Even ignoring that diversity can be a goal in and of itself, and ignoring that a lack of diversity can be a useful metric for identifying other problems, there's also plenty of reason to believe that targeting diversity directly can yield performance improvements. If you're building a product for women, you should have some women on your team. If you're building a product for the general population, you'll get better results if your team has a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.
It's the same exact reason why it's good for a CEO to have experience in the industry that they're targeting with their products, and why managers who know at least a little bit about code works tend to do a better job of managing programmers. Perspective and life experiences absolutely help with decision-making processes and can help you avoid certain pitfalls in your product.
Diversity increases your available breadth of input into decisions and planning; it's like the human version of increasing code-coverage in your QA department.
Also, what is your metric for "competence"? You can train people to be computer programmers, but there are many other traits that are impossible to train. Like seeing the world from a perspective different than a middle aged white man, for one.
We know opportunity is not.
We know education is not.
Also, competence and "best" schools are not the same.
I mean, unless factors you evaluate for competence are just 'similarity to current decision makers'. Which is what people largely do in practice. This is why we see that tests show that hiring decisions vary dramatically on the basis of names, pictures, educational background, etc.
No one has a magic 8-ball that spits out an employee's power level. So something else is being measured.
But even if we COULD measure for competence - say in an objective numerical manner - the amount of times you'd optimize towards a local maxima rather than overall maxima would be significant.
So the measurement is flawed, and the algorithm is wrong. You'd think people on HN of all people would recognize the above as self-evident given how frequently 'I'm upset at tech hiring' threads are posted here.
There's a moral argument that comes into play with politics that doesn't for age or race. There's nothing even abstractly morally problematic about making your product appeal to women or old people or whomever. There may be reasons to avoid marketing or aligning your product to, say, people whose political views you disagree with.
My point is that this can't be the real reason for D and I initiatives, since if it was, there would be a similarly strong push to have equal political and age representation in order to reflect the reality of these products' customer demographics.
Not only is there no attempt to represent customer demographics on dimensions such as age, but there continues to be rank discrimination against people based on these dimensions, and the people pretending to be in favor of diversity are consistently and conspicuously silent on the matter.
That's a hell of a worldview.
I grew up in an impoverished family, in a trailer park, in a mostly black county. I know far better than you do about "privilege structures", but since I happened to be white, none of the diversity initiatives care or help.
Poor white people are underrepresented in tech. But the white elites think poor whites are in trailer parks because they are stupid. It's their fault, right? That's what all of you say, I've heard it said everywhere. "Trailer trash" this and that, said casually without batting an eye. Never questioning if maybe, just maybe, the kids born there have opportunities equivalent to yours.
It's obvious nobody cares. If they did, they would talk about it, or try to do something. But there are no activist professors for them, so crickets.
> The statistically illiterate HR minions who preach the correlation between diversity and performance don't get this, because they aren't even educated enough to understand correlation/causation fallacy.
That seems kinda like a strawman? Who's arguing that? It's not like having a more diverse team will necessarily result in higher quality code, or more lines of code per month, or some similarly laser-focused metric of "performance".
Diversity can instigate cultural change at a company (do we value hard deadlines more, or should we emphasize work-life balance more?), make it easier to acquire and communicate with customers from diverse backgrounds (cross-cultural communications is hard for anyone, especially so for non-diverse teams with no specific training in it), fill some legal or marketing mandate (we gotta look diverse even if we aren't), help spur innovation in process or product development (what's "out of the box thinking" for one demographic may be a common process for another demographic), etc.
Of course there are costs too. Diverse teams may or may not work together as well, holidays might be different, food and beverage preferences may not line up with current offerings, religious or cultural conflicts may occur, staff polarization becomes more likely (along political/ideological/national origin lines, whatever)...
That's all to say diversity isn't just skin color but cultural backgrounds too, and you get all the pros and cons of that... for better or worse. It's far more nuanced than simply trying to hire for some arbitrary measure of "competence".