I think this is actually stated in the reverse, based on my experience. Companies that value high-quality output generally tend to become more diverse as they grow. There are obvious places this falls on its face. I used to manage plenty diverse global team of engineers (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, US, and a few in the UK) but that doesn't mean diversity was a cornerstone of our culture. Our CIO just wanted to cut expenses and do as much as possible in low cost locations. Software quality was predictably mediocre, not because there weren't some good engineers but because the short view was valued far more than the long view, and every dev cycle was a series of compromises followed by releases that were series of P0 emergencies.

> I used to manage plenty diverse global team of engineers

To have Chinese engineers in China, Brazilian in Brazil and Mexicans in Mexico is NOT diversity. That is the contrary of diversity. That is to have homogeneous teams.

I have worked for companies in Stockholm that have people from India, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, ... working together in the same office. That is diversity. All of them were had the same range of salaries and expectations. Of course, it was not fairytale perfect. But it was quite good.

Externalizing costs to a low-cost country has nothing to do with diversity, as I understand it.

> To have Chinese engineers in China, Brazilian in Brazil and Mexicans in Mexico is NOT diversity. That is the contrary of diversity. That is to have homogeneous teams.

I'm curious what definition of Diversity you're using that a team of people from all over the world doesn't qualify.

They're saying that if you have one team that's all Mexican and another team that's all Chinese, neither of these teams are diverse. Your company might have diversity if you look at the employees as a whole, but segregation is not part of what diversity is supposed to mean.

Ethnicity is not the only measure of diversity. To boil diversity down to one metric like that is missing the point.

You're right, but I think it's still important to consider. If I had a team of engineers that were from diverse cultures, but all happened to be male, I would feel that lack of (gender) diversity would still be a fair criticism. It's not boiling it down to one metric, it's pointing out that there's an important metric that might have been missed.

I didn't boil down diversity to one metric. I was responding to this:

> I'm curious what definition of Diversity you're using that a team of people from all over the world doesn't qualify.

What you wrote would work better as a response to that than to what I wrote.

Yea i echo this - genuinely different backgrounds, influences on business processes and styles as it pertains to the company is discountes as not diverse because of where they are pgysically located.

Like an office in sf with all genders and colors represented is diverse...even tho they are all impacted by being im sf and sf culture

So my global, remote team isn't diverse... because they're remote? The shared office doesn't matter IMO.

I believe it boils down to how often they all interact with each other. If they're all part of one team, and are regularly interacting, that's one thing, but if they're all kind of self-contained units that don't interact with each other normally, that's not that diverse.

I should have been clear. People across these teams were working together on projects, so in that context it meets your bar (as far as I'm concerned). That said, when I started at Google there were 7 countries represented in my initial team of 15 people, which is an entirely different situation.

Googling to me suggests its not as well studied as it could be; there are papers out there (eg: https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/63581/Thesisxx... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221256711...) but I'm not seeing anything with a lot of solid data out there (though this probably is a hard subject to quantify in such terms).

Intuitively though this position makes sense to me that, as long as the various issues surrounding natural human tribalism are managed, diversity is generally helpful -- as each "tribe" may offer a unique perspective towards problems and solutions.

Having said that, a lot of articles on "ageism in tech" more or less seem to focus on cultures of work that promote "long hours" for long hours sake, over something more balanced (and, in the end, productive and efficient). There's plenty of evidence out there that shows how wrong-headed of an approach "long hours" cultures are, this is not hard information to look up.

> may offer a unique perspective towards problems and solutions

This is my impression on why diversity generally works well. Unique perspectives and experiences often generate more original and creative approaches to some problem which in turn is much more valuable. Additionally, and especially for FAANGs, having the organizational awareness of a diverse set of perspectives allows you to create solutions that are broad and can adequately meet the inherent diversity in the world.

People often want to look at software engineering as this super technical line of work, but in practice it really isn't. How, What, and Why to engineer something varies significantly. Everyone will probably have a different approach to solving a problem. More diversity means a greater net to catch which one might be the most optimal.

Plus, you might want to create services or apps that specifically target a need. I would honestly question how well an app for women might be if is made by all men. I would question how well a app for rural living might be if it was made by people who only lived in a city. I would question how well an app designed for use in America might be for use in Africa. There are cultural differences and use differences, needs and wants, infrastructure, etc.

It would be assumed a highly diverse team would be much more suited to trying to solve those problems. And I would also believe that a highly diverse team would be the result of authentic merit based system anyways.

There is no evidence for this (I am not saying whether or not this could be empirically verified, I have no clue), but it is politically incorrect, especially on this website, to claim anything otherwise

here is a nice piece of article about that: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...