4 ms·

> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to

> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"

actually_a_dog 4y ago
It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefits-of-diversity-in-the-workplace https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi... Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).
- pcan77 4y ago
  +1 here, and yeah it's definitely not just white men. Where I work, it's ALL Indian or Asian, you'd be hard pressed to even find white people where I work that are actually in engineering.
- lazyeye 4y ago
  They dont want diversity in its true meaning. They just want to hire whoever they want, from wherever they want. And "diversity" is the camouflage they hide behind. https://web.archive.org/web/20220218114915/https://quillette.com/2021/07/21/silicon-valleys-cynical-treatment-of-asian-engineers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220218114915/https://quillette...
- sakras 4y ago
  I didn't go through and click all the links in the article, I was mainly interested in the problem-solving section. However, that one links to a Harvard Business Review study that drops this quote: > Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance. They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity: > Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age. Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills. I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).

actually_a_dog 4y ago

It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefits-of-diversity-in-the-workplace https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi... Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).

pcan77 4y ago
+1 here, and yeah it's definitely not just white men. Where I work, it's ALL Indian or Asian, you'd be hard pressed to even find white people where I work that are actually in engineering.
lazyeye 4y ago
They dont want diversity in its true meaning. They just want to hire whoever they want, from wherever they want. And "diversity" is the camouflage they hide behind. https://web.archive.org/web/20220218114915/https://quillette.com/2021/07/21/silicon-valleys-cynical-treatment-of-asian-engineers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220218114915/https://quillette...
sakras 4y ago
I didn't go through and click all the links in the article, I was mainly interested in the problem-solving section. However, that one links to a Harvard Business Review study that drops this quote: > Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance. They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity: > Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age. Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills. I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).