Our "dumb" Audi A6 ICE vehicle has just as good or better self driving and parking as most EVs on the market, so not sure why we are coupling these together.
The point is that Apple is all about coming across as innovative and trailblazey while also being premium. Smart features and build quality is the premium half of the equation, being an EV is still innovative/trailblazey. Your car isn't gonna feel innovative in 2028 if it is an ICE vehicle.
> Your car isn't gonna feel innovative in 2028 if it is an ICE vehicle
Couldn't disagree more. Again, our Audi A6 is much more advanced feature-wise than any Tesla on the market. That can continue to be true as the software, torque vectoring, AWD, air suspension, MPGs, assisted driving, etc all improves.
You're talking about incremental improvements, when I say innovative I mean Apple wants more Blackberry -> iPhone moments, not "our car has better suspension".
You might really like your Audi and think its advanced features are much better than what you'll find in a Tesla, but the market couldn't disagree more with you about which company is more "innovative".
Oh, so like going from physical buttons on a console to a massive iPad? Some may call that innovation, and that many now consider a regression in terms of usability. Thankfully the market doesn’t purchase cars purely for the sake of “innovation” or whatever your biased interpretation of that is.
And yeah, the fact that my car feels like I am driving on a cloud in a quiet cabin versus a rickety Tesla is innovative and equally important to a lot of people.
You realize we're actually talking about an Apple Car, right? Not Teslas. You're making points about why you think Teslas are shit, but I merely used them for illustrative purposes. Again, regardless of how much you like your car, it is not seen as "innovative", in large part because it is an ICE vehicle. Quality control, individual components, and decisions about the best way to interface with a car are secondary to that. In fact, you're only helping make the point. The fact that Teslas have a number of clear issues (including a founder many people like to hate) and yet still win the hearts and minds of people as an innovator in the car space speaks volumes.
Building an electric vehicle does not mean you need to be like Tesla in other ways. Apple doesn't want to be a Tesla clone, they want to do their own thing. I'm sure the bigwigs at Apple would balk at panel gaps or whatever more than you do. But Apple releasing an ICE vehicle in 2028 would not be in line with their brand and market positioning at all.
As an aside, if you'd like to see a vehicle that is both electric and superior to your Audi in terms of comfort, check out the new Rolls Royce Spectre. RR also feels that the best way for them to innovate is by electrifying their vehicles, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a car maker further from Tesla (in terms of ethos) than RR.
You’re right that it’s unfair to exceptions, of which there aren’t many in terms of cars on the road. My point was just that the combination of spatial computing + EVs is where an Apple entry starts to make sense.
I'm not looking forward to having to argue with a coworker that thinks MongoDB is web scale because ChatGPT told them so. It will be a hell of a lot more annoying than[1]
It may or may not affect their recommendation, but it may affect what products they review in the first place. So instead of the "The Best TV you can buy", it's more like "The Best TV you can buy from a company with an affiliate program"
I lived in SF for ~10ish years up until 2020 and still return regularly for work/friends.
I agree that it is mostly downtown that is dead but the rest of your comment seems hyperbolic to me. Hayes Valley, Valencia, Polk was way more lively when I was there.
> best job market
The hundreds in SF laid off this year may disagree
> most lucrative
yes, incomes and stocks do generally increase yoy. Tautology.
After all the layoffs we still have an unemployment rate of of 3.4% (as of Nov). In Seattle it is 3.6% (as of Oct). Also the fact the population is increasing probably reflects job hires. It's expensive here. Who else would move here? Maybe AI startups...
It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.
> You want people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.
Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind. So why does DEI suddenly become so important 50+ employees later?
In the most broadest sense, along all the dimensions. Including both what bad DEI is talking about and what you are talking asking about.
> If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind.
100%, as for when, always part of the culture so it never needs to be top of mind. I think it likely sufficient to root out bigots, zealots, and those who discriminate. At some point the scale does grow large enough that you need people who's job is to help standardize and facilitate the process. The bad DEI did not do this well, I've seen it done really well personally.
