100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

Re:100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley by phamilton on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @10:40AM (#9381259)

I think there are secondary effects. While technical expertise is probably not going to be affected, team dynamics will be affected through diversity in critical thinking and expression. That's not the same as race/gender/etc. Too much conformity within a team causes the team to embrace that common ground rather than embrace differences.

I'm a fairly loud, direct person. I work with other loud and direct people. We added someone to our team who is a bit quieter and quite frankly thoughtful onto the team. The effect wasn't so much that (s)he changed our technical decisions, but that we as a team started to give people apace for less confrontational disagreement. It improved our individual abilities to communicate and approach a problem from multiple angles.

That is why diversity in personality is important. The hypothesis is then that race/gender/etc is correlated with intellectual diversity.

Anecdotal evidence yes, but something I've found valuable.

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Re:100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley by yummyfajitas on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#9381599)

That's not the same as race/gender/etc.

No, it's not. Which is my point.

If you want to make the argument that racial/gender/etc groups think differently, be my guest - but that also implies that an unbiased hiring process might have disparate impact. E.g., if onion2k's hypothesis that women are more emotional than men is correct, then a hiring process aiming for rationalism might hire fewer women.

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