I talk a lot about how “empathy” in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn’t care, but it’s important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding “why” some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise “wow, steve. you really care about people don’t you?”
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are…
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
he got transphobic far earlier, one of his kids came out and he’s been malding since