> It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.
Not the poster and going to try to read the last sentence with positive intent.
You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public. The design of products come from the vantage of who is designing them. Historically this has been products designed by men and made for men. From male crash test dummies, to PPE, and even medical treatments. The designers were not looking to exclude women in these cases, everyone simply has blind spots or things that they don't consider, leading to worse/less safe products.
Going back to tech. How many demographic text boxes are designed by people who are not accustomed to long surnames? Security/Admin controls by someone who has never been in an abusive relationship? UX that is unusable by anyone with a disability, or simply not accustomed to technology.
If you don't care about these groups using your product effectively, then it's likely fine for business. Heck, many companies don't see a problem and conclude that their customers are "wrong" or "dumb" when features are left unused or bugs are reported.
> Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Everyone is different but I statistically have more in common with a white male 21-35 than any other group (even if he played team sports). Could a particular person be a deeply different 25 year old white man born in Thailand, deeply poor, and raised Jewish? I suppose, but we're all doing heuristics out there. So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
We all know that a leetcode question, or a system design interview, or a take home project isn't a perfect show of someone's technical skills, why should heuristics around diversity be any different?
> Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that. You ask most people on the street and few will say they judge people beyond their character/actions/intelligence/whatever. But we know that isn't true, people aren't that logical and detached.
It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us. Let's even ignore gender/race. I know many engineers that view front end code as "beneath them" and "not real software engineering". Are they really going to view me as a hardworking, intelligent engineer if that's what I'm doing?
Heck, am I a hard working, intelligent engineer if I focus some of my time on DEI initiatives? What if I can't invert a B-tree? What if I still got hired, what would you think of me?
> So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
Who is "we"? I personally define "different background" very similarly to your parent poster, and anecdotally 90% of all people I chatted on the topic (several dozen) do so as well.
So don't act like you represent some bigger group. I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
So let's stop normalizing a thought process that shouldn't even be called that. Would be a good start.
> It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that.
It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
I'm confused why this was focused on so much. I guess "people that use DEI for hiring". Or when I was speaking of heuristics generally that could be "hiring managers in general".
> So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
There are an infinite number of factors that go into a person and there will always be something missed with whatever way we slice it. "common-sensical" criteria in that world will end up as a wishy washy "we hire those with diverse opinions and backgrounds". But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
> I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity. It can be lobbed at literally any position one takes.
> It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
You're blowing by that I was responding to
"Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person"
If we're talking about company culture now, then we're talking about something different.
> Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
The comment I was responding to spoke generally so I spoke generally. I applied it to both tech and nontech with examples though.
> It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
OK. That is true. And? Your point being?
> But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Yes, that happens very often. What's the problem? Are you really having the goal of being able to get inside any company out there and tell them you know better who's a better fit for their specific team? If not, what's your angle / point / goal?
> Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
Sounds like you're looking what to be outraged at, I am saying this genuinely and apologies if it comes across as blunt but I am old enough to stop caring about sugar-coating stuff.
Point me at the exact problem in your quote above and tell me what you want changed?
> Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity.
Indeed, I am not at all curious about what do privileged people are looking to feel guilty about this week. (And yes you and I are privileged, there are no two ways about it.)
It is not your fault that a potential next John von Neumann happened to be born in Bangladesh and only used his wits to steal fruit and bread so as not to starve, for his entire life, and never managed to get educated enough to rise above such life circumstances. You can't be everywhere. Hell, you can't even be at 0.00001% of places. Let go and stop looking for injustices. If anything, our world is 99.9% injustice, if one bothers to look carefully enough just for a few months of their entire life spans.
> You're blowing by that I was responding to
OK, then I didn't understand your point there, which is the case for most of your comment anyway.
---
In general, I found your entire original comment super puzzling. It sounded like you are looking for problems where there might be none or they are impossible to fix (yet). OK, women are different and have different lives than you and me... and?
