Yesterday here on dev.to Sarthak Sharma(sarthology) posted an article about Hong Kong needing our help. In the post he described also how the use of ISO 3166 can be used to push a political agenda. He also explains that he was made aware of this issue from his Taiwanese developer friend who is also a dev.to user.

This got me thinking about a thing I read when I was doing research into hiring developers, and how the interview process and hiring decisions are made in a meritocratic way most places. Meritocracy being the idea of hiring based on one's achievements, knowledge, and demonstrated skills rather than based on who they know, bribery, or some other metric.

I can't find the thing I read at that time but it was about hiring for diversity and how it relates to meritocratic metrics. The article explained something along the lines of:

"If your organization only has one main demographic such as young white males, then your organization's view of what is a 'merit' will be skewed. Therefore hiring purely for diversity can realign the criteria for what is a merit into something more representative of reality."

That always stuck with me as something that really seemed true. However as a member of the main demographic here(young white male) I was unable to really imagine what some of those other merits could be. The post yesterday showed me a little insight though. Simply being from a foreign country or someone who exist between two cultures such as a Korean-American could provide similar insights as above.

I have a small list that I've thought of but would love to see more, or be told ideas on my list are wrong or discriminatory, or offensive!

• Political things such as above that could make a bad or incorrect address form or push a possibly harmful agenda
• LGBT issues that could push alienating gender selects or use non-inclusive language or the like
• Various disabilities that could cause a UX that is unusable for a part of the population due to motor, visual, hearing or other impairments
• Different cultural experiences that if known, would prevent offending a subset of customers, or maybe could tell you that some business initiative would not work because of the mindset of the people its targeting.

So I'm wanting to get feedback from the lovely community here, what are some diversity based merits that people don't think about? What are some examples you have from your own workplace where a person from a different background brought up a good point? Do you have examples where someone with a different background could have brought up a point if they were there?

Thanks for reading and I want to hear from you!