Companies are diverse as a side effect of hiring for competence. They aren't competent as a side effect of hiring with diversity as a goal. The statistically illiterate HR minions who preach the correlation between diversity and performance don't get this, because they aren't even educated enough to understand correlation/causation fallacy.
Even ignoring that diversity can be a goal in and of itself, and ignoring that a lack of diversity can be a useful metric for identifying other problems, there's also plenty of reason to believe that targeting diversity directly can yield performance improvements. If you're building a product for women, you should have some women on your team. If you're building a product for the general population, you'll get better results if your team has a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.
It's the same exact reason why it's good for a CEO to have experience in the industry that they're targeting with their products, and why managers who know at least a little bit about code works tend to do a better job of managing programmers. Perspective and life experiences absolutely help with decision-making processes and can help you avoid certain pitfalls in your product.
Diversity increases your available breadth of input into decisions and planning; it's like the human version of increasing code-coverage in your QA department.
How did you interpret JPKab's comment? Maybe I misunderstood, do you agree that a focus on increasing diversity can lead to better products and better company decisions?
So are you claiming opportunity is equally distributed? I feel if you "hire for competence", you are going to end up with a highly concentrated group of wealthy people who went to the best schools.
Also, what is your metric for "competence"? You can train people to be computer programmers, but there are many other traits that are impossible to train. Like seeing the world from a perspective different than a middle aged white man, for one.
>Companies are diverse as a side effect of hiring for competence.
I mean, unless factors you evaluate for competence are just 'similarity to current decision makers'. Which is what people largely do in practice. This is why we see that tests show that hiring decisions vary dramatically on the basis of names, pictures, educational background, etc.
No one has a magic 8-ball that spits out an employee's power level. So something else is being measured.
But even if we COULD measure for competence - say in an objective numerical manner - the amount of times you'd optimize towards a local maxima rather than overall maxima would be significant.
So the measurement is flawed, and the algorithm is wrong. You'd think people on HN of all people would recognize the above as self-evident given how frequently 'I'm upset at tech hiring' threads are posted here.
This is probably the biggest reason, they are building products used by virtually everyone on the planet, they cannot afford mistakes that could arise just because their employees only represent a small percentage of human diversity. If all diverse groups were equally well-off, or all they understood the existence and power of privilege, or there was no risk of the built products putting certain groups at a disadvantage, maybe we wouldn't need to do this. But we know that's not true.
Age is somewhat prioritized in practice. Why do you think political diversity would be similarly prioritized?
There's a moral argument that comes into play with politics that doesn't for age or race. There's nothing even abstractly morally problematic about making your product appeal to women or old people or whomever. There may be reasons to avoid marketing or aligning your product to, say, people whose political views you disagree with.
We're not talking about products aimed at a particular demographic. We're talking about products with customers from diverse demographic backgrounds, where the argument is put that we should then have a diverse team so as to ensure we are serving that product competently to the diverse customer base.
My point is that this can't be the real reason for D and I initiatives, since if it was, there would be a similarly strong push to have equal political and age representation in order to reflect the reality of these products' customer demographics.
The priorities won't change because the priorities were never stemming from an earnest attempt to represent customer demographics to begin with.
Not only is there no attempt to represent customer demographics on dimensions such as age, but there continues to be rank discrimination against people based on these dimensions, and the people pretending to be in favor of diversity are consistently and conspicuously silent on the matter.
And you're not educated enough to understand that "meritocracy" is a myth that entrenches existing power and privilege structures, because the people who are good at something are the people with the resources and social capital it takes to get good at that thing.
Skills and experience were not distributed fairly, but they are still real and still necessary. The fix for missing education is more education, not trying to somehow do without it.
Ahhh, so if I disagree with you on a point, it's due to lack of education?
That's a hell of a worldview.
I grew up in an impoverished family, in a trailer park, in a mostly black county. I know far better than you do about "privilege structures", but since I happened to be white, none of the diversity initiatives care or help.
Poor white people are underrepresented in tech. But the white elites think poor whites are in trailer parks because they are stupid. It's their fault, right? That's what all of you say, I've heard it said everywhere. "Trailer trash" this and that, said casually without batting an eye. Never questioning if maybe, just maybe, the kids born there have opportunities equivalent to yours.
It's obvious nobody cares. If they did, they would talk about it, or try to do something. But there are no activist professors for them, so crickets.
"Hiring for competence" doesn't automatically get you a diverse labor force, especially if "competence" is measured by metrics that are themselves demographically correlated to begin with (educational background from schools that aren't very diverse, experience at other firms that aren't diverse, etc.). Criteria like that can entrench established demographics, especially if the people who do the hiring look for similar backgrounds and traits that they themselves have... a bunch of WASPs hiring other WASPs because they come from the same schools or like the same governance tools or some framework, for example, or a bunch of Japanese businessmen excluding the white applicant who speaks perfect Japanese because they don't think he'll understand cultural norms, or a BLM group not wanting to hire the white diversity trainer because she ostensibly has worked mostly with Latino populations. There are always unspoken preferences, often cultural things, that bias hiring -- even if you aim for competence -- unless we blind the hiring committee and resumes, etc. A few studies about identical resumes with different last names (suggesting different races) suggest that competence is not really the best indicator of hireability.
> The statistically illiterate HR minions who preach the correlation between diversity and performance don't get this, because they aren't even educated enough to understand correlation/causation fallacy.
That seems kinda like a strawman? Who's arguing that? It's not like having a more diverse team will necessarily result in higher quality code, or more lines of code per month, or some similarly laser-focused metric of "performance".
Diversity can instigate cultural change at a company (do we value hard deadlines more, or should we emphasize work-life balance more?), make it easier to acquire and communicate with customers from diverse backgrounds (cross-cultural communications is hard for anyone, especially so for non-diverse teams with no specific training in it), fill some legal or marketing mandate (we gotta look diverse even if we aren't), help spur innovation in process or product development (what's "out of the box thinking" for one demographic may be a common process for another demographic), etc.
Of course there are costs too. Diverse teams may or may not work together as well, holidays might be different, food and beverage preferences may not line up with current offerings, religious or cultural conflicts may occur, staff polarization becomes more likely (along political/ideological/national origin lines, whatever)...
That's all to say diversity isn't just skin color but cultural backgrounds too, and you get all the pros and cons of that... for better or worse. It's far more nuanced than simply trying to hire for some arbitrary measure of "competence".
