Mike Monteiro really rubs me the wrong way for some reason. Maybe it's his abrasive, smug, always-right attitude in everything he says or writes.

He's a tough man to stomach.

He has raised awareness of the value of design thinking, and crucially the financial value of the designer to the process.

Despite all that, he remains a marmite figure. Add to that that the design work by his agency is (for my taste) underwhelming, and he can very quickly seem self righteous.

I dislike his tone, but he's a great communicator, and is discussing topics which are important to the industry. His two books from the Book Apart series are well worth a read.

So even if he isn't the first to bring up a topic, it doesn't make it less valuable.

Most tweets and articles read as snarky, self-righteous, all-knowing etc... This one does too and fails to surprise me in that regard. So much of writing on the internet is opinion. That being said, this is an essay. He doesn't claim to be a world economist with a solution. He even says it's fiction. Why attack his personality, but ignore his message?

Overall, his message of being more conscious of the world impacts we have as we build software, is a message that resonates with me. I did find this article to be a bit unfocussed, though. He talks about how we need to adopt socialism because our democracy is broken (which I personally sympathize with), but then ends with a very granular solution to fixing design culture in the workplace by eliminating bro culture.

I think that this article started off by highlighting some very big issues and then perhaps got intimidated and pivoted to some smaller ones. The responsibility of craft is important, but I doubt educating Uber designers in how to design better user experiences will solve their workplace culture or their lack of regard to the wealth inequalities they're encouraging.

Still, I think our society should always encourage this kind of writing. It makes me pop my head up a bit and think about the bigger picture as I work.

When we added to our job descriptions that our design culture values diversity we started to receive a more diverse (and talented, articulate) pool of applicants.

It seems that a good way to break down walls is to invite people in.

The irony of the king of designer "bro culture" telling people to destroy "bro culture".

As someone who hires UX designers and leads a high-growth design team in the tech industry I don't find this article is very useful. Diversity in hiring is on people's mind when looking to bring on new designers to the team.

The SJW sabre rattling has gotten traction. This article is virtue signalling at its worst — all sizzle with no help for those of us trying to figure out how to build diverse culture without being racist to whitey. You also aren't actually allowed to dismiss a candidate because they're white. It's discrimination. Like... go ahead and say that when you're hiring. Say "Sorry you're white. We're not hiring whites." Soon or later you're going to get fined.

Here are a few tactics we've been using to great success:

• Change the way you source talent. Hiring from exclusively SF tech-friendly hubs gets you predominantly white and asian guys. Without changing this you will never achieve close to parity without paying an arm and a leg. Apple and Google have diversity targets, too, which means talented women/coloured candidates tend to get snatched up. It's just free market demand/economics. It's literally illegal for me to not consider a candidate because they're white, male or even ask their sexual orientation. Not only that but it doesn't matter — if you change the way you source and bring more diverse candidates to the door the rest will sort itself out. Minority candidates are just as competitive as anyone.

• Don't focus on stuff like Beer O'Clock and after work social events. We're here to work, anyway, so that should be good enough. If you want a fun work culture be willing to invest 9-5 time on it. The counter measure is to be metric-focused as a business... so everyone is churning out effective work-meeting balance. Not hitting those targets or coming close is not acceptable.

• Focus on teaching and pairing. The biggest change for us was a willingness to hire junior-level designers and pair them with senior-level designers. This way if our pipeline was looking a bit light we could widen the net a bit. If a candidate doesn't work out and wants to grab a coffee try and mentor them... spend some time helping them figure out how to improve.

• Start with UI... teach UX. UX is a team sport, while UI is largely individualistic (at the divergent stage anyway). Finding people with good style and a consistent eye for detail tends to be harder. Everyone and their dog wants to be a UX Researcher these days. In my experience it can potentially mean they don't like to role up their sleeves and get in to the divs and pixels. They want to dump a bunch of boxes and arrows on a graphic designer and dictate what's best for the persona they've detailed.

Our design team is now only around 30% white guys, and nobody dismissed any potential white-boy candidates because of their ethnicity. The playing field was just evened, and that was all minority candidates needed to excel.

these are good points that shouldn't be constrained to the design world.

So cringy!

Lumping a group of individual people into "bros" isn't an argument. You are being more ignorant than the idea you have of the people you are attacking. There are multiple contributing factors to why there are less women than men in tech. Picking on a such an arguably small factor and using that as a weapon against random people is immature.

Mike, you are a white-male! Therefore you aren't qualified to have an opinion on these matters. :p (I hope my point isn't lost here.) Look, I used to work with an angsty SJW. At first, I was on her side 99% of the time, but she hated me no matter what I said or did because I am a "cysgen heteronormative straight white educated toxically masculine male" or something along those lines. I'm just a typical, friendly person. Even if I agreed with her on an issue, she would still add a reminder to me that she is more oppressed so I shouldn't add my thoughts to the conversation. It was a strange control issue. To reduce anyone's experiences and complex history to a list of their privileges shuts down communication.

I think Mike is someone who is so terrified of being attacked or criticized for being a white male, that he goes above and beyond to pander to the angriest of individuals in the PC/SJW community by saying "Hey look at me, I'm not like those other bad ones. I will help you marginalized people who need my help and if you ever revolt against the man, please spare me since I tried!" I get the intentions here, but I've walked down that path and I'd argue that it causes exponentially more harm than good. All it does is invite low-vibration energy people into your life. It's not good for your wellbeing to be a martyr for a cause that aims to change the definition of communication to one-way yelling at "the others."

Those that can't do, write medium articles.