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0 pointsDoreenMichele4y ago0 comments

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity.

But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

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commandlinefan4y ago

Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.

muffinman264y ago

I've seen various "innovation" studies that show more diverse teams come up with more ideas and are more productive, but less diverse teams think they are more productive. A quick internet search turns up https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/09... for example.

For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.

Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.

DoreenMicheleOP4y ago

Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"

If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.

djhn4y ago

Which one was that?

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bradlys4y ago

Probably hard to research.

How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.

webmaven4y ago

Using that definition, isn't every pre-product-market-fit startup a focus group?

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