you did something the way you did. Maybe they are just wrong. Maybe there's some business requirement you know that they don't or vice versa.
Also the other bit of not making changes just because they tell you to is this, you need to understand why you're making the change. This way you won't make the mistake again and you'll learn. You may stop doing the thing again if they comment it enough times and you internalize it, but that's not understanding, that's pattern recognition and won't help you be a better dev.
Code reviews are a two way street and a great learning opportunity. Use them to your advantage! :D
