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Comment by thras | Hacker News Reader

Even then, I wonder whether maximizing intellectual diversity is really the best strategy. Teams with hefty philosophical disagreements can have trouble getting on the same page enough to accomplish goals.

There may be an optimal level for intellectual diversity, but I wonder if it isn't closer to the minimum than the maximum for most tasks. It would be interesting to see real data on that; I have none.

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While getting on the same page is important, intellectual blind spots are a huge problem for most organizations. People who think too similarly tend to miss the same sorts of things, and it's absolutely crucial to the success of any serious project that you have diversity in terms of biases and opinions.

To make a trivial example, if you're an optimistic person and you hire all optimists, you'll ignore some potential problems. If you hire all pessimists, you'll ignore some potential long-shot opportunities you should pursue. If you hire all detail people, you'll miss out on the big picture. If you hire all big picture people, you'll miss out on the details.

People tend to hire people they feel comfortable with and get along with, which tends to mean people that think like them and agree with them. So when assembling a team, getting a diversity of opinions and biases is something you really need to take seriously. You need people who can work together and be civil and come to agreements and who like working with each other, but you really do need to have a mix of people who think differently.

I have no real data on the subject, but my mother has done organizational development work using the MBTI, so I've heard plenty of anecdotal stories around the types of dysfunctions that develop at organizations that have too much of a bias in one direction.

Yes. I think you have to add social skills into the mix. Ideally maximum intellectual diversity with maximum social (negotiation, facilitation, humility, leadership) abilities, but you'd have to scale back on intellectual diversity depending on the social ability of the group.

I think that's a popular way of thinking because people like the word 'diversity,' not necessarily because it makes any sense. If you wanted to write the next Digg, say, would you hire a chemist, a programmer, and a doctor? Or would you hire three programmers? Would you hire programmers that use different languages or three who use the same language?

In practice, you get so much accidental diversity between any two intelligent individuals (we are all quite different) that its rare that you have to go looking for more. Diversity is the great good and ideal of our time, but a rather flimsy idea when you get right down to it.

Why would you want to write the next Digg? Another social news site, huh? Maybe they could actually come up with something useful. I'm sure a good chemist, programmer, and doctor could come up with something of greater utility. You need to expand your mental diversity.

If I had a good chemist, programmer and doctor, I'd use them to design rational drug design software.

Amen. There are a few groups working in this area: http://www.deshawresearch.com/ http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t60817.html

There are other types of relevant diversity, however. The authors speak directly to "functional" diversity, which they describe as "differences in how people represent problems and how they go about solving them".

In the context of wanting to write the next Digg, I would propose that a better application of their conclusions would be, e.g., to favor hiring programmers from different schools over hiring programmers who went to the same school and studied under the same professors. In this way you might get some diversity in terms of how your programmers approach solving problems versus having a group of programmers who each approach a given problem in the same way and presumably reach the same conclusions / solutions.

I agree. And it's not just types of analytical processing. How about hiring programmers who represent major different personality types, which have an innate difference in how they both perceive and respond to problems? Language knowledge, social skills, and algorithm construction is a given.

I recall seeing a photo of the Clinton cabinet (I believe), with some caption about diversity.

There were blacks, whites, hispanic, men, women, but as I looked over the faces I thought, "Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, not sure, lawyer, ..." and wondered where, exactly, was the diversity?

Arbitrary or superficial diversity is not a good goal.

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