Lots of advantages to diversity:

- you get a wider range of product ideas coming from all parts of the org. You'd be surprised how many engineering decisions only favor the group of people who develop them, you are less likely to consider non-white-male demographics as a homogeneous group, leaving those users out as prospective clients.

- you have a less diverse QA and testing without diversity. That means you're only testing your products against white people. Lots of famous products struggle with being used with people of color because of that reason. For example many early photo augmentation software didn't work with anyone unless they were white.

- diversity begets diversity. The lack of diversity may (and often will) create a work culture that prevents a suitably qualified PoC from being hired. And even if they do, the lack of diversity may be unwelcoming. It's almost certain that lack of diversity will mean people will make innocent faux pas comments to the one diverse hire, pushing them out of groups. They therefore get disenfranchised from the work place, simply by non diverse culture being unaccommodating and not outright racism.

Basically, end of the day, by not having diversity, you're likely both pushing away people outside your demographics, both as clients and employees, and also leaving money on the table as a result.

> you get a wider range of product ideas coming from all parts of the org

> you're only testing your products against white people

I think these depend strongly on the kind of software you're building. This may be a benefit if you're building a highly user-facing consumer app, a TikTok kind of thing. It's less likely to be useful if you're building an interbank payment platform.

Maybe. Or maybe they'd highlight a bug in your system with working with different numerical and units systems that might not have been considered, so that your system can be preemptively prepared for expanding into new regions.

But yes, it largely benefits user facing or multi regional Software

What if we're not building software and not operating on a global scale? Is it equally important because of ethics or is it just when a different perspective might be useful once going global?

So I think it would come down to a few things then.

certainly I think the ethics is important. Mostly because highly homogenous groups tend not to be inviting for outsiders to the group. It may be intentionally done, but undetected due to lack of diversity, but even harder to discover is implicit biases that form stronger in homogenous groups. So even if you're not actively pushing out minorities, you may be passively doing so which is IMHO unethical when knowingly allowed to fester.

But from a business perspective, this means you're dramatically reducing your hiring pool, even if unintentionally done. So you may be missing out on a lot of people who may improve your product.

Now of course hypothetical value is hard to quantify, but you can quantify how many people you're potentially excluding. A good way to do this is see how many percentage points your makeup is versus college graduates, especially local. It doesn't need to be a match but it also shouldn't be dramatically off.

Then repeat through each tier of your company. A lot of companies struggle with turnover even if their hiring is adequately diverse. This is potentially due to years of forming homogenous in crowds that promote within themselves.

Therefore diversity can help identify procedural issues in your company that could result in better hiring and promotion practices, even if it doesn't lead to diversity itself.

The best thing to do here is collect data. A good analogy may be that you shouldn't test your software with low variance data sets. So why would you test your company with low variance data sets? It would highlight bugs in the system that is your company

Hope I don't step on a landmine here, please take the following in "good faith".

This is something I've struggled with understanding. With all jobs I've had (stacking shelves, software dev) the lack of diversity hasn't been something I've at least recognised as the faults of the team / company. The reason the product hasn't achieved the deadline / high-praise is usually down to bad management, bad technical decisions, over promising, etc. Now if we had more women on the team, or more non-whites that could have changed things, but I'm still left a little sceptical that would have made a big enough difference.

The other problem is the what I call the "sports-team" problem (sorry if this has an actual name): when picking players for a football (soccer) team to, lets say, compete in the World Cup, you pick the best players you can get hold of - regardless of their "identity". If a diverse player doesn't want to join your team because of all the whites, then offer them more money if you think they are worth it. Why shouldn't this translate to software teams? Do you just end up with all the 10x "bros" and a bad product?

I get that more diverse = more moral. But does that mean your competition will be able to out-compete you? If that's the case then there's no hope if "go woke, go broke".

It depends.

I’m famously non-PC, but there are certainly scenarios where diversity is actually a large benefit.

If you are making a product, it makes sense to have a diverse team working on it so that it had the broadest appeal or usability- Apple Watch not identifying the heart rate of black people and the Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys being the most famous or prominent examples.

> Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys

Tangential, but it’s interesting that facebook’s reputation is now so bad, it’s become a black hole that distorts responsibility enough that google’s bugs are pinned on them too :P

Wow. I totally misremembered that. Good catch!

> Apple Watch not identifying the heart rate of black people

Do you have a credible source for this claim? The one I found—from 2015 [1]—corrected the bit about skin color in their reporting but retained the bit about how Apple Watches can fail to work due the kind of pigment typically used for tattoos.