Yes people out there discriminate black people. I'd like that to stop as well. What are you doing to stop it, exactly? Surely you realize talking on a very niche forum like HN isn't going to achieve that, right?
Modern DEI got warped into an unrecognizable mess and nowadays it's mostly weaponized against white males by trying to play on their guilt (kill me if I know where does that guilt even comes from...) in order to gain convenient shortcuts to lucrative positions.
As such, I am neither impressed by modern DEI, nor do I support it. When its proponents chase away the leeches I'll be one of the first people to get on the line to donate and try to help. Until then, I'll just shake my head in disgust at what DEI has become.
I'm going to drop the inline quotes and respond more holistically.
I think you're pigeon-holing me a bit into a spot where you view me taking a moral stance with no external logic. Eg. I am a well meaning but ultimately naive savior-person that wants to create fairness and this doesn't help the company, the product, or the team. I feel like I'm becoming a projection for frustrations you have with those on a moral crusade.
I disagree that there is no logic to DEI. Specifically the idealized version of DEI, not whatever implementation company A has. I think a diverse team creates better products. I think diversity around gender/racial lines are stronger indicators of diverse experience than a wishy-washy "diversity of thought" angle that I see going around.
I also assert that, honestly, from a practical standpoint race/gender selection is easier to select for than most other forms of diversity. We use inexact tools as a heuristic for technical ability (leetcode, take home project, system design, CS fundamentals, etc), why would diversity be any different?
I assert that our interview tools and processes are inexact and consistently leave talented people off the table due to biases. The reality is if I have 10 candidates for a CRUD position I assert I could pick a name out of a hat and they'd be able to do the job most of the time. I think people pretend they can determine person A is 10% better of a developer than person B in an interview when they really can't. The reality is you could have probably picked B and it wouldn't have been a noticeable change once on the job. I think seeing these "successes" lead people to think they are better at interviews than they really are.
DEI to me is understanding the hiring process has bias + blindspots and taking the gamble that selecting in a differently biased way gets me better odds of getting that "Bangladeshi John von Neumann". And even if it's not a home run like that, that there is still an overall benefit to the added diversity to the team vs taking the person that did 10% better on our leetcode question.
Bangladeshi John von Neumann is probably going to be discriminated against by DEI policies because Asians are overrepresented is most tech companies. When I attended a career fair at Dropbox, Asian male applicants were marked with "ND" on their resumes. I later found out this stood for "negative diversity". Asian males are even worse than white males in the DEI policies used by most of the companies I've worked at.
The thing that most people don't like to talk about is, at many tech companies Black, Latin, and white people are underrepresented in tech roles. The only race that is overrepresented is Asians. And if the goal is equity, you can connect the dots.
I can't speak to specific implementations of DEI or Dropbox but if my engineering department was 95% Chinese American males, I would say it isn't a diverse team. The targets should be company dependent. The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from (due to bias whether in employee selection, type of interview, etc)
I don't really care what the idealized DEI policy is. I care about what companies actually put into practice. If companies submitted test resumes that were similar besides details identifying race and gender, and a disparity was noticed then I would be totally supportive of rectifying that bias. I'd similarly be totally supportive of anonymizing resumes, turning videos off in Zoom interviews and masking voices. But that's the total opposite of every DEI policy I've encountered. The problem is that a non-discriminatory recruiting system does produce an equitable outcome, but it's equitable with respect to the workforce not the general population. And if other companies in the field are engaging in hiring preferences, non-discriminatory recruitment will actually yield less because the diverse talent is siphoned off to those less scrupulous companies.
