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Comment by Crabber | Hacker News Reader

I think diversity has been pushed on the workplace because it massively opens up the labor supply and allows companies to plummet wages. As a native worker of a country it is completely against your self-interest to advocate for such changes.

All of the pro-diversity platitudes like "diversity is a strength" are never justified with data, they're just said as truisms you're supposed to blindly believe and repeat.

Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for. But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that! And that's why Amazon tracks lack of workplace diversity as a metric for risk of union formation :)

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> Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages

As I'm sure you're aware, software development is very different from physical labor. For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.

Think of it in terms of code reviews. Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences? I can't point to any studies to prove this, but from personal experience I'd argue it's the latter.

Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer and person.

Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best. Strong bonds can and do form regardless of culture.

>For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.

I'd say it's far more engineering than creative. You're writing code to meet the specifications of a client. I don't think the race of the person writing that code makes a difference.

>Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences

It benefits from being reviewed by people who have lots of experience writing different types of software. Which has nothing to do with ethnic diversity.

>Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer

Meaningless platitude, unless you can back this up with data

>Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best.

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403

> https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403

I stand corrected. Corporations gonna corporate /shrug

However I disagree with the conclusion:

> It appears it's nothing more than a union busting tactic to divide and conquer their own workforce so they'll be easier to control and accept lower wages.

Quite the sensationalist take. Again, I don't have data to back this up, but IME a diverse team produces better results and I'd rather work in one than not.

> Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences?

In practice "diversity" is more often people from the same schools and employment backgrounds, with just a bit more variation in sex or race or ethnicity.

> The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for.

It was certainly good for the owners of the mines and other extractive businesses to have their workers feel some sense of loyalty to each other based on where they were born. Not so much for the workers themselves that had fewer opportunities for growth, nor their families as the mines closed and the towns died.

> But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that!

There are plenty of unions made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them span states (or are at least affiliated with organizations that span states). I don't know where you got this idea that there's a connection between birthplace and unionization.

Diversity initiatives in tech have a strong bottoms-up component from a subset of employees. "Self interest" isn't really the point.

One motivator is societal good and fairness to ensure that great opportunities are as equally available as possible, and that nobody avoids or leaves the industry due to their race or gender.

The other is making sure you have more demographic variation that can make a better product for more people. A classic example is avoiding gaffs in ML models based on skin color. All else equal, the more representative your employees are of your target user base, the more likely someone is to raise the right questions early. This is especially true for consumer tech where engineers are part of the process of deciding what gets built, but also true in cases like thinking about ML fairness.

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