How diversity spurs creativity in software development

The music of programming

Some external interests may have particular value, and Katrina Novakovic, a business architect at US-based open source specialist Red Hat, has noticed that many of her company’s programmers were involved in music. “Musicians are generally logical and they follow reasoning – a skill coders have to have,” she says.

There are similar requirements in pattern recognition, planning ahead and methods of creation, she adds. “When you’re writing algorithms or coding, you can do this in different ways to fit your individual style, which is like music.”

The same can apply to artists more generally, with photographers using a blend of creativity and technology. One Red Hat interaction designer also works as a painter and gallery owner. Novakovic sees particularly good fits with agile software development, which requires innovation and flexibility, and open source, which requires collaboration. “It’s easier to teach someone how to code than how to be creative,” she says.

In multinational organisations, the international blend of people builds in some diversity, but it can need work to get the most out of everyone. Paolo Guglielmini, chief executive of US-based simulation specialist MSC Software, used to work at particle acceleration laboratory Cern, which has 23 member states and users from 110 countries. “Decision-making becomes interesting,” says Guglielmini, given different national styles of doing business, although working with an international group helps to improve decision-making skills.

MSC Software draws on this in the way it uses its software development bases in China, India, Europe and the US, he says. “A lot of products I see being successful in one geography and not another have been conceived by one group.”

To encourage joint working, the company has some staff working hours that fit with those in other time zones and sends managers to work for periods in other development bases. “It’s a way of building virtual teams that is very hard to do otherwise,” says Guglielmini.

Workplace diversity in South Africa

South Africa has moved from apartheid racism to “rainbow nation” integration in less than three decades. Lenore Kerrigan, the country’s sales manager for US-based automation software specialist UiPath, says this has resulted in a great deal of workplace diversity. “You’ve got people with different mindsets, different backgrounds and different terms of reference,” she says.

This helps in anticipating how different groups of people are likely to use products, but also means that employers have to work harder to gather everyone’s contributions, given differing cultural norms says Kerrigan.

Sales techniques and technology provide an answer, she says. “Part of selling is understanding how the other person wants to communicate. It’s the same in your own team.”

Kerrigan uses a wide range of communications channels, including face-to-face meetings, phone, messaging, Slack’s collaboration platform and email, to talk to colleagues depending on what they are comfortable with.

She says the company has connected with a broad range of people in southern Africa by offering a free community edition. This resulted in a young Muslim woman working for a bank in Mauritius trying the software and solving a problem, which led to her presenting the work to managers and developing her career while UiPath gained the bank as a paying customer.

Kerrigan says recent increases in bandwidth in several African countries are giving people access to new opportunities and education online, which can help them and companies alike.

Disability, like sex and race, is a protected characteristic under UK law on which it is illegal for employers to discriminate. But people with specific conditions can also help to improve software in ways that help many others. “By considering the needs of people living with various disabilities through user stories at the start of each project, the end product is more likely to be accessible to as many people as possible,” says Suzie Miller, a solutions architect for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and chair of the company’s People with Disabilities group.

For example, subtitles and audio descriptions were initially developed for people with hearing impairments, but now also enable people to watch videos on smartphones.

Miller says adding assistive technologies to existing products can be expensive, so it makes sense to use “inclusive design” in the initial development process. Amazon took this approach with text-to-speech service Polly and speech recognition product Transcribe, she says. “Those products were designed to benefit everybody by considering accessibility from the outset.”

But although software developers with experience of disability may be well placed to offer advice and guidance, Miller says they should not be defined by this. “You will struggle to retain employees if your one staff member with low vision becomes a de facto tester for screen reader functionality,” she says. “That isn’t why you recruited them in the first place and it reduces their expertise to a narrow niche.”

Joe Drumgoole, director of developer relations at US-based database provider MongoDB, has dyscalculia, which means he cannot do mental arithmetic. He keeps a calculator handy, but is also particularly aware of how easy or hard it is to use software. “How do I reduce the cognitive burden on users of our software so it makes life easier?” he says. “It has definitely informed how I think about software development. Whatever you do to make life accessible for those more challenged invariably yields benefits for the population at large.”

On improving diversity more generally, Drumgoole says standardised interviews used by companies and recruitment agencies make recruitment fairer. “You don’t allow individual interviewers to go into their own unconscious biases,” he says, given people’s tendency to recruit others like themselves.

Some employers say it is too difficult to find a wide range of candidates, to which Drumgoole reckons the answer is to work harder, with MongoDB benefiting from having set up a large work experience programme that has attracted a diverse range of people.

Drumgoole has no doubts that a broad range of experiences and perspectives is valuable in software development. “You’ve got to have rocks in your head the size of Gibraltar not to understand how a diverse population is going to help you solve diverse problems,” he says.