This is a question I wrestled a lot with. Growing up, diversity was not something I thought a lot about, and in any case I have always considered myself a hard-

This is a question I wrestled a lot with. Growing up, diversity was not something I thought a lot about, and in any case I have always considered myself a hard-nosed type of thinker, for whom concerns about quality and the bottom line should _always_ outweigh the messy questions of identity politics. But these days I work at a much more diverse organization than the one in which I started my career and what I have realized is: it's better. Better teams, better business, better tech. Far from being a sop to some sort of social-justice party line, diversity in the workforce has made every member function at a higher level. Social science research has pretty clearly shown that more diverse organizations tend to be more profitable ones, and my own experience confirms this. I don't know the mechanism by which diversity brings this improvement about, but I have two theories as to possible contributing factors: 1) Diversity (at least intellectual diversity) forces us to defend our ideas. Homogenous groups in all pursuits tend to mistake their own way of doing things for some sort of iron law of the universe. Diversity can impose intellectual humility on members of the group and is a useful counter to our tendency to cargo-cult. 2) We pattern-match too aggressively in our evaluation of candidates, which leads us to inadvertently underrate people who don't match the pattern of the type of person we are used to thinking of as being competent. On HN, we talk about this all the time in terms of the software industry's folkloric approach to interviewing.