What's bad about this? What value does it bring to diversify, what should we look for and why is it important? Or are we too small to need diversifying yet with only about 30 employees?
- 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'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.
But yes, it largely benefits user facing or multi regional Software
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
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".
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.
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
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...
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
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?
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.
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.
I agree, but I would also add that a company exhibiting the exact diversity representation as the surrounding country is also very odd, statistically.
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.
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.
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?
I might've jumped to conclusions, but I wouldn't read too much into that example.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If your company is providing services to specifically white men and women in the 20 to 60 age group, you have a pretty good mix of people. You could use somebody who isn't in the target demographic like most of you to help you out of the demographic Johari window, but otherwise your diversity is perfect.
If you're trying to market to people who need food around the world, you will at some point hit a wall on how much you can understand all the different markets. For instance, what do a bunch of white guys from the suburbs know about how a Sub-Saharan African interacts with food markets?
Your competitors will read that research.
edit: carlhjerpe is right- this is super condescending. Downvote me.
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.
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.
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.