In the real world, I've consistently seen DEI policies that call for X% URM engineers and Y% women engineers. And these figures for X and Y were substantially higher than the percentage of URM and women in the software development workforce (at Dropbox the gender target was 33% women in spring of 2019). This led recruiters to be much more selective when hiring white and especially Asian men. It didn't eliminate bias, it incentivized bias for the desirable races and genders. We didn't expand our candidate pools, we contracted them. We stopped interviewing non-URM men from boot camps any only advanced URM and women from bootcamps. We did the same with non-engineering majors. Women and URM men who majored in a non-tech field but practiced programming on the side were interviewed, men in the same situation were not.
Pretty much every attempt to make a company more "equitable" that I've witnessed has followed the same arc. Leadership assures people this isn't discrimination, it's just broadening candidate pools. They send recruiters to Grace Hopper, HBUs, etc. But this doesn't yield any change, because there's no untapped pool of women and URM engineers. Then the company sets quotas (under euphemisms like "inclusion targets", "diversity goals", etc.) and turns a blind eye to discrimination.
The whole reason why we use euphemisms like "DEI" is because nobody wants to discuss these phenomenons in concrete terms. We use euphemisms like "diverse" because we'd cringe if we just explained our policies in plain English terms (and it'd land us in lawsuits). If DEI really was about anonymizing applications, trying to identify and eliminate biases, and preventing discrimination then I'd be all for it. But that's to polar opposite of what DEI really is.
> You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public.
I have background as an engineer in consumer products in SV for 10+ years
Indeed the elephant in the room is that the people designing these products often have little in common with people using them (outside of the Bay Area anyway) Financial status, affluent, well educated immigrants from China, India, etc.
I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
> It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us.
I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
> I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
I don't understand DEI initiatives enough to agree or disagree. The poster I was responding to seemed to be speaking of diversity in general so that was what I was intending to address.
> I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
I view diversity in general as shifting biases, not eliminating them. It's just not possible to eliminate them.
We already know that certain groups are underrepresented based on historical selection criteria so we're going in with the assumption that they are capable of doing the job but are not given the opportunity.
To make it less open to misunderstanding I'll just use self-taught software engineer as an example. We can all imagine there is a 100x engineer that is self taught. But due to hiring practices (requires college degree, requires unrelated computer science fundamentals, etc) is never hired and given a chance to reach their potential.
Maybe we're not quite sure how to evaluate self taught engineers like we are with engineers that take a more traditional path, it's likely they work and learn differently. All we know is some part of our process is selecting them out.
I view the idealized vision of DEI sort of in those ways. We know there are some set of biases that are leading certain groups to be underrepresented in tech. We also know that our interview process isn't some grand objective measure of engineer competence.
DEI to me is accepting the existence of biases. While you try to address the ones you can, you cannot eliminate them all so you design processes with assumptions of bias.
I don't pretend to know what companies do specifically in their DEI to shift those weights. But let me pretend my company gives everyone score on 100 point scale. Now I'll shift to a genuinely controversial case.
The info I have:
A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
But if I think they both can do the job reasonably well, is it right to tip the scales? Do I think my company can benefit from underrepresented people in tech? Is there some bias that caused her to get the lower score in the first place such that she is the better engineer? Etc etc.
> A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
It is funny that all the biggest and most successful companies in the USA became such, before there was something like DEI. Or if you look at foreign successful companies which are basically monoliths in regards to DEI.
Success isn't binary, I'd argue many could have been more successful.
NASA was doing some good work for years before Katherine Johnson came along. Heck, I'm sure people at the time would say that NASA would accept anyone that was hardworking and intelligent. Would NASA have collapsed without her? Likely not, but it was made better because of her involvement. You don't know what you miss out on by not accepting people.
She was given the opportunity to show that she was good at the job. The reason she wasn't given this opportunity earlier was because of her skin color. Others that were not given this opportunity due to their skin color are lost to time.
Completely unrelated to the article: but what a refreshing website (on mobile at least). Fast, fluid, beautiful. Just its design made me feel compelled to check out and read other articles.
Our "dumb" Audi A6 ICE vehicle has just as good or better self driving and parking as most EVs on the market, so not sure why we are coupling these together.