4 ms·
This is weird to read. What caught my eye: "For an early stage, raw startup, your hiring focus should be on homogeneity." then right away: "You should be enc
by guylhem 14y ago
This is weird to read. What caught my eye:
"For an early stage, raw startup, your hiring focus should be on homogeneity."
then right away:
"You should be encouraging a diversity of origins (gender, ethnicity, etc.)"
I don't really care about one side of the argument or another, (homogeneity, heterogeneity) or even prejudices - but this seems inconsistent.
If you are advocating cultural homogeneity, except for political correctness or legal reasons (ie to avoid being sued by applicant you rejected because of their gender or ethnicity), why do you argue for diverse origins ?
Be consistent with yourself - it's A or B.
If it's A and B you may not really have an argument.
And I would really, really like to see facts supporting either homogeneity or heterogeneity. So far all I've seen are best described as case reports - no real trials with enough samples to have a good statistical power. Make teams of 100 persons, standardize on competence (SAT, whatever) then try and compare different mix of gender or ethnicities and pick up the top performing mixes. Do that multiple times. Then give a conclusion.
That's an argument I will be able to believe.
EDIT: some clarification - I don't care what anyone thinks/look like/believes as long as the person can deliver more than it costs, but I'm willing to consider that if conclusive evidence exists. The best I've read so far is a positive effect of homogeneity towards cooperation against others (parochialism).
EDIT2: to avoid statistical backslash, I realize that due to higher standard deviation in small samples of a given population, underrepresented genders or ethnicities may show a higher variance - hence the need to standardize beforehand on competence to select test subjects over a threshold and reduce this bias.
- zeteo 14y agoI don't think it's inconsistent. Many, if not most places these days aim to hire people who look differently but think the same.
- MartinCron 14y agoDiversity at it's shallowest?
- gruseom 14y agoIt only looks like a contradiction because you omitted the part where he resolves it. Here's the whole quote: For an early stage, raw startup, your hiring focus should be on homogeneity. You should be encouraging a diversity of origins (gender, ethnicity, etc.) while discouraging a diversity in company values. In other words: diversity of personal origins is good, divergence of company values is bad. I wonder if you misunderstood what he means by "culture". He doesn't mean the cultural background of each individual; he means the shared values of the team they're joining. His argument is that having teammates who share the same values about the work is so important that it should never be compromised, at least in the early stage of an endeavor. I agree with that. There's an objection to be made that company values can't actually be separated from personal origins, because people with different backgrounds are likely to want to handle the work differently.
- guylhem 14y agoIt is a contradiction for which no proof is offered (no, a reference to a quora post doesn't count, sorry). It is not consistent. I welcome any proof on any direction (diversity of personal origins is good, divergence of company values is bad / diversity of personal origins is good, divergence of company values is good / diversity of personal origins is bad, divergence of company values is bad / diversity of personal origins is bad, divergence of company values is good) Here, I just don't see any (except repeating politically correct clichés) Facts are usually stronger than a doctrine, however sweet or morally "better" it may pretend to be. If there are no facts, it's not even a theory but an hypothesis or worse- someone wishing the word to be a certain way while it's not (and getting burned in the process, and getting other people burnt too if they believe such claims) I don't "want to believe" in anything - not on HN. I just want to see facts, i.e. anyone is free to advocate diversity, racism, sexism, whatever- but that person would better have some solid facts to back such claims.
- throwawaymar2 14y ago"except for political correctness or legal reasons" But this is why the gender, ethnicity, etc words are in there. Not having them in there causes people to assume that the author is racist or sexist, so they have to be in there to forestall that, whatever the actual beliefs of the author.
- ucee054 14y agohomogeneity or heterogeneity You don't need a scientific test, you can just observe what kind of organizations you get on different points of that scale. homogeneity = The Army heterogeneity = University Science Research Lab
- msellout 14y agoUnless there are confounding factors also correlated with the h*geneity scale.