6 ms·

I'm not sure why having a more diverse applicant pools should even be a goal. Often diversity hinders team cohesion and creates communication barriers. What's w

I'm not sure why having a more diverse applicant pools should even be a goal. Often diversity hinders team cohesion and creates communication barriers. What's wrong with homogenous teams and organizations? Furthermore, when did the (highly subjective) masculine/feminine coding of a word become more important that its actual definition? What if you do in fact need an "independent" person? Does that mean you need a man? Aren't we just back to stereotyping then?

giraffe_lady 5y ago
The first question is not hard to find answers to if you genuinely want them. But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways. Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious? The actual definition is the meaning ascribed by users of a word as it is understood by their audience. The dictionary is a recording of meaning, not a creator of it.
- twofornone 5y ago
  >But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways As far as I'm aware there is a single contrived study which looked at financial metrics from boards with female representation to come to that conclusion. This is a tenet that activists desperately want to believe but flies in the face of conventional experience and basic reasoning. At the very lease some minimum common culture, like language, is necessary for a functioning team. How do you expect a team to function if half the members believe that traits like "independence" are toxic and words like "analysis" are offensive? That's culture too. >Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious? Another recently popular fallacy used to justify these toxic policies. That a team is composed primarily of one demographic does not imply sexism. People who share cultural values and personality traits are likely to gravitate toward certain disciplines, it is an entirely emergent phenomenon and does not require invocation of discrimination to explain. For example, regardless of the amount of sexism actually present in the tech workplace, it is absurd to expect gender parity if one acknowledges that women are fundamentally less likely to be interested in programming in the first place, as a consequence of human nature. These policies all feel great but are ultimately half baked, and the danger here is that for merely questioning them, as any rational person should, we risk our livelihoods. The consequences for society are bleak, as we are now explicitly prioritizing gender and race over competence. This is, ironically, top-down mandated systemic racism/sexism. Edit: in fact I would go as far as to say that all communication is predicated upon common culture, because words, symbols, gestures, and inferred intentions are all inherently cultural. Even things like correcting mistakes of others and questioning seniors/elders are vary with culture. There is absolutely no reason to believe that diversity is an absolute good and cannot hamper communication and cooperation when certain cultures are mixed. We've gone totally off the rails because the same people pushing for these policies have created a system where their discussion is forbidden.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less. But if we're at the point of looking around at this world and saying "Ah yes, human nature caused this and certainly nothing else did" then I don't think I have anything to contribute to that project.
    - twofornone 5y ago
      >I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less. You don't think, given the zeitgeist, that these studies might be a little biased? Maybe designed to produce certain acceptable results? What kind of scandalous pushback do you think google would get from activists if they dared to suggest results which went against this forced D&I consensus?
      - polski-g 5y ago
        https://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversity-garett-jones/ https://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversit... > Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity. > This may seem strange to you. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy diversity. You probably don’t observe the problems of low morale and high marginal costs that researchers have found in ethnically diverse workplaces.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  > homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways And more effective in other, measureable, ways. This is very much not settled science. There are many ways to measure effectiveness - idea diversity is only one of them. Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant? The fellow may bring a new perspective on how to run things, but if the owners are not interested in his perspective (which they are entitled not to be, right?), then all they're left with is the communication difficulties he would face performing his function. > Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious? Generally the mechanism has been that many people actively seek to associate with people similar to themselves, people they can easily relate to. This generally includes hiring. I think it's perfectly benign and quite natural for people do cluster around cultural similarity. It's why we have things like Chinatown. Most other behaviour, to me, seems to be in this category: people preferring the (professional) company of those they can relate to. If it's OK for a Chinese restaurant to only hire Chinese people, why is it wrong for an investment bank or programming firm to only hire people similar to the founders? It seems to be the same mechanism at play.
