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Comment by buckbova | Hacker News Reader

> When I wanted to hire women, I looked for women. I have been very successful in hiring a diverse team.

This never sits right with me. Diversity for the sake of diversity.

> Once you’ve learned one or two computer languages, you can learn any computer language.

It helps but going from one disparate stack to another can be troublesome for many I've worked with. Almost a complete non-starter, ie going from .NET + sql server to python + django + web services or from Java + hibernate to nodejs + angularjs.

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> This never sits right with me. Diversity for the sake of diversity.

There is something to be said for trying to prevent (or break up) a monoculture. Monocultural companies are slow and rigid, and ultimately liable to lose perspective.

> This never sits right with me. Diversity for the sake of diversity.

Diversity in a team can be a feature that is valuable in and of itself. Different backgrounds, ways of thinking, approaches to problems, life experiences, etc.

Almost everything boils down to time.

What I've found difficult to work with is people that think that anything they do has "magical" properties. I.E., they don't actually understand at least one abstraction level. That also boils down to time(and willingness, and a proper mentor). But it is a different order of magnitude, depending on what is missing.

Learning new programming languages is easy (except Haskell, attempt no landing there) and is also a matter of time. Learning the ecosystem that goes with it takes longer (again, time). Learning how to code idiomatically requires experience (time once more, but only if actively programming).

Yes, it's like the Niels Bohr quote, "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." You have to determine if you need someone who is an expert now, or can become an expert. If you have a bunch of experts already, you can relax the requirement for new people because of knowledge transfer. (Assuming you're good about that.)

But we must acknowledge the amount of time that people spend in jobs now. If it takes a year to gain mastery and people leave after 2, like you said, there's just not enough time for people to learn from scratch.

I usually believe emphasis on diversity is a bunch of PC shit that distracts from the core tenants of building a good business (i.e. shipping a product, having ethics, making sustainable profit, etc.), but you really should hire women. That is, you should have a balance of sexes on the team (so I guess hire men if you're in a predominately women field). This is because we're human and one of the most engaging things we can do is interact with the opposite sex.

Rather than having to spend money on extremely bs team-building exercises to get your employees to not hate coming to work, just hire a team of balanced sexes. A bit of flirting, imagined sexual tension, and does-she-like-me-what-do-i-feel-about-him goes a long way to creating an atmosphere where employees don't burn out. (Just make sure to hire non-toxic people and avoid the all-guys-are-rapists / all-girls-are-sluts ideological extremists)

What did I just read...

It sounds like you just read someone who said relationship drama between teammates is good for team building. I personally would expect it to have the opposite effect most of the time.

Right. "Hire more women for the sexual tension."

The tech sector has a long way to go.

It has to be satire. It HAS to be.

> This never sits right with me. Diversity for the sake of diversity.

This is the entire debate of affirmative action, and people come down on both sides for valid and unquantifiable reasons.

Another way to think about it is to recognize that you have an unconscious bias for people that look and think like you do. A big problem with tech geeks is that see themselves as being unbiased and objective in all things (eg. meritocracy, best argument wins, etc), and so ironically they are more susceptible to rationalizing their own biases. So acknowledge you're not omniscient, recognize the bias, and consciously counteract it by giving people who are different for whatever the benefit of the doubt. I have often profited dramatically from hearing someone out who at first seemed to hold crazy untenable ideas.

My department has had native born from all over the globe, north and south america, latin america, asia, europe, and africa with a third women. Probably being in a biotech has an impact on diversity.

I've had a hand in hiring some of the above. I do acknowledge I have a bias towards those who can express themselves well in english but accents are welcome.

It really depends on your timeframe, skill needs, and how desperate you are. Some jobs absolutely require you to be productive on day 1, while others are less stringent. In the latter case, hiring for experience and not just immediate skillset makes sense.

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