5 ms·

Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks. In ad

Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks. In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I know there is evidence to the contrary at the management level.

maxerickson 10y ago
Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Homogeneous in what sense? It seems likely to me that things like sense of humor and work ethic would be lot more important than maleness when crafting your measure of homogeneity there.
Apocryphon 10y ago
Isn't one of the central truisms these days in software is that "monocultures are bad"?
- Torgo 10y ago
  If I tried to apply that logically, it is probably an argument for diversity in the field overall rather than intra-team. There should be more all-women software teams/companies, half-half, etc rather than a domination of all or mostly male teams.
awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details. To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant feature. I've also watched an adult have an absolute emotional meltdown over curly brace placement. In my opinion, diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
- FT_intern 10y ago
  Gender and race are orthogonal to shortsightedness and nerdiness. >diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check. The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.? There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
  - sjc_native1980s 10y ago
    There's a happy gray area between less c/overt bias/discrimination and promoting people whom aren't qualified/interested to ameliorate guilt of the former.
  - awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
    I'm not particularly interested in gender and race, I'm interested in culture. Gender and race happen to be pretty easy metrics to break up monoculture on a typical programming team. The term diversity by itself has no meaning. Yes it does. There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender. Okay, thanks for the tautology.

maxerickson 10y ago

Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Homogeneous in what sense? It seems likely to me that things like sense of humor and work ethic would be lot more important than maleness when crafting your measure of homogeneity there.

Apocryphon 10y ago

Isn't one of the central truisms these days in software is that "monocultures are bad"?

Torgo 10y ago
If I tried to apply that logically, it is probably an argument for diversity in the field overall rather than intra-team. There should be more all-women software teams/companies, half-half, etc rather than a domination of all or mostly male teams.

awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago

Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details. To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant feature. I've also watched an adult have an absolute emotional meltdown over curly brace placement. In my opinion, diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.

FT_intern 10y ago
Gender and race are orthogonal to shortsightedness and nerdiness. >diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check. The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.? There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
- sjc_native1980s 10y ago
  There's a happy gray area between less c/overt bias/discrimination and promoting people whom aren't qualified/interested to ameliorate guilt of the former.
- awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
  I'm not particularly interested in gender and race, I'm interested in culture. Gender and race happen to be pretty easy metrics to break up monoculture on a typical programming team. The term diversity by itself has no meaning. Yes it does. There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender. Okay, thanks for the tautology.