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Shoutout to Lyel for giving an awesome lecture on Monday. Super engaging and valuable material right before our final project. Really looking forward to the next lecture on Wednesday.

Analyzing Interview w/ Dr. Rachel Gillum

Dr. Rachel Gillum Interview

In class, we spoke positively about Dr. Gillum's response to the interviewer regarding the efforts made by Salesforce to incorporate VSD into their workflow. Student's validly praised Gillum's points about her team creating friction with software developers and making a trustworthy application. However, in the remainder of her response, I did not find Dr. Gillum's answer very compelling.

Although asked for specifics from the interviewer, Gillum's response generally consisted of defaulting to "Oh, we have a team dedicated to that". For instance, when speaking about responsible innovation, she stated that "you know we've really built a structure in an institution to really do that work". I do not want to sound byte Dr. Gillum -- she does follow up with "we do this work thinking about the different stakeholders thinking about the different perspectives we meet at." Some may argue that this is a specific and thoughtful response. But, I can't really hop on this band wagon. To me, it sounds like a Big Corp is attempting to come across as thoughtful designers. If anything, I felt her response actually made me doubt SalesForce more than if I hadn't heard Gillum's interview at all.

Biased because of Big Tech?

As I am writing this, I want to acknowledge that I may be a bit biased from a lack of trust in large tech companies. Lyel touched on the lack of public trust towards Big tech. I certainly fall in this category. Nonetheless, I find it interesting that the general public (myself included) lack trust in Big Tech. It seems like an oximoron that the most widely used and largest companies are also the ones are not very trusted. Was this inevitable? Probably not. Maybe if they heard Lyel lecture it could have been prevented!