Perhaps you misremembered and should have mentioned Fitbit [2]?

1: https://qz.com/394694/people-with-dark-skin-and-tattoos-repo...

2: https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/24/fitbit-accuracy-dark-ski...

Politically incorrect opinion incoming: the most efficient teams are homogeneous for the same reasons that military battalions are best off being homogeneous.

1. it improves communication

2. shared experiences and culture

3. overall better team cohesion and culture building

I would go almost as far as saying that diversity is a red flag for a startup and that diversity starts to have benefits only in bigger companies

This has to be one of the most outright bigoted posts I've seen on HN.

It implies that only outright homogeneous cultures are good. So a white woman is a negative to be in a work culture with a white man, because she cannot relate to being a man?

Or a black man can't work with a white man because he can't relate to being white?

Or do you mean if I'm from a foreign country, legally allowed to work in America, that I am a negative because I don't share a common upbringing story?

Should people from different states not work together?

Asking rhetorical questions of this nature is not achieving anything except airing your hurt sensibilities. People can have opinions other than the ones you hold and I already outlined fairly clearly in my original post what I think.

Heterogeneity is bad for startups because of the need to have no friction communication and shared goals/ideals/experiences. It does _not_ mean that diversity is bad in a big company or overall.

You haven't outlined where you consider the extents of "being homogeneous".

Otherwise homogeneous is whatever demographic you prescribe to and is entirely a self serving concept.

> Otherwise homogeneous is whatever demographic you prescribe to and is entirely a self serving concept

Whats wrong with this? I like working closely with people that understand me just by body language and completely frictionless communication. You'd be surprised how valuable that is when you're solving a P0 breakage at 3am.

So you're saying you can't get on equally well with people outside your demographic? You wouldn't even give them a chance based on not being part of your demographics?

There's also a difference between how you pick your friends and how you hire employees. You were advocating that hiring homogeneously is beneficial. In and off itself, that's discriminatory.

And still you refuse to commit to what is the extents of "homogeneous". Is it ethnicity? Language? Gender? Sexuality? Nationality?

Your post also suggested that heterogeneous work forces , even if you qualify it as applying only to startups, work at an interior level to homogeneous ones. Again, that's implying that different demographics can't work well together. But clearly that can't apply across the board. Or women and men could never work together. So what's the extents of your statement?

To be perfectly fair with the parent; It _is_ a very western ideal about heterogeneity being highly valued.

I think tying emotions to it does us little favours - a prominent successful country that does not value heterogenity at all is Japan.

Does Japan outcompete per capita?

(The answer is no).

Not sure if there are other examples of note here.

There's a difference between not valuing heterogeneous work forces versus valuing homogenous ones. The parents comment is the latter.

Also you have to view the concept of heterogeneous work forces relative to the make up of the countries demographics makeup.

A diverse country having a non diverse work force make up is odd statistically.

> A diverse country having a non diverse work force make up is odd statistically.

I agree, but I would also add that a company exhibiting the exact diversity representation as the surrounding country is also very odd, statistically.

The research doesn't support that at all: https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter

That first study kind of put me off the article. Black defendant, white victim. Why did they choose just this specific very subject to racism way to measure if the group was better or not? It makes sense that if you have to collaborate whites and blacks both will have a bias towards defending their own, so they'd have to make up better arguments and highlight more facts to get their way.

I might've jumped to conclusions, but I wouldn't read too much into that example.

This is a question I wrestled a lot with. Growing up, diversity was not something I thought a lot about, and in any case I have always considered myself a hard-nosed type of thinker, for whom concerns about quality and the bottom line should _always_ outweigh the messy questions of identity politics.

But these days I work at a much more diverse organization than the one in which I started my career and what I have realized is: it's better. Better teams, better business, better tech. Far from being a sop to some sort of social-justice party line, diversity in the workforce has made every member function at a higher level.

Social science research has pretty clearly shown that more diverse organizations tend to be more profitable ones, and my own experience confirms this. I don't know the mechanism by which diversity brings this improvement about, but I have two theories as to possible contributing factors:

1) Diversity (at least intellectual diversity) forces us to defend our ideas. Homogenous groups in all pursuits tend to mistake their own way of doing things for some sort of iron law of the universe. Diversity can impose intellectual humility on members of the group and is a useful counter to our tendency to cargo-cult.

2) We pattern-match too aggressively in our evaluation of candidates, which leads us to inadvertently underrate people who don't match the pattern of the type of person we are used to thinking of as being competent. On HN, we talk about this all the time in terms of the software industry's folkloric approach to interviewing.

