I care about diversity. I've had experience with enough teams to know that teams that are homogenous (in whatever way -- this isn't exclusive to white guys, though that's the obvious example) tend to have problems.
I think I know what you're talking about. I've seen teams where everyone tries to look exactly the same way and is expected to have exactly the same interests and hobbies. That usually ends up being quite toxic and demotivating.
The trouble is - once the company starts setting quotas and special rules for enforcing diversity, it attracts the type of people that focus on gaming those rules instead of bringing in added value and this quickly creates another form of toxicity.
In my opinion the ideal work environment is somewhere between those 2 extremes.
Human nature really. The moment you transition from applying common sense to a formal set of rules, there are always some people ready to abuse it. One of the well-known historical anecdote would be the cobra effect [1], I guess.
A more recent example is how whiteboard programming questions during interviews turned out to be ineffective because it indicated how well a candidate rehearsed this type of questions, rather than their programming abilities.
The whiteboard thing is different. Candidates of all backgrounds can practice that and thus make it less effective as a tool to filter out bad applicants. But diversity quotas, for example, are harder to game because most people can't change much about themselves to meet diversity criteria. So instead you are presumably talking about people who use their background to get an advantage in the hiring process and end up in roles a role for which they are not competent. But this is also fuzzy, because if the company is seeking diversity, why shouldn't people apply and let the company decide if their skills are sufficient? How are they "gaming" something by showing up and being hired? That's a failing of the company, not the candidate.
Successful groups are diverse. If groups become gratuitously homogeneous there arises a lack of variance in approach. This lack of variance:
- Reduces ability to catch errors. Linus: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". But this does not work if everyone looks at things in the same way.
- Makes it easier for undesirable decision cascades to form: One or two people have an idea, and the other members in the group copy their decision, because they always agree. Smart well-weighted decisions are the product of disagreement.
- Stifles innovation. Do you really want your tech company to be all Stanford graduates? Where everyone knows the exact same algorithms, because they sat in the exact same classes, by the exact same professors for decades?
- Is inefficient in regards to Pareto optimality: It is impossible to hire someone that knows all. Hiring for diverse skill sets comes close. Hiring people with homogeneous skill sets is an expensive uphill battle, that relies on small random mutations.
- Reduces the motivation of your top performers. The really desirable job candidates don't always like working in a drone factory, where everybody dresses the same, there is no challenging of their ideas, and, for instance, women all have inferior roles.
Agreed, but it seems to me that, in the context of our industry, race and gender diversity is way less important than the other kinds of diversity(ex. age, industry background, type of personality).
