Thoughts

I once hired a developer who was legally blind.

Although, strictly speaking, that’s not quite how it happened.

I hired a developer. I didn’t discover he was legally blind until afterwards.

He was good at his job. That’s why I hired him.

We were building accessible websites, and having him on the team turned out to be enormously valuable. But not necessarily for the reasons you might expect.

He worked with an enormous font size and a high-contrast display. Watching him navigate his computer was fascinating. He had developed ways of interacting with software that were completely different from my own.

I learnt an enormous amount simply by observing him.

One of the most interesting things was which websites he chose to use.

He naturally gravitated towards websites that were more accessible. Not necessarily because other websites were completely unusable, but because some were simply easier and more comfortable for him.

That sounds obvious, doesn’t it?

But there’s a difference between knowing something in principle and watching it influence somebody’s everyday behaviour.

Accessibility isn’t just about whether somebody can use your website. It’s about whether they want to.

You can read the guidelines, understand WCAG, run automated tests and conduct accessibility audits. All of those things are important.

But watching somebody navigate the web in a way you’ve never experienced yourself teaches you something different.

And the interesting thing is that he wasn’t teaching me.

He was just getting on with his job.

You don’t know what you don’t know

I’ve spent a lot of my career building websites and leading development teams.

I’ve worked with some excellent developers, designers, strategists and project managers. I’ve learnt something from just about everyone.

But some of the most valuable things I’ve learnt haven’t come from somebody deliberately teaching me.

They’ve come from watching how other people work.

How they approach problems.

What frustrates them.

What they notice.

What they ignore.

The assumptions they make that are completely different from mine.

My colleague’s visual impairment was particularly relevant because we were building websites, but the principle applies much more broadly.

People bring themselves to work.

They bring their experiences, backgrounds, abilities, interests, preferences and ways of thinking.

And those things influence how they approach problems, often without them even realising it.

A team of people with similar experiences can be extremely capable. They might produce excellent work.

But they can also share the same blind spots.

If everybody approaches a problem from roughly the same perspective, who’s going to notice what they’re missing?

That’s where diversity becomes valuable.

Not simply because different people have different opinions, but because different people experience the world differently.

And you can’t necessarily learn those perspectives from a book.

Diversity isn’t the opposite of merit

Diversity has become a strangely contentious subject.

Much of the political argument seems to revolve around quotas, positive discrimination and whether somebody deserves an opportunity.

Those are questions about recruitment and fairness. They’re worth discussing, but I think they can obscure something fundamental.

Diversity can make teams better.

My colleague is a good example.

I didn’t hire him because he was blind.

I didn’t know he was blind.

I hired him because he was a capable developer.

But his experience brought something additional to the team that I hadn’t anticipated.

And I benefited from it.

That’s the part I think gets overlooked.

Diversity isn’t just about what an organisation can do for an individual. It’s also about what individuals contribute to the organisation, and what everybody learns from working together.

It doesn’t require lowering standards or treating technical ability as unimportant.

In fact, when you’re recruiting, you’re not simply trying to assemble a collection of individually excellent developers.

You’re trying to build an excellent team.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

You need technical competence, of course. But you also need people who challenge assumptions, approach problems differently, share knowledge and complement one another’s strengths.

Sometimes the person who brings the most valuable new perspective isn’t the person whose CV looks most like everyone else’s.

The people we’re missing

Software development remains a heavily male-dominated profession.

I’ve worked in the industry for more than 25 years, and I’ve seen plenty of development teams with very few women, sometimes none at all.

I think that’s a problem.

Not because women necessarily write different code from men, or because any individual woman should be expected to represent the experiences of all women.

But because we’re drawing our teams from a narrower pool of people than we could be.

And the people already working in an industry have a tendency to shape its culture.

How we recruit.

How we interview.

What we value.

How we communicate.

What we consider normal.

Even our ideas about what a developer looks like.

If we keep recruiting people who resemble the people already in the room, we risk perpetuating those assumptions.

Neurodivergence is another interesting example.