  - PuppyTailWags 5y ago
    > Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant? This isn't the position though. This is adding additional hypotheticals like language barriers. It would be more like hiring a white american waiter of a chinese restaurant, where both the white american waiter and the chinese kitchen staff don't have significant language barriers. In that case it might actually be helpful depending on the demographics of people eating at the restaurant.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      Culture and language are inexorably intertwined. Just ask anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language. A cultural barrier is just a softer communication barrier, where language has to be much more formal than speakers are typically accustomed to, in order to be understood and not to offend. When I'm speaking to people whom I relate to well (including colleagues), half of it is movie quotes, rude jokes, varyingly subtle digs, etc. I suspect most people are the same. In order to write for a wider audience, I have to add rather a few more layers of thought and consideration to what naturally comes to me - to formalize my language. This burden of formalization is in fact exactly what Google is trying to help with. It is only required when people don't relate to each other well. Having a homogeneous team eliminates the problem.
PuppyTailWags 5y ago
My understanding is not that independence as a trait is more common in men, its that independent women are less likely to apply for positions when its specified they're looking for an independent person. Like, for example, if I read for a competitive, independent, ownership, whatever buzzword position, I think "wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves? I'll pass, thanks". I would say I'm a fairly independent dev who takes a lot of pride in my craft. But a lot of toxic workplaces in my time excuse their toxicity in saying their employees just aren't tough enough to handle the workplace.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  > wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves? But what if that's an accurate understanding of the company culture? There are surely people who thrive in these sorts of environments, even if you (and I) are not among them. Are you suggesting that these people are mostly men?
  - PuppyTailWags 5y ago
    I made one point that women (apparently) apply less to something with X language even if the language describes them. Then I made a completely separate, personal experience anecdote of how I feel when I'm exposed to that language because of what it tells me about the culture. I didn't link my personal experience to that of a gendered experience representative of anything broadly, you did.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      My point was that if this hypothetical company, in the interest of inclusiveness, modified the language in their job postings to be less masculine-coded, they would be actively destroying useful information that you and I would use to pass them over.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    > But what if that's an accurate understanding of the company culture? Then avoiding the language would effectively be tricking people into applying when they wouldn't actually want to work under those conditions.
rrose 5y ago
homogeneous teams made up of people who think the same way, have similar backgrounds etc are more likely to have blind spots. Having a diverse set of viewpoints involved in decision making means you are less likely to overlook some corner case that is obvious to some people but not others.
- skrbjc 5y ago
  And how do you define "diversity"? Through externally presenting traits? Through who and how people decide to have sex? Much of diversity efforts seem to focus on these things instead of actual diversity of thought and experience. You might have three "white guys" and one grew up in poverty in the US south and made his way out of it, one who was born in a tiny town in eastern europe, and one who grew up in a middle class family in the SF bay area. But there are many people, if seeing those three guys in a photo, would make some snarky comment about "tech bros" or "white dudes" and completely discount the fact that they are three unique people that have grown up with completely different backgrounds and come with completely different experiences and approaches to life. Most, if not all, diversity efforts I have come across, including where I currently work, focus exclusively on externally presenting traits like race and gender, with the explicit goals of reducing the numbers of white men in category.

