I was interested in reading about data-driven product decisions and then the whole thing somehow ended up being about inclusion and the connection between the two seems really forced.
The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
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Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#22I was interested in reading about data-driven product decisions and then the whole thing somehow ended up being about inclusion and the connection between the two seems really forced.
the underlying message boils down to:
* data driven = incremental improvement
* innovation happens when you target parts of long tail (margins)
these points are expressed from social group problems perspective. My personal takeaway is that targeting marginalized groups can produce significant innovation.
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#23There's something about writing like this that gets at me. It's angry, for a good reason, it has lots of good points, but in trying to get across its main point, which is signaling dissatisfaction with the tech industry, attacks lots of groups, hits lots of unrelated points, and when it gets into historical tidbits overrates single events in order to build a narrative. For example, please stop using terms like cishet…
Cishet white male shaming is one of the most pernicious festering culture sores in the world today. We exist, we are real people, we want respect and representation, and our voices matter .
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Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#24(Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.)
what is a repost invite?
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#25More time on this article and I think the body is just wrong. The visionary examples all highlighted seem more to be finding ways to leverage major technological changes that will be largely paid for by someone else.
This has been tough to reason on lately because it isn't that you don't need to invest a ton of money. You do. But, if you are investing where other investments are getting made, you have a faster road to success.
Now, granted, I can't really comment on the slack and Basecamp things... Largely, that feels more like a tempest in a teacup not realizing how big the rest of the world is?
But the rest of the examples? Which, seems to just be one example. Apple and the touchscreen revolution. It would have died quickly if not for everyone jumping on it and making them better every year.
There is an allusion to more examples in, "everything you love about smart phones". But for me, that amounts to an mp3 player and an audible app. Really only possible because of the minimization of storage and processing. And largely ignored advances in battery tech.
I still resonate with some of the conclusion. Most of it, even.
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#26There's something about writing like this that gets at me. It's angry, for a good reason, it has lots of good points, but in trying to get across its main point, which is signaling dissatisfaction with the tech industry, attacks lots of groups, hits lots of unrelated points, and when it gets into historical tidbits overrates single events in order to build a narrative. For example, please stop using terms like cishet…
>you say cishet white guys and you can group up a whole lot of people without thinking much about them as individuals.
I can empathize with the "turnabout is fair play" logic of it...
>Do you believe this is constructive language that bridges the divide that's part of these issues?
...but, like you, I question its effectiveness in bringing us all together. My guess is that it generally triggers a sense of awareness in those who are already somewhere on the "allied" spectrum and that it triggers defensiveness and entrenchment in those that are on the fence or further away. There is clear benefit in the former and detriment in the latter. As you said: "know your audience."
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#27In the US at least this principal is true for all kinds of innovation - food, humor, clothing style, music, religion, science fiction, etc., etc. The boring homogenized dominant culture blands things out seeking an anti-creative hegemony, while the marginalized people keep things moving forward. From the 60s there was a truism that in a given situation the less powerful see more of the overall reality than the more p…
Careful here. You list a ton of things with the implication that they are all independent. But, "style" can pretty much explain major shifts in all of the other items.
And the dominant culture is what drives a ton of... Well, everything.
To pretend that progress only comes from the marginalized crowd is as silly as claiming it only comes from the kids. Probably less accurate, even.
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#28There's something about writing like this that gets at me. It's angry, for a good reason, it has lots of good points, but in trying to get across its main point, which is signaling dissatisfaction with the tech industry, attacks lots of groups, hits lots of unrelated points, and when it gets into historical tidbits overrates single events in order to build a narrative. For example, please stop using terms like cishet…
I find it a reach that you're complaining about grouping when used in this context:
> For example, I once worked for a company that poured a lot of effort into inclusive hiring: they made an inclusion skills rubric, placed ads in “diverse” tech spaces, et cetera. Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cishet white guys.
This is a paragraph directly talking about an initiative to increase diversity that ultimately had little lasting impact, but is making no judgments about either the group of "diverse people" that didn't stick around nor the group of hires that followed.
There's no thinking about either group there as individuals, nor positive or negative overall descriptions of them, just an anecdote about an HR initiative at a particular company that didn't really meet its objectives.
What's there to be offended by, asks this person who hadn't even encountered the term "cishet" before this article but falls in the group?
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#29The argument that in the pre-internet area, "for a glimpse of time, these privileged kids experienced a marginalization that the web suddenly made addressable" falls extremely flat to me.
I've never seen anyone - in the tech industry or not - claim that they felt marginalized as a kid because they weren't growing up in NYC or Boston. So the idea that all these ideas popped up and had a market just because of this "geographic marginalization" is a huge reach.
Sometimes there is a demand for something new from a non-marginalized majority group, and that's extremely likely to be the case with new technology, because new tech is definitionally new to both the mainstream and the margins.
The claim that as an industry matures, new growth will start from the edges is not very different from our common use of "disruption" - neither the existing players nor their current customers anticipate the new thing - but it's also not really related to being "data driven" or not.
You can try to serve the mainstream/your existing customer base in a data driven way or in a non-data-driven way.
You can similarly try to find new opportunities with or without being data driven.
There's a point in there about how if you're looking for new opportunities you need to be sophisticated in how you use your data, since you need to look for new insights and things that maybe won't show up in means and medians, but it's buried here in hard-to-support asides trying to exaggerate the business or innovation impact of being marginalized.
Re: The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
#30There's something about writing like this that gets at me. It's angry, for a good reason, it has lots of good points, but in trying to get across its main point, which is signaling dissatisfaction with the tech industry, attacks lots of groups, hits lots of unrelated points, and when it gets into historical tidbits overrates single events in order to build a narrative. For example, please stop using terms like cishet…
>you say cishet white guys and you can group up a whole lot of people without thinking much about them as individuals. I can empathize with the "turnabout is fair play" logic of it... >Do you believe this is constructive language that bridges the divide that's part of these issues? ...but, like you, I question its effectiveness in bringing us all together. My guess is that it generally triggers a sense of awareness i…
There's no "turnabout" happening in being prejudiced against a group full of unique people, many of whom aren't so prejudiced.