Software development can be particularly well suited to certain ways of thinking.

Some autistic people may have strengths in systematic thinking, pattern recognition, attention to detail or sustained focus on subjects that interest them.

Some people with ADHD may bring particular strengths in curiosity, creative problem-solving or making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.

Of course, none of these characteristics is universal. Neurodivergence can also introduce real challenges, and the same person might thrive in one working environment and struggle in another.

But that’s rather the point.

People don’t all work in the same way. Why do we keep expecting them to?

Someone who does their best work with long periods of uninterrupted concentration might find an office full of meetings and interruptions exhausting.

Someone who prefers written communication might struggle in a culture where every decision happens in an impromptu conversation.

Someone who needs clear requirements might be described as inflexible when, actually, clearer requirements would probably benefit the entire team.

A good manager should be interested in understanding how people work best.

Not trying to make everyone work identically.

Don’t hire diversity and then suppress it

There’s an important distinction between having a diverse team and benefiting from one.

Simply recruiting people from different backgrounds doesn’t guarantee better decisions.

If everyone is expected to conform to the same working practices, communicate in the same way and agree with the same people, much of that potential disappears.

You need to make room for difference.

That might mean adapting working practices, providing appropriate equipment, accommodating different communication preferences or creating an environment where people feel comfortable challenging decisions.

It also means being prepared to question your own assumptions.

I’ve always thought one of the dangers of leadership is surrounding yourself with people who agree with you.

It’s comfortable.

Decisions are easier.

Meetings are shorter.

Everyone seems to be pulling in the same direction.

But agreement isn’t necessarily evidence that you’ve made the right decision.

Sometimes it just means nobody has challenged it.

There’s no point employing people who see things differently if you expect them to think exactly like you.

And this isn’t about engineering disagreement for its own sake.

It’s about recognising that different perspectives can reveal things that a more homogeneous team might overlook.

That only works when people are listened to, respected and given the opportunity to contribute.

When diversity becomes a dirty word

I once worked with a consultancy specialising in diversity and inclusion.

More recently, they found themselves having to reconsider how they described their work as diversity initiatives came under political pressure, particularly in the United States.

I found that interesting.

The terminology had become contentious, but the underlying reasons for creating inclusive workplaces hadn’t necessarily changed.

You can describe the work in terms of organisational effectiveness, employee experience, talent development or better decision-making.

Those are all useful ways of looking at it.

But changing the language doesn’t change the underlying principle.

People bring different experiences and perspectives to work.

Organisations can benefit from those differences.

And people should have fair opportunities to contribute.

I don’t think those ideas need to be particularly controversial.

Of course, diversity programmes should be open to scrutiny. They should be fair, effective and accountable, just like any other organisational initiative.

And diversity isn’t automatically a guarantee of better performance. Different perspectives can introduce friction, and without good leadership that friction can be counterproductive.

But reducing the entire conversation to quotas and preferential treatment misses something important.

The value of diversity isn’t limited to who gets an opportunity. It extends to everyone who works alongside them.

People bring themselves to work

I often think about that developer.

Not because hiring him was some extraordinary act of inclusion.

It wasn’t.

I hired a good developer.

But working with him changed the way I thought about accessibility.

I learnt things about how people navigate software, how they choose which websites to use and how seemingly small decisions can make an enormous difference to someone’s experience.

I learnt those things because I happened to work alongside somebody whose experience of the web was different from mine.

And I carried that knowledge into other projects, other teams and other organisations.

That’s something I couldn’t have predicted when I hired him.

I didn’t even know that particular knowledge was missing.

And I think that’s the strongest argument for diversity in teams.

We don’t know everything.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

And we can’t expect to discover every gap in our understanding by surrounding ourselves with people who share our experiences.

I’ve worked with some brilliant people over the years. Some were specialists, some were generalists, some approached problems in ways I would never have considered.

They’ve all brought something different to the work.

And often, they’ve brought something different out in me.

People bring themselves to work.

That’s not something we should be trying to eliminate.

It’s something we should be making room for.