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Comment by canoebuilder | Hacker News Reader

So differences exist, but those differences don't make any difference?

Do any differences ever make a difference in performance? Like a particular tribe of Kenyans utterly dominate distance running events, west Africans utterly dominate sprinting events what accounts for those differences?

What's lost in all this and that I have seen zero evidence presented for is that I am in no way convinced that the population groups that are "under-represented" as software professionals have much interest in being software professionals.

Whatever differences in capacity that may exist among groups the differences in interests are surely just as big or bigger.

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I think it's a pretty bad false equivalence to liken physical sports to ability in the workplace, purely because one is specifically _the peak of human ability_ and the other is outcome driven.

Taking your example of say, sprinting - the outcome is to cross the line 100m down the track. I would say pretty much everyone is capable of doing that one way or another. When you apply a performance lense that says you need to do it in X seconds, then you're saying "we only want our definition of the best to do this task".

Bringing it back to the workplace, a lot of jobs in tech (and other sectors too), suffer from trying to apply a one size fits all performance lense over the actual outcomes. "Sure this person did their job, but did they do these metrics that we've decided we value". A large part of diversity is acknowledging that the lense that you view people through is not going to apply to everyone, and accepting that you need to focus on the outcomes.

So on several readings of this, it sounds like you're saying that corporations should function as some sort of jobs program and that should take precedence over their function as a profit making enterprise and that some groups should have lower expectations placed on them.

I'm confused on how an employer is not a "jobs program" - they literally employee people, and are responsible for that employees growth and career opportunities (if they value having low staff turnover and achieving better outcomes for their business).

I agree with yawaramin as well, happy employees are better performing employees, and can speak from experience with working at places that value individuality versus strict top down directing of behaviour, that the companies with that flexibility perform much better, at less cost, with much happier employees.

It's not about lowering expectations, it's about changing how you look at them - look at the outcomes and measure those, not the journey to achieve them. When you start focusing on outcomes as teams, you open the door to diversity, which leads to diversifying your ideas and solutions to problems - ultimately leading to better outcomes.

I dispute that corporations must function as a profit-making enterprise over all other concerns. A good company's first priority is employee happiness. Happy employees = hefty profits: https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghanbiro/2014/01/19/happy-emp...

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