Inclusive designers and designers who include
by Matt May
Hi, all. It's a new week, and I don't want to get in the way of you and your Beyoncé downloads, so let's get right to it.
Last week saw another wave of tech layoffs. Amazon cut another 400 from its OneMedical and Pharmacy divisions; DocuSign cut 6% of its workforce, with “the majority” of layoffs in sales and marketing; Snap cut 10%, or 528 employees, in a restructuring; Meetup announced it was going to slash its US operation in the wake of its acquisition by a European company; and this morning SiriusXM laid off 160 people, or 3% of its staff.
I’m going to single one out because it stuck in my craw. Grammarly announced the layoff of 23% of its employees in a blog post, with its CEO explaining that it was not about saving money. “This is not a cost-cutting exercise,” said CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. “Grammarly’s financial position is, and remains, strong.” I’m struck by the audacity of telling your own employees you’re cutting them loose because you’d rather hire some more AI engineers instead. But here, have 3 months of severance and 6 months of health insurance. No more of your stock grants, though. We need to save those for people who’ll give us value in the future.
As these cracks keep showing in what’s allegedly a booming labor market, I’m reminded of how many of the people I talk to in my office hours ask me about how to break into product DEI roles (accessibility, inclusive design, product equity, etc.). Here’s the short version of what I tell them.
Finding your way in
There are a few big variables to consider as you decide how to build up your own resume:
- How large an organization you want to work for. A Fortune 100 company will often have lots of these roles, but they may be very well-defined, and thus less flexible, than a smaller company that’s just getting up to speed.
- How much you want to be in charge of. Do you want to be the specialist on one big project and never change focus? Or do you prefer constantly-changing tasks and roles, doing engineering support in the morning, product management in the afternoon and CEO herding at night?
- How much you want to tie your career to a DEI label. This one’s tricky, and can have serious implications for your career going forward. In short: if you’re an engineer, do you want to be a great generalist who knows a lot about accessibility, or do you want to master the entire ecosystem and become an accessibility engineer?
It’s that last one that requires the most thinking at times like these. Even in a booming market, product-oriented DEI roles don’t grow on trees, and as specialties go, the compensation is neutral to negative compared to a generalist, much less someone with specialized AI/ML experience. It’s easy to paint oneself into a corner career-wise by doing only DEI-oriented work, especially when capital markets dry up. Still, there are more than enough of us who have decided that this is the only form of labor we want to be contributing to tech companies, so it’s never too hard to find high-level specialty talent.
I’ve talked with hundreds of university students and early-career tech workers about this split, and my advice changes depending on whether I think the market is expanding or contracting. Right now, to someone who’s about to graduate and looking at where to apply—which is tough enough, as they compete with people with years and years of experience—I would say the best way to get into tech is as a generalist. In other words, instead of looking for work as an inclusive designer, look instead for a design role in an organization that at least appears to value inclusion.
That’s not to say that those are necessarily easy to come by, either. However, a lot of people working in product DEI roles got there by crafting a position for themselves to move from a generalist role to a specialist one. If you want to do that, though, you need to be working somewhere that’s receptive enough to that idea. It’s the ethics of the company that determines whether anyone can do product DEI work effectively, more than a great title or an exciting job description.
It’s really important to know that it’s the specialists who are getting hit the hardest. Having garden-variety engineering or design skills, with garden-variety resumes and portfolios, is the safest way to stay employed in tech in almost all seasons (excluding events like major market corrections or novel coronaviruses). In the right environment, you can do just as much good for underinvested communities this way as you can as a specialist. In any case, this is a time to remember that your personal ethics come with an opportunity cost, and there’s no guarantee that the work you want to do in this space will be available at all times, or that they will be highly valued when they are.
As much as I hate how many of my colleagues are treated in this space, and how much stress I’ve personally gone through pushing the rock up the hill… it’s still the only work I want to do in tech. I could probably rebrand myself as a generalist engineer, a designer, a product manager, you name it, and land a job where my goal is to build apps quickly and profitably. But I’ve seen what companies do when that’s all that matters to them, and I’m secure enough not to have to make that tradeoff to keep a roof over my head. If you’re not, for whatever reason, I don’t see a problem finding work where you can. This field needs more ethical labor in it, whether it likes it—hell, whether it knows it’s there—or not.
Wherever you are in your career, you should take stock of whether your working arrangements are in line with what you want to be putting into the world. If not, it may be better for you to generalize and move to a better company than for example, to be an inclusion specialist in a place that still doesn’t recognize the value of inclusion work. It can take time for your ethics and your working life to align. But I promise you, there will still be critical problems to solve, even if it takes a few years for your career to migrate closer to them.
Office hours
If you want to talk stuff like this over with me, that’s what my office hours are for. Slots are open for the next four Thursdays.
Book a session (paid) (Thursdays, up to 28 days in advance)
Book a session (free) (Thursdays, up to 7 days in advance)
That’s all. Have a great week.