I absolutely want to work in a diverse team. I want to be challenged by different perspectives and ideas. I want to have the best team members out there, regard

I absolutely want to work in a diverse team. I want to be challenged by different perspectives and ideas. I want to have the best team members out there, regardless of their backgrounds. I however, think many D&I ideas fail to work when written into policies, and I think many times, higher-ups seem to write policy out of the best of intentions, yet fail to see how they can easily lead to abuse and poor results. Two examples from a corporate job a friend shared with me - 1. A friend was interviewing senior software engineers for an open position, then got a candidate who was grossly irrelevant (I won't bore you with the details, but she has ~1 year of experience at best, and this position was targeting a minimum of 5 years, 8+ years preferred). Turns out, that specific hiring manager had recently lost a (male) top candidate because they didn't have a female candidate in that candidate's pipeline - the manager learned his lesson and now always dumps 1-2 female candidates that have no chance of making it into any senior position, just to meet the "diverse slate" requirement of their D&I policy. 2. Another example, this time not related to diversity - during the recent economic downturn, a company decided that on top of an aggressive hiring freeze, for any employee that is fired or quits, their position goes away with them, then gets re-assigned to where the higher-ups think the need is greatest. At first glance, that sounds like a good idea - kind of a CI/CD for re-orgs with minimal "slack". But of course, if you're a smart enough manager, that means your biggest hope is to remain static through this period, which means you'll never fire (or even challenge) anyone. You'll even promote mediocre folks to keep them on, then fire them afterwards. Naturally, the most talented will still get plenty of offers and move / leave at some point, and then the slightly less talented folks get hit with all of their work and eventually move on as well, and over time the average talent level of that team will slide down considerably, and as we all know - hiring a top performer into a mediocre team is a challenge. Nice policy in theory, but in practice - it will cause the company to lose tons of great talent, in a way that will take years to recover from.