I actually see the cargo-cult tendencies quite a bit, I'm working as hard as i can to question everything we're doing and how we're doing it. Not a very rewarding task, but if you don't you're obsoleted by others.

There was a paper I saw a few years ago that showed a high correlation between the diversity of a lab (racial, cultural, income, political, age, anything they thought to measure) and citations of published work.

My personal experience is the more diverse a team in software, the fewer blind spots the product will have. This might not be something you always care about, but I think in general it leads to better products, since all that input can be very valuable. I would say by the time you have 30 employees you have had a lot of opportunities to not hire an echochamber. Of course you’ll get some diversity just by hiring different roles. Even just having senior and junior devs rubbing elbows is a good start for diversity, and even if it doesn’t make your product better, you’ll find the two groups have different tasks that are morale tarpits, and you’ll tend to have a happier team.

Several benefits.

1. People with different backgrounds and experiences may notice important product features that you missed. The person who uses a screen reader is probably going to notice accessibility problems faster than the rest of the team.

2. There exist a lot of qualified people who aren't white. If your hiring process is failing to hire these qualified people due to internal biases then you are hiring suboptimally.

3. Social injustice is heritable and building a diverse workforce helps the world (in a small way) shift towards being more equitable.

> What is the upside of a highly diversified workforce?

It's harder to fail to cover use cases that the development team isn't aware of.

One example of this is name changes. Many products neglect this use case even though it's common[0] for women to change their family names after marriage.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200921-why-do-women-s...

That's very condescending. I'm asking because I don't see why my colleagues would be any better than they are if they were black, brown, jewish, muslim, female in various combinations, maybe I hold my colleaguestoo high?

> That's very condescending

You're right. I apologize. Often times in tech, the people asking questions like that are uninterested in the answers.

My own view is that I have been blind to the advantages that my background (white, male, straight, upper-middle-class) has given me for my entire life over other friends and colleagues. And I'm trying to learn more, read more, and pay more attention to these things.

Ijeoma Oluo, who I mentioned above, comes from tech. She saw a lot of things that you and I wouldn't notice. Things that matter, and we don't even see it. So she writes, she talks, and she makes a lot of great points. And it's really hard to read and listen to her sometimes because she makes points that part of me does not want to hear.

So that's the ethical reason why it matters.

As to the original question: Diversity of backgrounds can lead to diversity of ideas. Not on every problem. Not every day. But often enough that it can matter. And it can happen in many cases that you and I would not expect or predict. More diversity of ideas leads to better solutions being found. That's the premise- you don't have to believe it and many don't.

In the 1980s, Frito-Lay's CEO, who had never imagined the Latino market, put out a call for ideas. A Latino janitor answered the call with his idea- Flamin' Hot Cheetos. It was a huge hit. Imagine how many markets they (and others) were missing because of a lack of diversity of ideas.

Thanks for this reply.

The Cheetos idea was good indeed. But this is a 1B$ company. Where i work we turn about 7M$ around a year. We're not going global and we're not delivering software. We're an MSP.

I intentionally left out those facts that we're not ever going to operate on a global scale, and that we're not from the US, rather Sweden with 9M inhabitants. The reason i left this out is because i wanted to question the "truth" that a diversified workforce is the always the best. I'm not saying it isn't important, but I'm also not saying that it always is.

I'll add Ijeoma Oluo to my to-read list, i hope you got my point though. WHY is something true, when you know the why you also know when it is and isn't applicable to your situation, giving you the upper hand.

Now this is what I call a tone deaf question! You shouldn’t be asking if a minority or person of color would perform the job any better? The real question is whether there are competent workers who are not white? And if your workforce is entirely white, you should be asking if you’re mixing up competence with familiarity. People usually trust what is familiar.

There's barely any non-white workforce available where i live and we operate. I stand by my question being perfectly valid, what does a diverse workforce that doesn't deliver software to the globe do better than one that isn't diverse? If the answer is as you're suggesting: that we're missing out on competent workforce because we're racist, then I don't see the importance in a diverse workforce, but rather importance in not being racist and hiring whoever's best. I'm not tasked with reqruitment, but I don't believe my colleagues responsible for this are racist. And we're short on people right now so if we had a !whitemale presenting himself with a skillset we need, we'd hire him/her in an instant I'm sure.

I don't think it's a personal slight against your colleagues. It's not that they would be better. They're fine.

I think the idea is that the company overall would be better with a more diverse set of thought patterns, opinions, and experiences contributing to its success. One way to achieve this is through diversity of identity, gender, or culture.