giraffe_lady 5y ago

The first question is not hard to find answers to if you genuinely want them. But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways. Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious? The actual definition is the meaning ascribed by users of a word as it is understood by their audience. The dictionary is a recording of meaning, not a creator of it.

twofornone 5y ago
>But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways As far as I'm aware there is a single contrived study which looked at financial metrics from boards with female representation to come to that conclusion. This is a tenet that activists desperately want to believe but flies in the face of conventional experience and basic reasoning. At the very lease some minimum common culture, like language, is necessary for a functioning team. How do you expect a team to function if half the members believe that traits like "independence" are toxic and words like "analysis" are offensive? That's culture too. >Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious? Another recently popular fallacy used to justify these toxic policies. That a team is composed primarily of one demographic does not imply sexism. People who share cultural values and personality traits are likely to gravitate toward certain disciplines, it is an entirely emergent phenomenon and does not require invocation of discrimination to explain. For example, regardless of the amount of sexism actually present in the tech workplace, it is absurd to expect gender parity if one acknowledges that women are fundamentally less likely to be interested in programming in the first place, as a consequence of human nature. These policies all feel great but are ultimately half baked, and the danger here is that for merely questioning them, as any rational person should, we risk our livelihoods. The consequences for society are bleak, as we are now explicitly prioritizing gender and race over competence. This is, ironically, top-down mandated systemic racism/sexism. Edit: in fact I would go as far as to say that all communication is predicated upon common culture, because words, symbols, gestures, and inferred intentions are all inherently cultural. Even things like correcting mistakes of others and questioning seniors/elders are vary with culture. There is absolutely no reason to believe that diversity is an absolute good and cannot hamper communication and cooperation when certain cultures are mixed. We've gone totally off the rails because the same people pushing for these policies have created a system where their discussion is forbidden.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less. But if we're at the point of looking around at this world and saying "Ah yes, human nature caused this and certainly nothing else did" then I don't think I have anything to contribute to that project.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    >I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less. You don't think, given the zeitgeist, that these studies might be a little biased? Maybe designed to produce certain acceptable results? What kind of scandalous pushback do you think google would get from activists if they dared to suggest results which went against this forced D&I consensus?
    - polski-g 5y ago
      https://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversity-garett-jones/ https://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversit... > Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity. > This may seem strange to you. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy diversity. You probably don’t observe the problems of low morale and high marginal costs that researchers have found in ethnically diverse workplaces.
thegrimmest 5y ago
> homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways And more effective in other, measureable, ways. This is very much not settled science. There are many ways to measure effectiveness - idea diversity is only one of them. Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant? The fellow may bring a new perspective on how to run things, but if the owners are not interested in his perspective (which they are entitled not to be, right?), then all they're left with is the communication difficulties he would face performing his function. > Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious? Generally the mechanism has been that many people actively seek to associate with people similar to themselves, people they can easily relate to. This generally includes hiring. I think it's perfectly benign and quite natural for people do cluster around cultural similarity. It's why we have things like Chinatown. Most other behaviour, to me, seems to be in this category: people preferring the (professional) company of those they can relate to. If it's OK for a Chinese restaurant to only hire Chinese people, why is it wrong for an investment bank or programming firm to only hire people similar to the founders? It seems to be the same mechanism at play.
- PuppyTailWags 5y ago
  > Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant? This isn't the position though. This is adding additional hypotheticals like language barriers. It would be more like hiring a white american waiter of a chinese restaurant, where both the white american waiter and the chinese kitchen staff don't have significant language barriers. In that case it might actually be helpful depending on the demographics of people eating at the restaurant.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    Culture and language are inexorably intertwined. Just ask anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language. A cultural barrier is just a softer communication barrier, where language has to be much more formal than speakers are typically accustomed to, in order to be understood and not to offend. When I'm speaking to people whom I relate to well (including colleagues), half of it is movie quotes, rude jokes, varyingly subtle digs, etc. I suspect most people are the same. In order to write for a wider audience, I have to add rather a few more layers of thought and consideration to what naturally comes to me - to formalize my language. This burden of formalization is in fact exactly what Google is trying to help with. It is only required when people don't relate to each other well. Having a homogeneous team eliminates the problem.

PuppyTailWags 5y ago

My understanding is not that independence as a trait is more common in men, its that independent women are less likely to apply for positions when its specified they're looking for an independent person. Like, for example, if I read for a competitive, independent, ownership, whatever buzzword position, I think "wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves? I'll pass, thanks". I would say I'm a fairly independent dev who takes a lot of pride in my craft. But a lot of toxic workplaces in my time excuse their toxicity in saying their employees just aren't tough enough to handle the workplace.

thegrimmest 5y ago
> wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves? But what if that's an accurate understanding of the company culture? There are surely people who thrive in these sorts of environments, even if you (and I) are not among them. Are you suggesting that these people are mostly men?
- PuppyTailWags 5y ago
  I made one point that women (apparently) apply less to something with X language even if the language describes them. Then I made a completely separate, personal experience anecdote of how I feel when I'm exposed to that language because of what it tells me about the culture. I didn't link my personal experience to that of a gendered experience representative of anything broadly, you did.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    My point was that if this hypothetical company, in the interest of inclusiveness, modified the language in their job postings to be less masculine-coded, they would be actively destroying useful information that you and I would use to pass them over.
- wtetzner 5y ago
  > But what if that's an accurate understanding of the company culture? Then avoiding the language would effectively be tricking people into applying when they wouldn't actually want to work under those conditions.

rrose 5y ago

homogeneous teams made up of people who think the same way, have similar backgrounds etc are more likely to have blind spots. Having a diverse set of viewpoints involved in decision making means you are less likely to overlook some corner case that is obvious to some people but not others.

skrbjc 5y ago
And how do you define "diversity"? Through externally presenting traits? Through who and how people decide to have sex? Much of diversity efforts seem to focus on these things instead of actual diversity of thought and experience. You might have three "white guys" and one grew up in poverty in the US south and made his way out of it, one who was born in a tiny town in eastern europe, and one who grew up in a middle class family in the SF bay area. But there are many people, if seeing those three guys in a photo, would make some snarky comment about "tech bros" or "white dudes" and completely discount the fact that they are three unique people that have grown up with completely different backgrounds and come with completely different experiences and approaches to life. Most, if not all, diversity efforts I have come across, including where I currently work, focus exclusively on externally presenting traits like race and gender, with the explicit goals of reducing the numbers of white men in category.